Tag Archives: Bill Gates

Help fix land revaluation: come to Farm Bureau –Board of Equalization

Come to the Farm Bureau in two weeks to hear Tax Assessor staff present their updates and provide your input Contents for changes to the rural land revaluation, this time taking into account rivers, aquifer recharge zones, and uniformity. Maybe the Tax Assessors actually don’t want more flooding in Valdosta; both the City of Valdosta and GA-EDP have already shown interest in attending about that point.

At an appeal on my property valuation, the Board of Equalization stopped short of actually ordering the Tax Assessors to redo last year’s rural land revaluation, because staff volunteered Continue reading

Monday August 10th deadline to appeal tax valuations –VLCoC

Valdosta-Lowndes County Chamber of Commerce members just got a message from Bruce Allred, Government Affairs Council Chairman, saying:

MONDAY IS DEADLINE TO APPEAL PROPERTY TAX ASSESSMENTS!

You can look up your property on the Tax Assessors’ website: www.qpublic.net/ga/lowndes.

See also the LAKE Videos: Rural revaluation meeting at Farm Bureau 2015-08-04.

That Chamber message includes this useful information: Continue reading

Videos: Rural revaluation meeting at Farm Bureau 2015-08-04

See for yourself the Tax Assessor response to local landowners, in these LAKE videos of last night’s meeting at Farm Bureau. Do you think there’s a problem? If so, what do you think we should do to fix it?

The attendees appointed Gretchen to take notes. Here are her notes, followed by the videos.

Accessibility is not about access, it’s about geographic location…. That was done by one of our appraisers on staff. —Chief Appraiser Silas Hrobar

Rural and commercial land owners got surprises in the mail in July when they received the updated assessments of their properties. Lowndes County Assessors engaged a contractor last year to help with the reassessments of approximately 10,000 properties. Rural properties were categorized as small (under 20 acres) and large (over 20 acres) but complaints were the same, inconsistent and confusing application of criteria.

On Tuesday evening, Farm Bureau hosted Continue reading

Rural revaluation meeting at Farm Bureau 2015-08-04

Are Bill Gates and subdivisions really more important than agriculture or rivers or public transportation? Come to Farm Bureau tomorrow evening and find out what’s going on with the rural land revaluation. facebook event.

When: 7PM, Tuesday, 4 August 2015

Where: 3296 Greystone Way, Valdosta, GA, (229) 242-7876

By: Farm Bureau board member Buddy Coleman called this meeting.

What: Compare the Comprehensive Plan to this revaluation here (PDF).

Sprawl: sprawling residential growth is a certain ticket to fiscal ruin (Or at least big tax increases). PDF of the report by UGA Prof. Jeffrey H. Dorfman Lowndes County paid for in 2007, The Local Government Fiscal Impacts of Land Use in Lowndes County.

Who: At least some of the Lowndes County Tax Assessors Continue reading

Rural tax revaluation: Bill Gates and subdivisions more important than agriculture and public transportation?

Does this rural land revaluation map resemble the Comprehensive Plan Future Development map? Tax Assessors: Rural Land Accessibility Codes Why not? And why were rivers and public transportation not considered either by the Lowndes County Tax Assessors while tracts with road frontage were considered the “highest market area” and land purchases by Bill Gates were considered “benchmark sales” instrumental in pricing large tracts?

This rural land revaluation is yet another vehicle to drive development straight north into the agricultural areas of the county, not even stopping at the Withlacoochee River.

That way lies sprawl, which as Dr. Jeffrey H. Dorfman of UGA has said, “is a certain ticket to fiscal ruin* * Or at least big tax increases.”

The City of Valdosta better watch out! Much of this Continue reading

What is Moore’s Law for solar power?

Many people are unfamiliar with Moore’s Law, and how it affects solar power. Moore’s Law doesn’t occur in many technologies or industries, but it’s there in solar photovoltaic (PV). For those of us whose whole working lives have been affected by Moore’s Law, seeing it turn up in another field is like a flashing neon sign pointing to the future. A future of distributed solar power sunrise over the crumbling industrial relics of coal, nuclear, and natural gas plants. A future with much less control by monopoly utilities, which is why they fight it. If they even see it coming; Bill Gates didn’t, back in the day, but Jeff Bezos of Amazon did. They both surfed that tide, and Moore’s Law made both of them among the richest humans on the planet while changing the world for all of us. Steve Jobs even used it to put a computer in your pocket more powerful than big companies could buy a few decades ago. What does Moore’s Law for solar power mean for electric power?

This chart shows the telltale symptom of Moore’s Law in solar electricity: 65% compound annual growth rate in solar power plants deployed for the past 5 years:

Source: Solar Power Graphs to Make You Smile by Zachary Shahan for CleanTechnica 10 June 2011.

As SunPower’s Dinwoodie puts it:

That 17 GW installed in 2010 is the equivalent of 17 nuclear power plants — manufactured, shipped and installed in one year. It can take decades just to install a nuclear plant. Think about that. I heard Bill Gates recently call solar “cute.” Well, that’s 17 GW of “cute” adding up at an astonishing pace.

Bill Gates should recall that Moore’s Law made formerly “cute” PCs with his “cute” operating system Windows expand into every company in the world and made him the second richest human on the planet. Growth of computer software markets, like for the U.S. as shown in the graph on the right, is a symptom of the original Moore’s Law. Software runs on hardware, and these hardware market curves are driven more directly by Moore’s Law:

Continue reading