In two months, less than 60 days away, Wiregrass Power LLC is supposed to
break ground on the biomass facility in Lowndes County. By now, they are
supposed to have contracts with power companies to sell the electricity
to and with suppliers to purchase the wood waste. They have neither,
nor does the company have an agreement with the city of Valdosta to
purchase the wastewater from the sewage treatment plant.
And yet the folks at the Industrial Authority appear to be rather
nonchalant about the fact that this company has yet again broken its
agreement. They have the power to renogiate the terms of the agreement and
they also have the power to cancel it, but neither is happening. Instead,
they are giving the company all the leeway they need to continue dragging
this project along that the community doesn’t want.
Some local councils don’t even have open records request forms,
and many don’t have them posted online.
But that doesn’t have to stop you!
As mentioned,
there are plenty of open records requests still to be filed.
If you want suggestions, inquire at
information at l-a-k-e.org (the dashes are part of the address).
For how, see the previous post on the
Open Records Act.
Send LAKE the results of your request and we may publish them.
If you want your name mentioned in a LAKE post as the open records requestor,
please say so.
Also remember that any communications you may receive from
an elected
Continue reading →
Elizabeth Pran asks
Who Gets More Tax Dollars… Prisoners or School Children?
Of course, being Fox News, it advocates cutting prison
costs by reducing air conditioning for prisoners.
The real problem is the War on Drugs and Three Strikes.
She does at last manage to mention in passing “alternative programs
for non-violent offenders.”
Yes, like not locking up people for minor drug offenses in the first place!
And indeed, educating students today would cost less than
locking them up later.
Meanwhile, privatizing prisons does nothing to solve these problems;
it just lines some corporation’s pockets with tax money.
The Wiregrass Power LLC biomass facility was supposed to have met a number
of project goals established by the Economic Development Agreement (EDA)
between the company and the Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial Authority
by April 1, 2011. According to Allen Ricketts, Industrial Authority
project manager, those goals still have yet to be met.
The specific goals in the agreement were that a “finalized engineering
procurement construction contract” would be ready by March 31. By
April 1, the company was supposed to have finalized both a power
purchase/transmission agreement along with a wastewater/biosolids
agreement.
They’ve been slipping deadlines for quite some time.
According to page 4 of that EDA (which you can see for yourself
on the LAKE web site):
Continue reading →
“More African American men are in prison or jail, on probation or
parole than were enslaved in 1850, before the Civil War began,” Michelle
Alexander told a standing room only house at the Pasadena Main Library
this past Wednesday, the first of many jarring points she made in a
riveting presentation.
She’s written a best-selling book,
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness,
and she discusses the problem:
Continue reading →
After he gave his
goodbye speech,
I
wished him happiness in Myrtle Beach
and thought maybe he’d make a graceful exit.
Nope, he’s still cranking the Edison phonograph on the same old
scratched wax cylinder.
Here he is last week responding to James Wright
and dozens of other people in the same thread
to which I later posted
It’s an opportunity.
In Lofton’s case, he’s still fixated on the losing proposition of biomass fuels.
-jsq
Thanks so much for sharing this and for your continued strong support of our
client’s green renewable energy project. In addition to assisting the
country in reducing our consumption of middle eastern fuel and improving the
environment, this project will provide a much needed economic impact for
landowners of every race, and the Industrial Authority will assist in the
efforts underway to assist local farmers. Google “benefits of biomass
electricity,”
Protestors wearing respirator masks held signs reading “Biomass? No!”
in front of the Valdosta City Hall building on Thursday. Members of
the Wiregrass Activists for Clean Energy, the VSU student organization
Students Against Violating the Environment, and other concerned Valdosta
citizens showed up to protest the construction of the Wiregrass Power:
Biomass Electric Generating Plant.
“We already have solar power resources in place that we could be using
and I feel like money should be directed towards that,” Ivey Roubique,
vice-president of the Student Geological Society, said. “It wouldn’t
be good for the community and even though I’m in college here it
still matters.”
The Spectator article quotes from two speakers for whom LAKE
happens to have video, linked below.
Continue reading →
When public officials ignore objections for long enough, eventually
people start speculating as to their motives, in this case about the proposed biomass plant.
Here’s
the video:
Regular meeting of the Valdosta City Council, 24 February 2011.
Videos by Gretchen Quarterman for LAKE, the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange.
Erin Hurley provided the very model of how to give a speech:
I’m the president of
Students Against Violating the Environment at VSU.
I’m here representing
200+ members of SAVE, that consists of students, faculty, community members.
We are deeply concerned with environmental issues and
we are networking together to make this city a more humane and
sustainable community
for future generations.
As a student, I feel I have the right to be able to breathe clean air
at the college I attend.
With this biomass plant possibly being built here,
the future for generations to come are in jeopardy, and we want to protect our fellow and future students’ health.
Please take into consideration the future health of this university
and its community,
and don’t sell grey water to the proposed biomass plant.
Erin Hurley, President of
SAVE, Students Against Violating the Environment, speaking at
Regular meeting of the Valdosta City Council, 24 March 2011,
Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia.
Videos by Gretchen Quarterman for LAKE, the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange.
She said who she was, who she represented, how many, what they were for, what they wanted, quickly enough that attention didn’t waver, slowly and loudly enough to be heard, and briefly enough to transcribe, with pathos, logic, and politic. Even the mayor looked up at “As a student….”
It seemed like a good idea at the time when the west Texas farming
town of Littlefield borrowed $10 million and built the Bill Clayton
Detention Center in a cotton field south of town in 2000. The charmless
steel-and-cement-block buildings ringed with razor wire would provide
jobs to keep young people from moving to Lubbock or Dallas.
For eight years, the prison was a good employer. Idaho and Wyoming paid
for prisoners to serve time there. But two years ago, Idaho pulled out
all of its contract inmates because of a budget crunch at home. There
was also a scandal surrounding the suicide of an inmate.
Shortly afterward, the for-profit operator, GEO Group, gave notice that
it was leaving, too. One hundred prison jobs disappeared. The facility
has been empty ever since.
In two months, less than 60 days away, Wiregrass Power LLC is supposed to break ground on the biomass facility in Lowndes County. By now, they are supposed to have contracts with power companies to sell the electricity to and with suppliers to purchase the wood waste. They have neither, nor does the company have an agreement with the city of Valdosta to purchase the wastewater from the sewage treatment plant.
And yet the folks at the Industrial Authority appear to be rather nonchalant about the fact that this company has yet again broken its agreement. They have the power to renogiate the terms of the agreement and they also have the power to cancel it, but neither is happening. Instead, they are giving the company all the leeway they need to continue dragging this project along that the community doesn’t want.
Some local councils don’t even have open records request forms,
and many don’t have them posted online.
But that doesn’t have to stop you!
![](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Emperor_Norton_proclamation_re._assumption_of_prerogatives_WFHM_SF.JPG")
