Category Archives: Elections

Changes to the alcohol ordinance @ LCC 2012-12-10

Being curious about the

changes to the alcohol ordinance,


I had the opportunity to talk with a county staff member
who said that the changes were to incorporate recent
amendments regarding

brown bagging, social hosts (serving
alcohol at private events to underage drinkers), and
the

Sunday package sales
into the body of the ordinance,
rather than having those items as amendments to the document.
Also, the setting of the license fees for Sunday
sales will be established

(from the referendum that passed 59.80% to 40.20%).

-gretchen

Houston County and Georgia buying houses in Warner Robins AFB encroachment zone

Update 8 December 2012: Actually,

Houston County does have enforceable encroachment zones around RAFB.

Houston County hasn’t had a enforceable encroachment zone around
Warner Robins Air Force Base (RAFB) and is now fixing the problem
after the fact by using state money to buy up houses near the base.

Tommy Stalnaker

Houston County Commission Chairman Tommy Stalnaker labelled encroachment
his number one priority, in stark contrast to Lowndes County Commission
Chairman Ashley Paulk, who has put

two items on the agenda for Monday and Tuesday
related to a proposed rezoning next to Moody Air Force Base,
and already at a previous Work Session

invited the developer to speak
without letting anyone else speak.

Gene Rector wrote for WRWR “10 months ago”,

Stalnaker ‘ecstatic’ over state action on Robins encroachment issue,

In a word, Houston County Commission Chairman Tommy Stalnaker was
“ecstatic” last week when he learned state officials

Warner Robins Air Force Base encroachment buy-back map
will allocate $7.5 million to help resolve the encroachment issue
affecting Robins Air Force Base.

State Rep. Larry O’Neal called and gave him a heads-up before Gov.
Nathan Deal made the announcement on Friday.

“I felt like jumping up and down and screaming and
hollering,” Stalnaker admitted. “But then I remembered
we hadn’t done our part yet.”

Encroachment has dogged Robins for a number of years. Some 250
parcels — mostly private residences — spread over 1,600
acres in south Bibb and north Houston counties fall within the
base’s noise or potential mishap zone.

That risk to homes in the designated region could restrict or limit
current operations or force the Air Force to look elsewhere for
future workload and mission growth.

Stalnaker has labeled resolving encroachment his number one
priority.

Mike Stucka wrote for the Telegraph 31 May 2012,

Interactive map: Robins AFB encroachment and property purchases,

Continue reading →

Text Amendment —Richard Raines

Received yesterday, referring to
TXT-2012-02, which is on the agenda for

Monday morning’s Work Session and Tuesday evening’s Regular Session
of the Lowndes County Commission.
-jsq

From: Richard Raines

To: Gretchen Quarterman

Subject: RE: Text Amendment

Gretchen,

Based on a conversation with the Chairman yesterday, it is my


understanding that this issue will be tabled until sometime next
year (Chairman-elect Slaughter will decide when to put it back on
the agenda) because we are working with MAFB on a compromise as they
are well aware of our mandate to balance property rights with
protecting against base encroachment.

Since I’ve been on the County Commission we have made it a priority
to constantly evaluate the ULDC and all zoning districts. MAZ 1-3
is no exception and must be evaluated to make sure that it is
balanced and consistent.

We have discovered

Continue reading →

Solid Waste, Developer Favors, Dollar General, Library, and Alcohol: Agenda @ LCC 2012-12-10

Updates 9 Dec 2012: Marked with *.

Will the Lowndes County Commission Tuesday evening
finish railroading through their non-solution to solid waste disposal,


without shouldering its legal responsibility to protect
the environment and the public health, safety, and well-being from solid waste,
and what’s this about a vendor change?
Will the Chairman once again invite a developer to speak in Monday morning’s
Work Session without letting anyone else speak?
Will the Commission change the zoning code and rezone inside and against
the Moody Exclusion Zone for that same developer they already
provided $130,000 in road construction labor to back in 2007?
Does Naylor need the area’s nineteenth Dollar General, and who’s behind it, anyway?
How come the Five Points library is still on the agenda even though SPLOST VII failed?
And what are they doing to the Alcoholic Beverage Ordinance this time?
Come Monday morning at 8:30 AM and Tuesday evening at 5:30 PM and see!
Better yet, also call or write your Commissioner before then.

Trash

6.b. Solid Waste Ordinance

Will the Commissioners finish

railroading through their



already-failing non-solution to solid waste disposal
in the last session of this Chairman?
The plan for which they held

zero public hearings while any of
the Commissioners who voted on it this October were on the Commission,
yet someone down there feels free to

anonymously ridicule concerns about that plan failing?
Two citizens

spoke up anyway,
even though

Citizens Wishing to Be Heard
was after the scheduled vote last time,
and

another on this blog,
all willing to state their names, unlike the anonymous pro-trash-railroad
ridiculer.
What was that

unspecified new information
that caused them to table it last time, anyway?

8.b. Exclusive Franchise Agreement for Residential Solid Waste Collection Services with Advanced Disposal Services of Central Alabama, Inc.

What happened to Veolia;

Continue reading →

U.S. has “moral responsibility to reduce the flow of [drug] money towards Mexico” —Felipe Calderón, President of Mexico

The Mexican president who put the Mexican Army onto the streets
to stop the drug war, resulting in 40,000+ deaths, many
collateral damage like

the son of writer Carlos Fuentes,
the Mexican president who

a year ago started hinting that that didn’t work and something else should be done,
is already following the path of his predecessors
Ernesto Zedillo and

Vicente Fox, in calling for the U.S.
to end the war on drugs.
Georgia can’t afford to continue spending a billion dollars a year to lock people up, especially while cutting education.
If we listen to the Mexican presidents, we can save much of that billion and spend much of the savings on education.

T.W. wrote for the Economist 23 November 2012,

“Impossible” to end drug trade, says Calderón,

In an interview recorded last month for this week’s special report

Felipe Calderon, President of Mexico
on Mexico, Mr Calderón said: “Are there still drugs in Juárez [a
violent northern border city]? Well of course, but it has never been
the objective…of the public-security strategy to end something
that it is impossible to end, namely the consumption of drugs or
their trafficking…

“[E]ither the United States and its society, its government and its
congress decide to drastically reduce their consumption of drugs, or
if they are not going to reduce it they at least have the moral
responsibility to reduce the flow of money towards Mexico, which
goes into the hands of criminals. They have to explore even market
mechanisms to see if that can allow the flow of money to reduce.

“If they want to take all the drugs they want, as far as I’m
concerned let them take them. I don’t agree with it but it’s their
decision, as consumers and as a society. What I do not accept is
that they continue passing their money to the hands of killers.”

The Economist article spelled out what Calderón still doesn’t quite say:

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 →

GaSU wins at GA PSC, but will GaSU help all of us win in the legislature?

GA PSC Stan Wise’s 2009 nuclear CWIP lobbying points eerily matched Southern Company’s,
but suddenly he’s got separation-of-powers religion about Georgia Solar Utilities (GaSU).
The PSC recommended GaSU’s utility bid anyway.
When the legislature takes that up in a month or so, will GaSU CEO Robert Green,
unlike SO or Georgia Power or Stan Wise, help the rest of us little people
fix the 1973 Territoriality law so we can sell our solar electricity
on a free market?

Dave Williams wrote for the Atlanta Business Chronicle yesterday,

Georgia Public Service Commission moves ahead on solar energy,


Georgia Power logo
The Georgia Public Service Commission approved a plan by Georgia
Power Co. Tuesday to acquire an additional 210 megawatts of solar
generating capacity, more than tripling its investment in solar
energy.


GA PSC PR about 20 November 2012 decisions
But a sharply divided PSC also gave a potential competitor to
Georgia Power its blessing to appeal to the General Assembly to
amend a 39-year-old law that gives the Atlanta-based utility the
exclusive right to continue serving existing customers.

Under Georgia Power’s Advanced Solar Initiative, the company will
buy solar power produced by both large “utility-scale”
solar farms and from smaller projects operated by residential and
commercial property owners.

Right, that’s actually

only 10 Megawatts from “smaller projects”,
maintaining Georgia Power’s monopoly while throwing throwing
a bone to the rest of us.

While the PSC supported Georgia Power’s plan unanimously, a
subsequent motion by McDonald encouraging other solar utilities
interested in serving Georgia to pursue their plans with the
legislature passed by the narrow margin of 3-2.

Georgia Solar Utilities Inc., a company launched in Macon, Ga.,
earlier this year, filed an application with the PSC in September
for authority to generate solar energy in Georgia on a utility
scale.

The two Nay votes were from the two recently-reelected PSC members,
apparently now thoroughly in the pocket of the incumbent utilities.
Here’s one of them now:

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 →