Category Archives: Lakeland

Flatlanders Arts & Crafts Show in Lakeland, GA

Flatlanders Arts & Crafts Show

The Flatlanders Arts & Crafts Show features a variety of antiques, collectibles, food and beverages. It is one of the oldest annual arts and crafts shows, and is held each Labor Day weekend at the Threatte Center, just inside the city limits of Lakeland, Georgia.

10AM to 5PM Saturday October 11th
10AM to 4PM Saturday October 12th

The Threattle Center
134 Burnt Church Rd Continue reading

Burnt Church Road: 2 megaWatts solar in Lanier County

The answer is: Burnt Church Road is the location of the 2 MW Lakeland Solar Farm, conveniently next to what appears to be a Georgia Power substation. The landowner appears from the Lanier County tax assessor maps to be Patten Seed Company. Compare this map to the big image in the previous post and they clearly show the same location. Apparently nobody has satellite images of Lanier County new enough yet to show the solar panels. Continue reading

2 megaWatts solar in Lanier County

Somebody told me a few weeks ago there’s a big solar farm near Lakeland. He was not very specific about where, but it’s big: two megawatts, organized by a company out of Chicago. Can anybody point me to where it is so I can go take pictures?

Evergreen Solar Services says,

2.0 MW Lakeland, GA
Completed in 2014, 2 — 1.0 MW Georgia Power ASI projects. Fixed tilt PV with central inverters, medium voltage interconnected.

You can see by this Evergreen Solar Services picture that Continue reading

Lakeland environmental violations

Demolition debris buried without a permit? That happened in Lakeland, and it’s causing a heap of trouble for the City Council. Could such a thing also have happened in a nearby county?

Andy Alcock reported yesterday for WCTV, Lakeland Hires Firm to Check Environmental Issues

There’s a new push to find out about dozens of potential environmental violations in the South Georgia city of Lakeland.

As we first reported last week, Georgia’s Environmental Protection Division issued a notice of violation for the city of Lakeland.

That notice lists twenty-three properties where demolition debris may be buried without a permit.

The city council has now unanimously approved the hiring of an engineering firm to assess those sites.

Stevenson & Palmer Engineering will be paid an hourly rate plus expenses not to exceed $15,000 without approval by the city.

There are claims of improperly demolishing, burning and burying dozens of homes.

According to whom?

Continue reading

Lanier County Advocate and Lakeland City Council

Local newspaper videos local government and puts it on YouTube! They have city council, county commission, board of education since September last year. It’s the Lanier County Advocate, videoing the Lakeland City Council, the Lanier County Commission, and the Lanier County Board of Education, plus the Lanier County Historical Society on their YouTube channel.

Continue reading

Videos of Rally for HOPE @ LCDP 2012 03 24

Rain kept the numbers down, but the enthusiasm was strong in Lakeland at the Rally for HOPE, 24 March 2012.

The announcement said:

This will be a Rally for the Hope Scholarship and a Voter Registration. Everyone concerned about HOPE is invited. We will have guest speakers and will hear from those students and families affected by the current status of HOPE.

The featured speaker was Janice Barrocas of HOPE for Georgia, which is running a three year nonpartisan campaign to save HOPE scholarships.

Bikram Mohanty explained that there will be a shortfall of $270 million for the HOPE scholarships in 2012. Janice Barrocas pointed out there were really two HOPEs now: the other one being the Zell Miller scholarships. Bikram showed a map that illustrates that very few Zell Miller Scholarships go to south Georgia.

Janice Barrocas and Bikram Mohanty discussed that HOPE is funded by a lottery, and lottery funds are down in the recession. The blue line on the chart is deposits from the lottery into the HOPE program, the red line is expenditures, and the green line, dropping rapidly, is reserves at the end of the year.

Janice Barrocas noted that

The end users of this program were not at the table

when the recent HOPE changes were passed. Especially students mostly found out when they got stuck with bigger bills they had to pay. Students and their families may still be too polite to mention they have financial troubles, but it’s time to break the culture of silence when it’s a choice between the family eating or the student going to school. Betty Marini pointed out students loans add up to $1 trillion dollars, which is a huge drag on the economy.

Matt Flumerfelt observed that there is a push for divestiture and privatization these days, and he wondered if the silence around the quick passage of the recent HOPE changes wasn’t because it was a money grab for the lottery funds.

Tech school HOPE is grants, and most tech school students get them. If HOPE went away, the lottery would Continue reading

Lowndes County: commuter rail hub

Look at all those other railroads converging on Valdosta in that GFRR project proposal map. Valdosta is a historical rail hub for passenger traffic to Atlanta, Savannah, Jacksonville, Orlando, Thomasville, Tallahasssee, and beyond. All the tracks are still in place and still in use for freight. With some rolling stock and a few deals with the railroads, Valdosta and Lowndes County could become again a passenger rail hub with a mass transit system for local commuting to jobs and for long distance travel.

Add a bus system and local commuting becomes very practical. People could take the train to town and catch a bus to work. Many people could walk or take a bicycle to their work from the train station. This could work the other way around, too. People could live in Valdosta and work in Ray City or Lakeland or Hahira or Lake Park or Clyattville and not have to drive to get there. That would save a lot of wasted time and wasted fuel.

This kind of mass transit would attract the knowledge-based workers we supposedly want around here. Including jobs our high school and college graduates could take, so they wouldn’t have to move elsewhere.

And upgrading the railroads, building stations, building and refurbishing houses and apartments near the stations, etc., would employ a lot of construction workers; probably as many as road projects and sprawling subdivision projects, but without the sprawl.

-jsq

Flatlander Fall Frolic in Lakeland

What’s like the Azalea Festival crossed with the Happening? The Flatlander Fall Frolic, today and tomorrow in Lakeland, Georgia, 9-5 today, 10-5 tomorrow. That’s the Arts and Crafts show. Other things are also going on. Arts and Crafts is at Threatte Center at the corner of GA 37 and US 221 and US 129. Go to Lakeland and follow the signs. There’s usually music after the Arts and Crafts show closes.

“South Georgia’s Premier Community Festival” –VDT
According to the Lakeland Chamber of Commerce:
The Frolic is among South Georgia’s longest running community festivals. The event was started by the Lanier County Lions Club on Labor Day, 1971, as a one-day event. Through the years the Frolic has grown to include diverse entertainment over as many as seven days. The 40-year-old frolic includes the Country Music Show, Miss Fall Frolic Beauty Pageant, the Dawg-Gone Good Race (5k and 1-Mile Run), and Flatlanders Arts & Crafts Show. The Lions Club continues as the overall sponsor of the frolic. Flatlander Arts & Crafts Show attracts artists and craftsmen from across Georgia and other nearby states. Now produced by the Lakeland-Lanier County Chamber of Commerce, the outdoor exhibition features special activities for children, a variety of food and beverages, and stage entertainment at intervals.
See you there.

-jsq