No Work Session Today; County Commission still meets Tuesday

No work session today; regular session still on for 5:30 PM Tuesday 25 Jan 2011. The county website has under Special Events this notice:
Work Session Meeting Cancelled (1/24/2011)

PUBLIC NOTICE
COMMISSION MEETING
WORK SESSION CANCELLED

Due to the lack of agenda items requiring additional information or discussion, the Lowndes County Board of Commissioners Work Session on Monday, January 24, 2011, has been cancelled.

The regular session meeting is still scheduled for
Tuesday, January 25, 2011 at, 5:30 p.m.

327 N. Ashley Street
Valdosta, GA

For questions please call Paige Dukes at 229-671-2400.
This has happened several times before. Paige Dukes is the County Clerk.

See the previous post for the one unusual item on the agenda, about policies and procedures for Citizens Wishing to be Heard.

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Valdosta Locally Grown

Local food for local jobs! According to their facebook page,
Valdosta Locally Grown is an online farmers market being formed to bring consumers together with small farms, gardeners, and food producers located around Valdosta , Georgia, all carrying the common thread of dedication to community, environment, health and education. We hope to be operating by the early spring harvest season.
They are working on a website. Their primary instigator is Tom Kuettner, whom you can see here at the Hahira Farmers Market: Continue reading →

Farmers grow renewable energy? –James Wright

Grow crops to burn for fuel, or for food? Valdosta City Council member James Wright brings up an article about farmers growing plants for biomass fuel. These things get passed around by council members, and I’m pretty sure this one that came to me indirectly is it: November 12, 2010 – Incentivizing Renewable Biomass Production, by New Energy Farms, Leamington, Ontario. What they’re mainly recommending is Miscanthus, which is a genus of clump grass.


The above video was already posted as part of
After all the citizens left –Valdosta City Council, 20 Jan 2011.

Now call me old-fashioned, but I prefer local farmers growing food Continue reading →

County Commission Meetings Monday and Tuesday


left to right: Ashley Paulk (Chairman),
Joyce E. Evans (District 1),
Crawford Powell (District 3),
Richard Raines (District 2).
The next scheduled meetings of the Lowndes County Commission are:
  • 8:30 AM Monday January 24, 2011: work session
  • 5:30 PM Tuesday January 25, 2011: regular session
The agenda is posted on the county website. This meeting will probably be very brief, since it has no rezoning cases; those come every other meeting. This one is mostly contracts for consideration. However, there is this interesting item:
5. Resolution Establishing Policies and Procedures for Citizens Wishing to Be Heard and Consideration of Lowndes County Board of Commissioners Policies and Procedures for Citizens Wishing to Be Heard

It also has the regular item:

7. Citizens Wishing to be Heard Please State Name And Address
This item is for the regular session, not the work session, although in the work session the Chairman sometimes notes somebody is there wanting to talk and asks them to say what they want to say. Conversely, in the regular session we don’t usually hear much from this one:
8. Reports-County Manager
The county manager often gives a longer report in the work session.

By “very brief” I mean work sessions typically run about 15 minutes, with the record being something like 8 minutes. And they start on time, or a minute early. Be there or miss what you want to hear or say.

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State needs to rethink locking up nonviolent offenders –Nathan Deal

Conservative Georgia governor Deal wants fewer people in prison, discovering, like Texas before, that Georgia can’t afford it. Jim Galloway reported in the AJC 17 Jan 2011, Georgia Gov: Drug court offers good alternative Cost of crime and punishment is high on new governor Nathan Deal’s list:
Georgia Governor Nathan Deal has said that violent offenders will remain behind bars, but the state needs to rethink the costs of locking up others, like nonviolent drug offenders.
Last May we noted that Georgia spends a billion dollars a year to keep the fourth-largest number of prisoners of any state. Now that the state is cutting every other budget, including huge cuts in education, we just can’t afford to lock so many people up.

The number of people locked up has grown way faster than violent crime since 1980. The U.S., with 5% of the world’s populatioon now has 25% of the world’s prison population: more than any other country total and per capita: more than China, more than Russia, more than Cuba. As Sen. James Webb remarked in 2009: Continue reading →

After all the citizens left –Valdosta City Council, 20 Jan 2011

Want to know what your city council really thinks? Stay through the entire meeting and you’ll get some clues; or watch these videos by some who did stay. City Manager, Attorney, and each council member say what’s on their minds. Much of it addresses some of the questions asked by citizens earlier: cracks in the MLK monument, biomass, council members answering questions from the audience, etc. What they didn’t talk about may indicate what various citizens didn’t succeed in conveying to the council.

It’s not like what they were saying was a secret. The VDT reporter was there. They were finishing up the agenda with the sections “7. City Manager’s Report” and “8. Council Comments”. You can see them adjourn at the end. Some of them groused about the time citizens take up in “Citizens Wishing to be Heard”.

But remember, almost none of those citizens bothered to stay around to listen to them. Among the stay-latest: two cameras for LAKE, the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange, providing you these two views: Continue reading →

The Quitman 10 and the Press

Patrick David reports from Macon, 7 Jan 2011, Quitman 10: New Year’s Day protest march sends message to J. David Miller, GBI:
Approximately three hundred marchers converged onto the steps of the Brooks County Courthouse to send a public message that voter intimidation and voter disenfranchisement will not be tolerated.

This story has flown under the radar of the mainstream media, but the GBI in conjunction with Republican J. David Miller, the district attorney for the Southern Judicial District that represent majority-African-American towns such as Thomasville, Moultrie, Valdosta and Alma, is preparing to move forward in the targeting of ten African-American Brooks County citizens, otherwise known as the “Quitman 10”.

I mentioned the day after the arrests (22 Dec 2010) that it was curious that the local newspaper, the Valdosta Daily Times, seemed to have nothing about that. At least WCTV and WALB reported the arrests, but they don’t seem to be following the story since. Dean Poling did report in the VDT 24 Dec 2010 that Charges won’t keep Brooks school board members from serving: Continue reading →

Reporting on Valdosta without water

The talk of the town (and apparently all of south Georgia today) is the Lowndes County seat lost water. Both the Valdosta’s city government web pages (VLD) and the newspaper (VDT) have been reporting online, but it’s hard to tell exactly when, since both have only datestamps, not timestamps. What does “in the next hour” mean when you don’t know in what hour the notice was posted? Time notations appropriate for paper media issued once a day aren’t quite adequate for online posts multiple times a day.

WCTV does include timestamps, and Dontaye Carter did some reporting for her story posted 6:48 PM: Continue reading →

“I don’t feel my interests were adequately represented” –Matt Flumerfelt

First-time speaker Matt Flumerfelt notes the Valdosta City Council and the Lowndes County Commission both disclaim responsibility for the Industrial Authority even though both appoint its members, and he thinks that may make VLCIA’s contract for the biomass plant challengeable on constitutional grounds. He also sent LAKE the appended article on 20 Jan 2011.

Video by John S. Quarterman of the regular meeting of the Valdosta City Council, 20 January 2011, for LAKE, the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange.

Faith In Technology Is What Got Us Into This Mess

by Matt Flumerfelt

Many people in the Valdosta-Lowndes County community have faith that the proposed Biomass incinerator won’t harm anyone or anything, but faith in technology is what got us into our current environmental mess in the first place. Those old enough to remember the nuclear power debate will remember how many people gave assurances that nuclear power was safe, yet we see today how difficult nuclear waste is to dispose of and how much damage it has caused when things go wrong, which, human nature being what it is, they inevitably do. The recent gulf oil spill would not have happened if

Continue reading →

District numbers and MLK repairs –George Rhynes

George Boston Rhynes asks for Valdosta City Council members to be easier to visually distinguish, and thanks council and staff for promising to pay attention to physical problems with the MLK monument.

Video by John S. Quarterman of the regular meeting of the Valdosta City Council, 20 January 2011 for LAKE, the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange.

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