It’s a food festival Saturday in Valdosta!
Before, after, or during stocking up on local food at
Valdosta Farm Days at the historic Lowndes County Courthouse,
you can mosey up Patterson Street to Drexel Park for lunch, music, fun, and
education at Earth Day!
Drive, bike, or even walk; it’s only a little more than a mile.
|
|
Appended is the text of the announcement.
-jsq
Continue readingWe already saw that private investment is funding a 100 acre 10 MW solar farm with Cobb EMC as a customer. What does that mean for Cobb EMC’s direction? How big is Cobb EMC, anyway? And what does all this mean for Georgia Power, and for solar power in Georgia and all the jobs it can produce? What does it mean for everyone running for the Georgia legislature?
Kristi E. Swartz wrote for the AJC 16 April 2012, Solar project could be a catalyst for more if policies allow it,
“I always thought solar power was something further out for Georgia. We just weren’t in the right time,” said Chip Nelson, chief executive officer of Cobb EMC. “The way things have been moving in the utility industry, particularly the last two or three years, I find that we’re just ripe for it.”
Ripe indeed! Coal is dead. Nuclear is going down. 
Solar will eat the lunch of utilities that don’t start generating it. It’s time for utilities to get out in front and generate their own solar power. Austin Energy continues to show the way in Texas with a 30 MW solar farm. Now Cobb EMC can do the same for Georgia.
Nelson isn’t some fresh outsider: he’s a Cobb EMC lifer. According to Patty Rasmussen in Georgia Trend February 2012, Power Players: Taking Over At Cobb EMC,
Nelson worked for Cobb EMC for 37 years, most recently serving as chief operations officer. He stepped in as interim CEO in February 2010 and decided to apply for the full-time position.
And Cobb EMC is not small. According to Kim Isaza in MDJonline.com 20 July 2011 New Cobb EMC chief Nelson ready to ‘turn page’ on past costly litigation, divisiveness,
Continue readingLikely new industry, private prison really cancelled, strategic planning, and trees in the median!
Here are videos of the entire March regular meeting of the Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial Authority (VLCIA). Here’s the agenda.
It’s good that they approve minutes after emailing them to each other. Maybe someday we the taxpayers will get to see those minutes.
Did you know they had two executive sessions on 23 February 2012, at 10AM and 2:25 PM in addition to their retreat and regular meeting of that same day? If they’re having all these executive sessions, presumably all the material about personnel and real estate that needs to be kept confidential is in there, and the minutes of the regular meetings shouldn’t contain anything the public should not see.
For example, Continue reading
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
Underfunding of Georgia’s ethics commission has led to numerous inappropriate fines, some of which are still being straightened out after many months. Maybe the legislature should fund the ethics commission to a working level and make it independent of the legislature.
David Rodock wrote for the VDT 29 September 2011, Transparency Confusion: New campaign contributions system leads to officials owing fines,
The Georgia Government Transparency and Campaign Commission posted a seven-page list online earlier this week ethics.ga.govof local government officials who have supposedly failed to submit their campaign contribution information this year.
According to the state organization’s website, each late filer owes fines of different amounts.
Various elected officials were quoted in that article saying the fines were inappropriate. Many of those fines had already been removed from the list by the time that article was written.
There have been calls to properly fund that agency and to make it independent of the legislature. The Columbus Ledger-Inquirer wrote 25 January 2012, Ethics panel needs funding and independence,
Continue readingA $200 transaction can cost society $100,000 for a three-year sentence.It’s time to legalize, regulate, and tax drugs, taking tax money away from private prisons and police militarization, and freeing it up for education, health care, and rehabilitation.
George F. Will wrote 11 April 2012, Should the U.S. legalize hard drugs?
Amelioration of today’s drug problem requires Americans toWill-like, he ignores the real reasons we’re locking up so many people (corporate greed), but he does get at the consequences: Continue readingunderstand the significance of the 80-20 ratio. Twenty percent of American drinkers consume 80 percent of the alcohol sold here. The same 80-20 split obtains among users of illicit drugs.
About 3 million people — less than 1 percent of America’s population — consume 80 percent of illegal hard drugs. Drug-trafficking organizations can be most efficiently injured by changing the behavior of the 20 percent of heavy users, and we are learning how to do so. Reducing consumption by the 80 percent of casual users will not substantially reduce the northward flow of drugs or the southward flow of money.
As 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
7.a. Seminole Circle PropertyYour guess is as good as mine about the Seminole Circle Property. If the Commission wanted we the public to know, they would have told us.
7.b. Request from LCSO — GOHS Grant #2013-TEN-0077-00 & #2013-GA-0040-00
Update 2012 05 06: fixed the date in the title.
However, I believe that 7.b. alphabet soup translates as Lowndes County Sheriff’s Office (LCSO) — Governor’s Office of Highway Safety (GOHS). The TEN in the grant numbers makes me wonder if those grants are related to GOHS’s Georgia Traffic Enforcement Networks:
LCSO participates in this TEN:The Governor’s Office of Highway Safety in cooperation with state and local law enforcement agencies has organized regional Traffic Enforcement Networks around the State of Georgia. There are currently sixteen regional traffic enforcement networks servicing all 159 counties in Georgia. The regional networks are open to all sworn law enforcement officers and prosecutors and are designed to enhance traffic enforcement activities through networking, training and legislation. The networks serve as a catalyst for traffic enforcement officers to voice their concerns and share ideas with their counterparts from other agencies in their region. Guest speakers and panelists have included state and municipal court judges, prosecutors, legislators, MADD representatives, Public Service Commission, and ALS judges.
Southern Regional Traffic Enforcement Network (SRTEN) Counties included: Atkinson, Lowndes, Berrien, Brooks, Clinch, Coffee, Cook, Echols, Irwin, Lanier, Ben Hill and Tift.Or maybe they’re just buying another tank. Or will the Commission require that “surrounding counties could be persuaded to contribute” financially like they did when refusing an emergency vehicle grant?
I’m guessing the Commissioners won’t like me guessing what they’re up to. But, you know, if they told us, for example by putting board packet details online with the agendas, we wouldn’t have to guess.
Here’s the agenda.
-jsq
Continue readingLOWNDES COUNTY BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS
PROPOSED AGENDA
WORK SESSION, MONDAY, APRIL 9, 2012, 8:30 a.m.
REGULAR SESSION, TUESDAY, APRIL 10, 2012, 5:30 p.m.
327 N. Ashley Street – 2nd Floor
The Valdosta-Lowndes County Zoning Board of Appeals (ZBOA)
had a somewhat unusual case to start out its March meeting,
of someone wanting to revert to a previous zoning after the County Commission
had approved a rezoning.
The owner wants to do a development, but doesn’t have the resources in this economy,
so wants to go back to agricultural zoning to make a little money while waiting.
It was complicated, with issues of wetlands, costs,
advice by county staff, and small business employment. Watch and see!
|
View Larger Map |
Both of these cases were numbered 2012-01 (one from the county and one from the city). How can they be numbered 01? If I understand correctly, these were the first cases ZBOA has received this year, and this was the first ZBOA meeting this year. That could be an indication of the state of the local economy.
ZBOA mostly considers Continue reading
We previously discovered who was on the Valdosta-Lowndes County
Land Bank Authority Here’s the video:
Joyce Evans and Frank Morman reappointed to Land Bank Authority
Regular Session, Lowndes County Commission (LCC),
Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia, 27 March 2012.
Video by Gretchen Quarterman for Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE).
-jsq