Category Archives: LOST

Video of oral arguments in LOST GA Supreme Court case

Here’s the Georgia Supreme Court’s own video of

S13A0992 Turner County v. City of Ashburn et al.

Walter Elliott

Tuesday, June 4, 2013.
It starts with the attorney for Turner County, Walter Elliott
(who is also Lowndes County Attorney)
apparently arguing that the courts shouldn’t intervene because
only legislative bodies should decide on taxes.
The judges didn’t seem to understand his argument.

One judge wondered how disputes would be settled then.
Elliott said the local elected bodies would decide or the tax
wouldn’t be levied.
Another judge pointed out that legislative bodies could delegate
administrative functions.
Later the same judge asked how to distinguish this case from
a child custody case as far as criteria and a court being
able to decide.
Elliott claimed that was a judicial function, but allocating
tax dollars was not.
The judges didn’t seem to be buying the city attorney’s argument later, either.

Funny how the Supreme Court of Georgia videos its sessions,
but the Lowndes County Commission does not.

Here’s

the subject of the case: Continue reading →

Videos of morning of budget discussion @ LCC 2013-06-05



Here’s a

video playlist
of Wednesday morning’s

Lowndes County Commission Budget Discussion Meeting.



Video by Gretchen Quarterman for Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE),

Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia, 5 June 2013.

They broke for lunch shortly before noon, and Gretchen had another appointment,
so the video ends there, although the Commission apparently continued
te discussion in the afternoon.
Hm, if they had real discussion at their other meetings, they wouldn’t
have to save it up for long marathon sessions like this….

-jsq

Budget hearing public notices @ LCC 2013-06-05

Yesterday’s County Commission meeting was billed as a

Budget Discussion Meeting,
and apparently it was not a public hearing on the county’s budget,
because state law requires such a hearing to be advertised in the newspaper
or published as a news story, a week in advance.


This is different from public notice for other Commission meetings:
for budget hearings the notice has to be not just sent to the newspaper:
it has to be published, and not in the legal notices section,
and it has to appear at least a week before the hearing.
It’s also illegal

to refuse to provide a copy of the submitted
draft budget to the public or the news media:

O.C.G.A. 36-81-5.(d)
On the day that the proposed budget is submitted to the governing


authority for consideration, a copy of the budget shall be placed in
a public location which is convenient to the residents of the unit
of local government. The governing authority shall make every effort
to provide convenient access to the residents during reasonable
business hours so as to accord every opportunity to the public to
review the budget prior to adoption by the governing authority. A
copy of the budget shall also be made available, upon request, to
the news media.



LAKE is a news medium,

according to federal law.

Georgia Department of Audits and Accounts has

Georgia Law on Local Government Budgets: Continue reading →

Budget Discussion Meeting 8:30 AM Wednesday @ LCC 2013-06-05

Popped up

since 3PM today on the

Lowndes County Commission online calendar:

Budget Discussion Meeting (6/5/2013)



On June 5, 2013, at 8:30 a.m., the Lowndes County Board of Commissioners
will meet for a budget discussion, in the Executive Conference Room
on the 3rd Floor of the Lowndes County Administration Building. For
more information, please contact the Office of the County Clerk at
229-671-2400.

That’s tomorrow morning, the morning after
the Georgia Supreme Court decision about LOST
was expected today.

-jsq

Budget meetings? LOST meeting? Nothing on Lowndes County Commission calendar

Update 7:45 PM 4 June 2013: 8:30 AM Wednesday 5 June 2013.



Rumor has it that the Lowndes County Commission has already had one budget
meeting and is going to have a meeting tomorrow about the

GA Supreme Court LOST decision.
Yet there’s nothing on

the Commission’s public calendar
and under Special Events

their website says

There are no events at this time

How is meeting where the people don’t know doing
people’s business?

-jsq

LOST decision coming from GA Supreme Court

Local Lowndes County and city officials are awaiting breathlessly
the news from Atlanta today about new rules on LOST negotiations.
Currently, negotiators have to choose one of the positions submitted
by the contending parties. The GA Supreme Court may decide to let
negotiators pick some other division of LOST funds.
Valdosta Mayor John Gayle cancelled a meeting here yesterday
so he could be in Atlanta for this court decision.
Lowndes County Commissioners are

rumored to be planning a meeting tomorrow morning after the decision.



Fox 31 posted 30 May 3012,

Supreme Court of Georgia to hear Turner County LOST case

On June 4th, the Georgia Supreme Court will hear the case between
Turner County and three cities over the distribution of Local Option
Sales Taxes. Below is the entirety of the facts in the case as
released by the court:

In this dispute between the governments of Turner County and three
cities over how Local Option Sales Tax (LOST) proceeds should be
distributed, the county is appealing a superior court ruling which
picked the cities’ plan for distribution over the county’s.

There’s much more detail in

that article.

Also,
Tim Omarzu wrote for timesfreepress.com 9 May 2013,

Georgia top court to consider LOST negotiations.

-jsq

Retreat, Lowndes County Commission @ LCC 2013-02-22


Clockwise: Stephanie Black (Finance), John Page (Dist. 5), Joyce Evans (Dist. 1), Demarcus Marshall (Dist. 4), Richard Raines (Dist. 2), Bill Slaughter (Chairman), Crawford Powell (Dist. 3), Paige Dukes (Clerk), Joe Pritchard (Manager)
The Lowndes County Commission has retreated to Berrien County once again
this year.
So far they’ve talked about budgets and finance, LOST and SPLOST,
departmental requests, and the local Land Bank Authority,
with the occasional policy interjection.
Commissioners and staff were clearly taking their tasks very seriously,
although not without humor from John Page’s sneeze.
And I congratulate them on

going some place that couldn’t have cost much.
I wish they’d talk more about policy and strategies for increasing the pie,
rather than almost entirely about how to divvy up the existing pie.
Video will follow; meanwhile here are a few notes.


On the one hand, it’s great that county staff have pulled together
and managed with 30 fewer people, and while Commissioner Page
was right that that’s efficiency, I think Chairman Slaughter was
even more right in saying it’s beyond that, it’s beyond capacity.
County Manager Joe Pritchard noted if there’s no SPLOST, the
current Commission will have to decide between cutting some
services and raising taxes.
That’s no doubt true, and he indicated that Valdosta seemed to
be waiting to hear what the County wants to do about SPLOST,
while the county is waiting to hear what Valdosta wants to do.
Several people remarked that the prior LOST negotiations (which
are currently on judicial hold pending one participant returning from
the current session of the state legislature)
did affect SPLOST losing in the most recent election.
I didn’t hear anybody suggest holding public hearings this time,
but Commissioner Marshall did say it would be good to say what
SPLOST funds would be for in some detail.


On the other hand, the Chairman asserted

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 →

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

SPLOST VII lost



Speaking of

transparency,
Lowndes County voters defeated SPLOST VII 18,864 to 17,923 (51.28% to 48.72%).

Kay Harris in the VDT today quoted Ashley Paulk with this reason:

The defeat came as a surprise to Mayor John Gayle but not to Lowndes
County Commission Chairman Ashley Paulk, who said he warned the
mayors of the five municipalities that if they continued to argue
over

LOST, the local option sales tax, that voters would turn
against SPLOST in retaliation.

“I told them at the beginning if they didn’t stop arguing over
a few percent of the LOST and refused to leave the numbers as is by
taking the county’s offer, that taxpayers were going to turn against
the SPLOST,” said Paulk.

“Voters are disenchanted with the way their local governments
have gotten greedy and they’re tired of the arguments over money.
They voted SPLOST down because they don’t trust us with their tax
dollars, and it’s a real shame.”

I would agree
bickering over the
LOST pie was one of the reasons
SPLOST lost, and add to that the opaque back-room processes by which
the SPLOST VII projects were selected.
While the library needs updated and expanded facilities,

the lack of documented decision process
for the architect

and lack of adequate explanation for that
probably didn’t help, either,
nor did
the county’s puzzling lumping of the library in with Parks and Rec.

which they later tried to clarify.
Perhaps the voters are

tired of seeing transparency be a constant source of tension.
And I’m using the library as just one example. I could equally cite the
project for a farmers market under the overpass, which I think is a bad idea
because the farmers market already has a fabulous location at the historic
Lowndes County Courthouse, and so far as I know none of the vendors who sell there
were even asked if they wanted a new location, much less the public who buy there.

At the public-not-invited
SPLOST VII kickoff speeches
the last speaker said they were not there

Continue reading →