Tag Archives: construction

Valdosta’s Penn Station to be torn down –Alfred Willis @ VCC 2014-10-23



Received as a response to

Outside corporation trumps Valdosta citizens about historical Nichols house? –Jim Parker @ VCC 2014-10-23. -jsq

The City Council’s deliberations on the 23rd had nothing to do with
any construction project, but rather focused on the sale of a parcel
— as

Councilman Carroll’s message of the 25th accurately
conveys. The Council’s vote was historic because it signified openly
the supremacy of certain private property interests (specifically,
those entailed in selling as a form of enjoyment) over civic
cultural interests, at least within the municipality of Valdosta. In
doing so it gave Valdosta’s citizens a peek behind a curtain that
had remained drawn over historic preservation here since 1980. The
construction of buildings, the demolition of buildings, the
remodeling or moving of buildings, the maintenance and preservation
of buildings, their sale and their purchase, their adaptive reuse
— all of those processes are historical processes that turn on
the resolution of conflicts among interests. Thus they all reveal
structures of power and the machinations of powerful individuals and
groups. How could they not?

The construction of the Nichols house in
the early 1950s showed with a degree of clarity that probably no
other Valdosta building of that time did, the identity, values,
attitudes, and mode of operation of Valdosta’s leadership. Its
demolition will Continue reading →

Work Session Minutes @ LCC 2011-01-10

Ordinance or policy?
That question comes up for at least two items,



Special assessment
and

Speed control devices,
in the

minutes of the 10 January 2011 Work Session
of the Lowndes County Commission.
-jsq

LOWNDES COUNTY BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS

MINUTES

WORK SESSION

Monday, January 10, 2011

Continue reading →

$30,000 saved by library furloughs, $millions for building construction —Idelle Dear @ LCC 2013-01-08



Idelle Dear noted we’re up to 12 library furlough days,
and reported a flaw in that picture to

the 8 January 2013 Lowndes County Commission Regular Session.

I looked across the street
and there are millions of dollars being spent on the construction of the
hospital, construction of the VSU Health Sciences building.
And yet what is happening, because
this is a mandatory furlough for all employees,
is that people who are employed by the South Georgia Regional Library,
most of whom are minimum wage, work part time,
rely on the income: they are going to lose out….

We’d heard about these

state-mandated furlough closings at a library board meeting.
Idelle Dear spelled out some of the consequences, and made
some telling comparisons.

Something is wrong with this picture,
and I realize there are different kinds of money,
but something is wrong with this picture if we can spend
millions and millions of dollars on construction of these buildings
and yet shut down the library and the employees who are in low income
are going to be affected.

She said she wasn’t sure most people even knew about all this.
And she heard somebody had said most people have Internet at home, but

Continue reading →

No T-SPLOST means 30% match for LMIG, and what else? @ LCC 2012-12-10



To pave or not to pave?
That is the question that was danced around by County Engineer
Mike Fletcher and County Manager Joe Pritchard, with interest,
at

yesterday morning’s Lowndes County Commission Work Session,
on agenda item

8.d. Georgia Department of Transportation Local Maintenance & Improvement Grant.

County Engineer Mike Fletcher said
Lowndes County was receiving from GDOT a Local Maintenance
and Improvement Grant (LMIG) of $746,984.75 for FY “two thirteen”.
Because T-SPLOST didn’t pass, the county has to come up with a
30% match, which is $224,095.43.
He said there was a work sheet and project list in the board
packet (which the rest of us don’t get to see).

County Manager Joe Pritchard said with change from LARP
(Local Assistance Road Projects, primarily for resurfacing) to LMIG
the county could now use these funds for any purpose,
and had planned to use LMIG for

Continue reading →

Vogtle circular firing squad delaying opening

Southern Company and the other owners of Plant Vogtle are blaming the contractors (who are suing them) for further delays in construction. How much money will they waste before they never open?

Kristi E. Swartz wrote for the AJC yesterday, Disputed costs at Vogtle rise,

Georgia Power and a group of municipal and cooperative electric companies are building twin 1,100-megawatt reactors, the first in the United States to win permits in 30 years. The total expected cost of the project is $14 billion, but potential cost overruns at Vogtle, located in Waynesboro in east Georgia, continue to grow, according to the recent Southern Co. regulatory filing.

Delays in getting federal licensing approvals for the new reactor design and then for the entire project have been cited as the chief culprit.

Because of the dispute with contractors over the additional costs, “the owners are evaluating whether maintaining the currently scheduled commercial operation dates of 2016 and 2017 remains in the best interest of their customers,” the filing said. The total amount of the cost overruns could be well over $900 million; Georgia Power owns 45.7 percent of the project, so its share is $425 million, the latest filing said. Originally the overrun was projected at $400 million when the issue was first made public in April.

Up another $25 million since April? How long until it gets into billions of cost overruns? Which will be paid by whom?

Continue reading →

Concrete flaws at Vogtle delay construction, require modified nuke permit

Concrete sinking into the dirt less than two months after licensing?
One license amendment already requested and dozens more to come?
Does this give you confidence in Southern Company's ability to
build a safe nuclear plant without huge cost overruns charged to
you the Georgia Power customer or you the taxpayer?

In mid-March

the nuclear industry bragged about



Progress continues at the construction site of Plant Vogtle units 3
and 4 — the country's newest reactors and the first to be
licensed since 1978.

We discover that at the end of March Southern Company had to ask
NRC for a licensing change due to construction problems.

Vogtle Nuclear Construction Faces “Additional Delay”
Based on Miscalculations in Foundation Concrete — News Release
from NC WARN and Alliance for Nuclear Accountability—April
9th, 2012,

Continue reading →

Lowndes County: commuter rail hub

Look at all those other railroads converging on Valdosta in



that GFRR project proposal map.
Valdosta is a historical rail hub for passenger traffic to Atlanta,
Savannah, Jacksonville, Orlando, Thomasville, Tallahasssee, and
beyond. All the tracks are still in place and still in use for freight.
With some rolling stock and a few deals with the railroads, Valdosta
and Lowndes County could become again a passenger rail hub with a mass
transit system for local commuting to jobs and for long distance travel.



Add

a bus system and local commuting becomes very practical.
People could take the train to town and catch a bus to work.
Many people could walk or take a bicycle to their work from the
train station.
This could work the other way around, too.
People could live in Valdosta and work in Ray City or Lakeland or
Hahira or Lake Park or Clyattville and not have to drive to get there.
That would save

a lot of wasted time and wasted fuel.

This kind of mass transit would attract the knowledge-based workers
we supposedly want around here.


Including jobs our high school and college graduates could take,
so they wouldn’t have to move elsewhere.

And upgrading the railroads, building stations, building
and refurbishing houses and apartments near the stations, etc.,
would employ a lot of construction workers;
probably as many as road projects and sprawling subdivision projects,
but without the sprawl.

-jsq

PSC lining up to vote for solar

Previously

PSC Chair Lauren McDonald said he wanted Georgia Power to
“come up with options in the next 30 days for expanding the tiny amount of electricity generated from solar power”.
Yesterday,

PSC Commissioner Chuck Eaton
said “Solar is great for diversity, independence, research, and business,”
and added that until recently he had discounted solar, but now he had seen it.
And it turns out that Friday

PSC Commissioner Tim Echols
wrote an op-ed saying



It wasn’t until I entered the training room of Mage Solar in Dublin
and saw 40 subcontractors in their solar academy that I got it. The
growing solar industry is not just about funky collectors on a roof or
left-leaning environmentalists who hate fossil fuel. It is about skilled
jobs in manufacturing and construction, about economic development in
Georgia, about consumers saving money on their power bill so they can
spend it somewhere else, and about empowering people to essentially
create their own power plant. This could eventually be big.

That’s three out of

five commissioners.
I’d call that a majority shaping up to do something in the

PSC Energy Committee meeting of 16 July 2011.
I couldn’t say what, exactly, since there nothing

on the energy committee’s agenda
about this.
But something solar seems to be in the works.

-jsq