John, this is the first open records reguest I did with GDA. The rest will be in order of date of the request.The document Shirley King attached for Item #2 was this PDF of a letter from Joe Pritchard of 27 August 2010 telling
Documents about the animal shelter are appearing here on the LAKE web pages. Here are the messages Susan Leavens forwarded along with this particular letter.
-jsq Continue reading
Solar Power Generation in the US: Too expensive, or a bargain? by Richard Perez, ASRC, University at Albany, Ken Zweibel, GW Solar Institute, George Washington University, Thomas E. Hoff, Clean Power Research. That’s Albany, New York, but it applies even more to Albany, Georgia and Lowndes County, Georgia, since we’re so much farther south, with much more sun.
Let’s cut to the chase:
The sun supplies solar power when you need it: at the same time the sun drives heat waves.The fuel of heat waves is the sun; a heat wave cannot take place without a massive local solar energy influx. The bottom part of Figure 2 illustrates an example of a heat wave in the southeastern US in the spring of 2010 and the top part of the figure shows the cloud cover at the same time: the qualitative agreement between solar availability and the regional heat wave is striking. Quantitative evidence has also shown that the mean availability of solar generation during the largest heat wave driven rolling blackouts in the US was nearly 90% ideal (Letendre et al. 2006). One of the most convincing examples, however, is the August 2003 Northeast blackout that lasted several days and cost nearly $8 billion region wide (Perez et al., 2004). The blackout was indirectly caused by high demand, fueled by a regional heat wave3. As little as 500 MW of distributed PV region wide would have kept every single cascading failure from feeding into one another and precipitating the outage. The analysis of a similar subcontinental scale blackout in the Western US a few years before that led to nearly identical conclusions (Perez et al., 1997).
In essence, the peak load driver, the sun via heat waves and A/C demand, is also the fuel powering solar electric technologies. Because of this natural synergy, the solar technologies deliver hard wired peak shaving capability for the locations/regions with the appropriate demand mix peak loads driven by commercial/industrial A/C that is to say, much of America. This capability remains significant up to 30% capacity penetration (Perez et al., 2010), representing a deployment potential of nearly 375 GW in the US.
The paper identifies the problem I’ve encountered talking to local policy makers, especially ones associated with power companies: Continue reading
This would be great at stalls at Downtown Valdosta Farm Days at the historic Courthouse: practical cooking and marketing for solar Valdosta and Lowndes County!In Oaxaca, Mexico taco street vendors are using the solar energy from the sun to cook their tacos. This is being done as part of a project run by Michael Gotz who is trying to find to what degree they can transform the use of solar energy.
More about
Michael Götz.
-jsq
Concerned Citizen,Continue readingPlease understand that there are state laws that people get arrested for each day also; the county ordiance mirrors the state law(s) however if you have not read the statements no one was arrested either. And do you think the bulldog was the first incident? Keep reading!! Below are some other things which have occured in the shelter.
Page 3 #15 Cruelty,
Page 5 #23 hoplesly disable animal,
page 5 #26 humane care,
page 7 #36 records,
Section 5 page 10 Emergencies involving animals,
to name a few of the Lowndes County Ordinance.So when you say why didn’t I(Officer Leavens)end
Welcome AndreaContinue readingShuijerSchruijer to a great opportunity as the new Executive Director of the Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial Authority (VLCIA)!
For a year I’ve been asking for a list of jobs attracted by the Authority. We welcome your marketing expertise so we’ll know the Authority’s successes!
We welcome your communications expertise to inform the community affected by the process of bringing new jobs. VLCIA could publish its agendas, minutes, and videos of its meetings, events, and new jobs on its web pages, and facebook, maybe even twitter.
We welcome your stewardship of the Authority’s $3 million/year in taxes. Maybe some
…the Humane Society provided two county employees with undercover cameras as a gratuity.The picture shows Ashley Paulk (center) motioning to VDT reporter David Rodock (foreground) as he directs the VDT to publish what he just said. Mechelle Sullivan is on the right, and County Manager Joe Pritchard looks on from left. Voting Commissioners Evans, Raines, and Powell are just visible between Paulk and Sullivan.
…
I want those two undercover cameras returned by my two employees, or there will be some administrative action.
…
I’m making this a public record.
…
If I don’t get those cameras back and the gratuity I’m going to pursue it through the Sheriff’s office.
…
Needs to be public record in the VDT.
The VDT did take dictation and publish that this morning, adding this quote from Chairman Paulk:
“It’s a gratuity. You can’t give a government employee something in order to get something in return. It’s not legal.”Other things are also not legal, yet never seem to be pursued.
Speaking of pursued, Chairman Paulk encountered a group of Continue reading
She gave some examples.However, the most frustrating to me was the lack of enforcement of animal…. You know, this went on for a long time time and we were all very frustrated. And so we finally decided that the only way to improve enforcement was to strengthen animal control laws…. So the Human Society was very interested in strenghtening those laws. And I think the animal control ordinances now are [better]. However, enforcement is still an issue.
Here’s the video:
Regular Session, Lowndes County Commission (LCC),
Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia, 28 June 2011.
Videos by Gretchen Quarterman for LAKE, the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange.
Continued in next post.
-jsq
Sheriff Prine was at last night’s
budget hearing (his office accounts for more of the county
budget than anything else).
Afterwards I asked him how matters such as the complaints about
the animal shelter could be brought to the attention of his office.
He said that was a code enforcement matter, and if code enforcement
thought it rose to a criminal matter, they would take it to Magistrate
Court, which would issue a warrant, which would go to the Sheriff’s office,
where it would be pursued.
Remember who code enforcement is in Lowndes County. Continue reading
Catherine E. Shoichet wrote for CNN 28 June 2011 about Paul Bridges, mayor of Uvalde, Republican mayor in the South becomes unlikely advocate for immigrants:
He thinks Governor Nathan Deal got it wrong when he signed HB 87: Continue readingBridges is waging a deeply personal battle.
Enforcement of the Georgia law could put him in prison and tear apart the families of some of his closest friends.
budget hearing today, 28 June 2011 at 5PM.
The county didn’t publish the proposed budbget, but
LAKE did.
Maybe you’d like to come ask some questions, like
these by Jessica Bryan Hughes.
Then there’s the regular session of the County Commission; agenda appended. They plan to vote tonight to approve the budget they never published.
-jsq
Continue reading
LOWNDES COUNTY BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS
PROPOSED AGENDA
WORK SESSION, MONDAY, JUNE 27, 2011, 8:30 a.m.
REGULAR SESSION, TUESDAY, JUNE 28, 2011, 5:30 p.m.
327 N. Ashley Street – 2nd Floor