Also an appointment to a Courthouse Preservation Committee and a subdivision infrastructure acceptance.
Here’s the agenda:
LOWNDES COUNTY BOARD OF COMMISSIONERSContinue reading
PROPOSED AGENDA
WORK SESSION, MONDAY, APRIL 23, 2012, 8:30 a.m.
REGULAR SESSION, TUESDAY, APRIL 24, 2012, 5:30 p.m.
327 N. Ashley Street – 2nd Floor
The local cities want more LOST money from the county. Imagine if they and the county spent this much effort bringing in new industry such as solar to increase the pie!
David Rodock wrote for the VDT 17 April 2012,
County’s LOST proposal declined:
Cities want more money; negotiations to begin in May.
Well, that about sums it up.
Looks like this is going to end up in another round of litigation
after a lot of talking past each other.
So there will be LOST again, this time in Hahira, 9AM 2 May 2012 at the Hahira Community Center, 215 Randall Street.
They could spend their time talking together more productively.
-jsq
It’s a cloudy sunrise for open government in Georgia with HB 387 now law. Will anyone enforce it? Will local governments comply? Will the legislature extend this law into a sunshiny day in Georgia?
Aaron Gould Sheinin and Bill Rankin wrote for the AJC yesterday, Governor signs Open Records rewrite into law,
House Bill 397, which took effect upon Deal’s signature, is the first major rewrite of Georgia’s sunshine laws in more than a decade. New provisions in the open records and meetings laws increase fines for offenders. The maximum penalty of $500 is now $1,000, and offenders who commit repeat violations within a year face fines of up to $2,500.
Previously, the sunshine laws allowed only criminal complaints to be filed against suspected violators, meaning a prosecutor would have to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt. The rewrite now allows the filing of civil complaints, which have a lower burden of proof.
That could be interesting if anyone actually files a complaint.
The rewrite also would provide new exemptions for some gatherings of governing bodies, such as allowing a quorum of members to attend the same civic function, receive training or visit government agencies — provided no official business is discussed or transpires.
So the various elected boards meeting together at the end of last month was probably OK, since they weren’t making decisions, merely educating each other. But the Lowndes County Commission repeatedly hiding from the public while discussing solid waste disposal, among other issues, does not seem to fit that exception.
It also reduces the cost of most documents disclosed under the Open Records Act from 25 cents to 10 cents per page.
That means the price of the Industrial Authority’s old minutes just went down, Continue reading
Here are videos of the entire
“first annual Valdosta-Lowndes Governmental Leadership Meeting”
that was held 6:30 PM 29 March 2012 in the Lowndes High School Lecture Hall.
Here’s
the announcement.
The meeting was introduced by Dr. Steve Smith, Superintendent, Lowndes County Schools. Lowndes County Schools had a written position statement, with everything from a broad variety of test scores and other metrics to specific examples of existing collaborations such as loaning busses to the Valdosta School System for away sporting events.
Dr. Smith
clarified that:
This is not a community forum, it is not an open dialogue.He told me before the meeting started that he was concerned that if they opened it up to questions from the audience it would take all night and it had been hard enough to get the various elected officials to show up at all without expecting them to stay for that. I didn’t see but maybe a dozen non-elected audience members, so I wonder whether that really would have happened, but I applaud the various governments for collaborating at all. He did say if you had a question you could write it down and hand it to a member of your elected government or school board. He also indicated that committees might form, not that evening, but perhaps growing out of that evening’s meeting. He reiterated this meeting was for brainstorming among the elected officials.
The elected officials included Valdosta Schools Superintendent and many VBOE members, Lowndes School Superintendent and Superintendent-elect and many LCBOE members, Valdosta Mayor, City Manager, and many city council members, and Lowndes County Manager, Clerk, and voting commissioners, but not the Chairman.
Wes Taylor, Lowndes High School Principal & Lowndes County Schools Superintendent Elect
talked about finances.
Valdosta Mayor John Gayle said
we’re regional now (regional hospital, regional university, etc.).
He talked about how Troup County went about landing the Kia plant,
which had to do with each governmental entity taking a role and collaborating.
(It had nothing to do with school consolidation.)
VBOE member Vanassa Flucas said they try to put everything related
to their schools on their website, in an effort of transparency for
parents and students. Plus:
We noticed that since we put our strategic plan on our website approximately three years ago, it was very well received. It was very heartening; people could find the information that they wanted.Imagine that! Continue reading
The Lowndes County Board of Education (LCBOE) often includes along with its agendas detailed information from its board packets. The Lowndes County Commission could do the same.
Here’s their November FY2012 Finance Report in their 12 December 2012 agenda. Sometimes they even include details of items for their executive sessions, as in Personnel recommendations attached to that same agenda.
The Valdosta Board of Education (VBOE) does the same thing. Here’s a football ticket proposal and a Coke contract from VBOE’s 27 February 2012 agenda; also health insurance cost information. That particular agenda has several more financial documents attached.
Both LCBOE and VBOE use eboardsolutions.com. Other companies sell other products that facilitate posting board agendas and minutes.
Travis County, Texas, which includes packet items with its agendas, appears to have constructed its own website. Travis County adds videos after the meetings. I bet they’d tell other local governments how they do it.
So there’s part of a spectrum of solutions to posting board packet items online with agendas: use a turnkey cloud solution, or roll your own.
The Lowndes County Commission could pick a solution, and inform the public about what they are doing by putting agenda packets online with their agendas.
-jsq
Your county commission might have a problem with transparency when no item in a voting session takes more than a few seconds longer than the invocation and pledge. Or perhaps a public hearing in which the public is not invited to speak.
Another five minute meeting, like the previous morning’s four (Chairman’s count) or five (VDT’s count) minute work session. They did not spend even one minute on any item of the agenda.
We did get to learn that the cryptic
7.a. Seminole Circle Property
is owned by the county which wants to sell it off. Commissioner Richard Raines even read from Georgia Code the reason why the county could do that without putting it up for bids. If you did have any objection, or maybe you wanted to buy it, you’re too late, because a few seconds after we learned what it was, they sold it off. That was the longest item, at 1 minute and 20 seconds.
They didn’t mention that the subject property is apparently a splinter of a much larger 538.31 acre parcel, 0172 119, which is presumably the “land application site” they referred to. According to the 8 December 2009 minutes they use it as a hay field. After land application of what? Continue reading
Here are videos of the
Local Option Sales Tax (LOST) talks yesterday morning
between Lowndes County and the local cities (Valdosta, Hahira, Remerton, Dasher, and Lake Park.
Not really negotiations, these were more an exchange of views.
The county’s position is the same as Chairman Ashley Paulk told me after
the county’s
four minute work session earlier that morning:
the county could claim 72% of LOST based on cost of services delivered
to the whole county,
but the county’s offer is to stick with the 58% share from 2002.
The cities all would like a bigger share.
The venue was the county’s meeting room next to Commission Chambers. There was no sound feed available in there, so sound is variable.
First
County Manager Joe Pritchard explained
the state-mandated procedures
and
Lowndes County’s position,
both of which were spelled out in a
three page paper.
Basically, the county wants to stick to the percentages negotiated in 2002,
although by the county’s reckoning it could ask for a much higher percentage.
None of the cities had a written position paper.
Valdosta Mayor John Gayle noted Valdosta had grown more than the
county as a whole.
County Chairman Ashley Paulk responded that the city couldn’t grow
without the county growing.
The Mayor said nontheless most growth was in Valdosta.
The Chairman asked whether that was growth in households?
The Mayor said he didn’t know the answer to that right now.
The Chairman remarked that according to his reading of the census,
it was mostly not in households.
Lowndes County Clerk Paige Dukes handed out this document, Lowndes County’s Report for Initial LOST Negotiations: April 9, 2012, at that first LOST meeting yesterday. When I spoke to her later, I mentioned that I thought it was the very model of how to write such a document: clear, complete, pithy, and easily understandable. She did not have a readily-accessible electronic copy, so I’ve posted these scanned images on the LAKE website.
The document includes a summary of the negotiation procedure (60 days to negotiate, after which it goes to mediation, then Superior Court “baseball arbitration”), plus how and how much LOST can reduce property taxes.
The rest of the document is the county’s position, which includes that the county provides services such as sheriff, courts, public health, and animal control that benefit the entire county, and the county could claim 72% of LOST. However, the county is only asking for the same 58% as negotiated in 2002.
A few things I did not know include that the dedicated millage for Parks and Rec (VLPRA 1.5mil) and the Industrial Authority (VLCIA 1 mil) come out of county property taxes, not out of any city property taxes. Also VLCIA’s millage started since 2002, before which VLCIA was funded out of hotel-motel taxes, including Valdosta hotel-motel taxes.
I also remarked to Paige Dukes that I wished the cities had prepared 
similar position statements. She said they may be depending on LOST negotiating documents by the Georgia Municipal Association (GMA), and that there were similar documents by the Association of County Commissioners of Georgia (ACCG), both which you can find linked in on the LAKE website.
The ACCG guidelines include this interesting passage:
Continue readingAs I walked in the door, a couple minutes late due to construction on the hospital parking lot, Commissioner Crawford Powell said,
John, you’re late!
They were milling about and looked like they were about to start. But no, they had started early and Chairman Paulk told me the meeting had lasted four minutes because there hadn’t been much to say. So there are no videos of this morning’s Lowndes County Commission Work Session.
I remarked that it had seemed like a fairly complicated agenda, but he didn’t think so.
I asked him about this mysterious item:
7.b. Request from LCSO — GOHS Grant #2013-TEN-0077-00 & #2013-GA-0040-00
He said it is about some equipment to automate Sheriff’s deputies checking license plates against databases. I told him I had assumed they had already been doing that. He said they could do it by hand, but they’d get really tired trying to do as many as this device could do.
Presumably it’s similar to the Automatic License Plate Reader (ALPR) described by Doug Nurse in the AJC 20 March 2009, New police license plate scanner eyes criminals.
Alpharetta Police Officer John Allen said that a few weeks after the system became went online last August, he was driving home after a shift when the system alerted him that he had passed a stolen car. He wheeled around, and after a chase, arrested the thief.
“I never even saw the tag myself,” Allen said. “I would have just kept going. It catches things I would be unable to see.”
While I don’t know that I’m in favor of ALPR, it’s common enough elsewhere that I was actually surprised the famously drug-interdicting LCSO wasn’t already using it.
To the Chairman’s credit, as soon as I asked about the LOST meeting with the mayors, he said it was at 9:30 in the room next door, and the public was invited. I took videos of that LOST meeting, and they will appear soon.
-jsq
Kay Harris wrote Saturday in the VDT, LOST talks set to begin: County, cities to meet Monday,
Well, that’s interesting. When is this meeting? Ah, the time of day wasn’t included in the article.As required by state law, Lowndes County issued a letter to the mayors of all the municipalities in the county, requesting they attend a renegotiation meeting Monday, April 9 to discuss LOST (local option sales tax) distributions.
“This has to be done and approved by the end of the year in order to stay in place, so we have to start the process now,” said Commission Chairman Ashley Paulk.
There’s a clue in David Rodock’s 31 March 2012 writeup about the Commission retreat, Continue reading