Sprawl to ruin, or dense with green space for quality of life

Jeffrey H. Dorfman, Professor, Dept. of Agricultural & Applied Economics, The University of Georgia:
Local governments must ensure balanced growth, as sprawling residential growth is a certain ticket to fiscal ruin*
* Or at least big tax increases.
See The Economics of Growth, Sprawl and Land Use Decisions.
  • Green spaces increase property values of surrounding land
  • Green and open spaces can provide environmental amenities for free
  • If green spaces contribute to quality of life, you attract people and jobs to community
Note and jobs, not just people: jobs so the people can work and afford the houses they live in.

But this doesn’t mean exurban subdivisions with big yards: Continue reading →

Water Planning

In 2004 the state of Georgia adopted a water planning system, and in 2008 adopted a water plan, with regional councils appointed in 2009 by the governor, lieutenant governor, and Speaker of the House. While I wonder why this organizational setup inserted a regional layer of government that is unaccountable to the people in the region, it’s good somebody is doing some water planning.
In the event “gaps” between available water and future (or current) demands are identified, the Council will determine which water and land use management practices should be employed to ensure there is sufficient water and assimilative capacity to meet future needs. EPD will use computer models to test the ability of the recommended practices to close any identified “gaps.”
If you remember Atlanta running out of water a few years ago Continue reading →

Dr. William Sammons on Biomass Sustainability and Economics

Here’s an interesting video interview with Dr. William Sammons, the doctor who spoke in Traverse City just before that biomass plant was nixed.
Is it more important to reach the target … or to say we have new information and we need to revise the targets and what qualifies?
He’s talking about potential billions of dollars of health costs from particulates, about “waste” wood (what they say they will burn) vs. whole trees (what they end up burning), and most importantly about sustainability.

Biomass plants don’t have to report their CO2 emissions, so if all the proposed biomass plants get built we’re talking about as much as 800 million tons of CO2 from biomass plants by 2020, 12 to 14% of total CO2 emissions for the U.S. (not just power emissions: total national emissions). Trees don’t grow fast enough to suck all that back out of the air in ten years. Continue reading →

On behalf of local workers

From: George Boston Rhynes
Date: Sat, 14 Aug 2010 16:21:27 -0400
Subject: Citizens To Be Heard At Valdosta City Council Meetings, Mr. Roy Taylor on behalf of local workers!

August 13, 2010

George Boston Rhynes (229-251-8645) Valdosta, Georgia 31605

TO: All Editors and Beyond

The Valdosta Daily Times Article on Aug 11 that read; “Order in the Court, a look at the Lowndes County Court House.” It highlighted the history and benefits of the old 1905 Lowndes County Court House but did not address diversity, gender, and who mostly benefited through employment from building this new facility. That is except for the employers and immigrants from Mexico. Continue reading →

Village Green or Detention Pond?

George Monbiot writes in the Guardian about how We have allowed developers to rob us of our village green:
Build loose suburbs carved up by busy roads and without green spaces and you help to create a population of fat, lonely people plagued by criminals. Build dense, leafy settlements with mixed uses, protected from traffic, and you help to create safe, fit and friendly communities.
Here’s one picture of what a fit, safe and functional community might look like. There’s nothing radical or new about it: similar developments have been built for centuries (and most are now monopolised by the rich). Houses or apartment blocks are built densely around a square of shared green space. It is big enough for playing ball games, but without fixed goalposts, allowing children and adults to define the space for themselves. It could contain trees; perhaps rocks or logs to climb on. There might be a corner of uncut meadow, or flowerbeds or fruit bushes. The space will work best when it is designed and managed by the people who live there.

Most important, the houses face inwards, and no cars are allowed inside the square: the roads serve only the backs of the buildings. The square is overlooked by everyone, which means that children can run in and out of their houses unsupervised, create their own tribes and learn their own rules, without fear of traffic accidents or molesters. They have a place in which to run wild without collecting asbos.

(An asbo is an Anti-Social Behaviour Order, like a citation for disturbing the peace.)

Suppose instead of walling off a detention pond and letting it grow weeds and snakes we made most of it high enough not to flood and let it grow trees, flowers, grass for children to play on, and maybe even vegetables. That wouldn’t cost much more to develop. The detention pond pictured is in the Hamilton Pointe development, where several residents told me they had no place to play football or basketball. If the detention pond was turned into a village green, they would have a place for sports.

-jsq

Proposed Solar Plants

OK, let’s look at “solar” in the online interactive map from Joel Achenbach’s story about The 21st Century Grid in the July 2010 National Geographic. It’s easy to count the proposed solar power plants in Georgia: zero. Yet there’s one in Virginia, one in Maryland, and at least three in Florida, adding to the currently largest solar plant in the country near De Soto, Florida. The map legend repeats the GEFA canard that
The Southwest is a solar-power hotbed. To supplement fossil fuel plants, long-distance transmission lines stretch from the Mojave Destert, which has plenty of sun.
Yes, that’s true, but what about this. At least three solar plants are proposed around San Antonio and Austin, which are not in the area of the southwest the map blurb is referring to. In fact, the largest solar plant in the country is proposed for Austin. Austin is one degree of latitude south of Valdosta, and has been leading the country in solar deployment for many years now. Texas in general almost doubled renewable energy generation between 2004 and 2006 while Georgia did nothing. Texas hasn’t stopped. When will Georgia start?

The Austin solar solution doesn’t require massive new power lines, either. It’s mostly been accomplished with solar panels on houses and business roofs; panels that wouldn’t show up on National Geographic’s map because they’re small and distributed. Which is the point: they generate power where it’s needed, and at peak times when it’s needed, namely when it’s hot and sunny out and air conditioners are running on max. There’s no reason Georgia can’t do the same.

I would continue this series by showing wind generation proposed for Georgia, but there isn’t any of that, either. There could be, off the coast.

Which makes more sense: polluting our air with more coal and biomass plants, or getting a move on with solar and wind?

-jsq

Proposed Biomass Plants

Let’s select “other” in the online interactive map from Joel Achenbach’s story about The 21st Century Grid in the July 2010 National Geographic. This map clearly shows the proposed Wiregrass LLC plant in Valdosta, as well as two plants proposed just to the south for Hamilton County, Florida, and one in Echols County, Georgia, which presumably would be the Oglethorpe Power alternative site. Several of the other plants shown are probably the other proposed Oglethorpe Power plants. Missing is Georgia Power’s Plant Mitchell in Albany, which is supposed to convert from coal to biomass. (Also if you select “nuclear”, the two Georgia Power proposed nuclear plants on the Savannah River are missing.) Apparently National Geographic edoesn’t have a complete list of proposed biomass plants. I wonder who does, if anybody?

Nonetheless, take this map of proposed biomass plants and combine it with the map of proposed new coal plants, plus the existing coal plants in Juliette, Georgia (dirtiest in the country) and Albany, and south Georgia is slated to become even more infested with polluting energy sources.

Does that seem like a good idea to you?

Next: proposed solar plants.

-jsq

Proposed Coal Plants

In the July 2010 National Geographic, Joel Achenbach writes about The 21st Century Grid. It’s mostly about how we need a smart grid and additional power lines to redistribute power better, but it does get into proposed power plants to generate new power.
Although everyone acknowledges the need for a better, smarter, cleaner grid, the paramount goal of the utility industry continues to be cheap electricity. In the U.S. about half of it comes from burning coal. Coal-powered generators produce a third of the mercury emissions in America, a third of our smog, two-thirds of our sulfur dioxide, and nearly a third of our planet-warming carbon dioxide—around 2.5 billion metric tons a year, by the most recent estimate.
Then it talks about how it’s hard to get stodgy electric utilities to invest in anything else. However, there is at least one way:
A California law requires utilities to generate at least 20 percent of their electricity from renewable sources as of this year.
OK, so what new energy plant are proposed for Georgia? The online interactive map lets you select different energy types. The map above shows four proposed new coal plants in Georgia, surrounding south Georgia (plus something nonrenewable in Florida near Tampa). I recognize the one in far southwest Georgia as the one proposed for Early County and fortunately still tied up in litigation. All four are in addition to the existing Plant Scherer at Juliett, GA, near Macon, the dirtiest coal plant in the country, and the one that generates 2/3 of our power for south Georgia (as well as selling a lot of power to Florida). Adding still more dirty coal plants does not look like progress.

Continued in next blog entry.

-jsq

Valdosta in bottom 10 metro areas for wages

Richard Florida writes about The Geography of High-Paying Jobs, including this map based on Bureau of Labor Staistics (BLS) data:

The Valdosta Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) comes in the bottom 10 nationwide. That’s for overall average wages.

It doesn’t look quite as bad for specific classes of jobs (creative, service, and working class), but that’s mostly because there are almost no MSAs in the lowest pay tier. However, for service jobs, Valdosta is not as good as Tallahassee, and makes it into the bottom 10: Continue reading →

Local Food for Economic Benefit in Georgia

The UGA Center for Agribusiness and Economic Development has quantified the economic effects of eating local food in Georgia, in this report: The Local Food Impact: What if Georgians Ate Georgia Produce? Prepared by: Sharon P. Kane, Kent Wolfe, Marcia Jones, and John McKissick Center Report: CR-10-03 May 2010
If Georgians produced all of the fruits and vegetables that they consumed, it could provide a way to close this utilization gap (the difference between state-wide production and consumption) of over $780 million per year. Even if this level can’t be achieved, simply closing the gap in one commodity­lettuce, for example­could mean an additional $83.6 million of direct revenue to local producers.

What is the lettuce gap? The Cordele Dispatch explains it: Continue reading →