Category Archives: Education

Industrial park from green grass to a green solar future: Decatur County

Our Industrial Authority is in favor of solar business now; what if they seeded some of their industrial parks with solar panels like Decatur County is doing? They think it will make them look like a progressive county. What do we think?

Ty Wilson wrote for WTXL 7 Dec 2012, A solar park is coming to the Decatur County Industrial Park,

The Decatur County Industrial park will go from having green grass to having a green future.

A Lenexa, Kansas company is building a solar farm at the Decatur County Industrial Park.

The Decatur County Industrial park will go from having green grass to having a green future.

Keith Lyle is the chairman of the Bainbridge Decatur Development Authority, he says, “We are just extremely excited to have this come for the community.”

Decatur County Solar Park in solar Megawatt context And, it’s private investment!

Trade Winds Energy is leasing at least 100 acres to put in solar panels at ten thousand dollars a year.

Company executives says they will invest 17 million dollars into the project.

Lyle says, “This will add from the tax aspect a significant revenue stream. When it is all said and done you are looking at a taxable amount of 40 million is assets. On the project that is 400 hundred thousand a year in tax revenue.”

Trade Wind Energy doesn’t list this project yet (and all the projects they do list are wind projects), but if we take a rule of thumb Continue reading →

How to stop climate change: divest from fossil fuel companies

In response to a very downbeat diatribe by Bill McKibben in Rolling Stone on the occasion of the U.N.’s Rio+20 conference being some sound and less fury accomplishing not much about stopping climate change, [Bill McKibben, Rolling Stone, 19 July 2012, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math: Three simple numbers that add up to global catastrophe – and that make clear who the real enemy is”] Chloe Maxmin, Divest Harvard Harvard student Chloe Maxmin followed up McKibben’s problem statement with a plan for what to do: divest from fossil fuel companies. [“In Honor of Kalamazoo: An Open Letter to Bill McKibben,” NextGenJournal, 25 July 2012, no longer online, referred to in a post the same day by Chloe Maxmin on First Here, Then Everywhere.] Maxmin didn’t just wish, either, she joined up with McKibben’s 350.org and helped organize Harvard students to do something about it: persuade Harvard to divest its shares of fossil fuel companies. Students at the University of Georgia, or at Valdosta State University, for that matter, could do the same.

Alli Welton wrote for 350.org 18 November 2012, 72% of Harvard Students Vote to Divest from Fossil Fuels,

Last Friday night, the Harvard College Undergraduate Council announced that the student body had voted 72% in favor of Harvard University divesting its $30.7 billion endowment from fossil fuels.

Members of the Harvard chapter of Students for a Just and Stable Future have been campaigning since September to divest Harvard’s endowment from the top 200 publicly-traded fossil fuel corporations that own the majority of the world’s oil, coal, and gas reserves.

Harvard actually already has divested its shares of one fossil fuel company due to public pressure. Continue reading →

SPLOST, media, southside library: videos @ SGLB 2012-11-20

Here’s a video playlist of the 20 November 2012 South Georgia Regional Library Board meeting. And here’s George Rhynes’ editorial on what he saw, heard, and was asked at that meeting. He’d prefer SPLOST being spent first on sidewalks than on moving the library where people would have to go farther to get to it. Also, like many of us, he’s tired of a few people controlling the purse-strings without input from the rest of us. He gave an example:

Continue reading →

SPLOST VII @ SGLB 2012-11-20

SPLOST on the ballot again? --Willis Miller @SGLB 2012-11-20 At Tuesday’s South Georgia Library Board meeting. a board member (his nameplate said Willis Miller) wanted to know about SPLOST:

How we know it’s going to come up next November or at another time?

Good question.

Here’s video of the discussion as it resumed later in the meeting:

SPLOST VII discussion at Monthly Meeting, South Georgia Library Board (SGLB),
Video by George Boston Rhynes for K.V.C.I. and bostongbr on YouTube,
Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia, 20 November 2012.

Kay Harris said there had to be a minimum of twelve months, so November 2013 would be the next possible time. She said County Commissioner Richard Raines had expressed full support for the new library, and she was talking to the other commissioners. She was asked whether the SPLOST lists would be the same, and said there might be some changes, but she hadn’t heard anyone suggest that the Five Points property might be deleted. That’s curious, because she quoted Valdosta Mayor Gayle in the VDT 7 November 2012 as saying:

Continue reading →

Help the military stop climate change through sustainable renewable energy

In memory of Armistice Day, the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, when World War I ended, let’s help the military get us off of oil and to deal with climate change so fewer people will die in wars.

John M. Broder wrote for NYTimes 9 November 2012, Climate Change Report Outlines Perils for U.S. Military,

Climate change is accelerating, and it will place unparalleled strains on American military and intelligence agencies in coming years by causing ever more disruptive events around the globe, the nation’s top scientific research group said in a report issued Friday.

The group, the National Research Council, says in a study commissioned by the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies that clusters of apparently unrelated events exacerbated by a warming climate will create more frequent but unpredictable crises in water supplies, food markets, energy supply chains and public health systems.

Hurricane Sandy provided a foretaste of what can be expected more often in the near future, the report’s lead author, John D. Steinbruner, said in an interview.

“This is the sort of thing we were talking about,” said Mr. Steinbruner, a longtime authority on national security. “You can debate the specific contribution of global warming to that storm. But we’re saying climate extremes are going to be more frequent, and this was an example of what they could mean. We’re also saying it could get a whole lot worse than that.”

…

Climate-driven crises could lead to internal instability or international conflict and might force the United States to provide humanitarian assistance or, in some cases, military force to protect vital energy, economic or other interests, the study said.

This is in addition to the even more obvious connection between war and U.S. dependence on foreign oil which the veterans in Operation Free want to fix by helping us shift to clean renewable energy.

“In Iraq… the lines would stretch up to ten miles long under the hot sun, under constant risk of attack by extremists. I realized then just how vulnerable it makes any country to be dependent on oil, especially the United States, which uses nearly a quarter of the world’s supply.”

We also heard last year from Col. Dan Nolan (U.S. Army ret.) that the Marines in Afghanistan realized Continue reading →

Charles Darwin won 16% against Paul Broun (GA-10)

Occupy Athens, which a few weeks ago couldn’t draw more than a few people to its General Assembly, has pulled off some electoral theater seen nation-wide: write-in candidate Charles Darwin drew 16% of the vote against evolution-denier Paul Broun in Congressional district 10.

Natalie Jennings wrote for the Washington Post 9 November 2012, Charles Darwin earns nearly 4,000 write-in votes against Ga. Rep. Broun,

Darwin, who was the original proponent of the theory of evolution and died in 1882, got nearly 4,000 write-in votes against the incumbent Broun, according to the Athens Banner-Herald. Broun, a physician, is a creationist who in September said evolution was based on “lies straight from the pit of hell.”

And here’s part of what one of Occupy Athens wrote online today:

Continue reading →

What people are interested in having their pennies spent on —Gretchen Quarterman

Received yesterday on Allocate resources in a yearly budget? -jsq

As I was out campaigning, it was interesting what people are interested in having their pennies spent on. Many want better sidewalks and safer places to ride their bikes. One Valdosta police officer particularly commented on the dangerous bike riding conditions (especially on North Oak Extension). Many in the un-incorporated areas want increased fire protection and it seems that everyone better drainage (and I don't mean simply open ditches for rain water) and still others would like to see some soccer fields.

It seems like we should be able to do some prioritizations and then save up for these things. I guess that will be up to the new commission chairman and members and they will have to figure out how to move forward without a SPLOST immediately in 2014.

Personally, I'd like to see a public accounting of how the previous SPLOSTS were spent. And not in big categories, but the actual details… But that's just me.

-Gretchen Quarterman

-jsq

Challengers made statehouse incumbents work in south Georgia

Hardly-funded insurgents led by Haley Shank put a scare into turncoat south Georgia statehouse incumbents. What would happen with well-funded candidates?

As we’ve already seen, in new district 177 Dexter Sharper (D) won 2 to 1 over opponent J. Glenn Gregory (R). (All election data in this post is from GA Secretary of State.)

Conversely, Jason Shaw (R-176) ran unopposed, perhaps because he is the least offensive of the incumbents (he voted against HB 1162 that put the Atlanta-power-grab “charter school” amendment on the ballot, although he did vote for HB 797 that will funnel more of your local tax dollars to charter schools imposed by Atlanta even if your school board doesn’t want them).

Other south Georgia statehouse incumbents, all Republicans, had challengers, all Democrats. All the challengers opposed Amendment 1. Haley Shank did best, in District 173 against Darlene K. Taylor, 8,324 to 12,048 (40.86% to 59.14%).

Next was Continue reading →

Allocate resources in a yearly budget?

Received today on SPLOST VII lost. -jsq

After reading this post, a question came to mind. Have we the citizens of Lowndes County actually been encouraging our elected officials to be fiscally irresponsible with public funds by allowing SPLOST to continue? if elected officials had to allocate resources in a yearly budget, we may actually encourage our officials to allocate resources towards public projects that would be desirable by the public rather than a priority in pthe minds of our elected officials.

-Bill Grow

Most corrupt state sells public education to Waltons

Amendment 1 results And it wasn’t even close: 2,152,091 to 1,526,959 (58.50% to 41.50%). Lowndes County went for the Atlanta-power-grab “charter school” amendment 18,606 to 17,619 (51.36% to 48.64%). The voters of Georgia just sold their children’s educational birthright for a mess of slick brochures.

Amendment 2 results The other ALEC amendment, on multi-year contracts, passed by an even wider margin: 2,241,621 to 1,275,809 (63.73% to 36.27%). Lowndes went for it 20,205 to 14,414 (58.36% to 41.64%).

Apparently Georgia voters will vote for any old thing that’s submitted to them as a constitutional amendment.

Esau sells his birthright for a mess of pottage Congratulations, ALEC and Wal-Mart! You’ve demonstrated money talks and slick brochures sell. This was even better for you than ALEC’s so-called anti-immigration law which the legislature passed and that actually devastates Georgia agriculture for the profit of private prison company CCA. This time you got the people of Georgia to vote directly against their own best interests to the benefit of school privatizing corporations in Virginia and Michigan!

Boo Georgia voters. You’ve just given the most corrupt legislature in the country the ability to commit you the taxpayers to contracts for decades. And you’ve just traded your children’s educational birthright for a mess of slick paper.

-jsq