A Budget Adoption Meeting 5PM before the 5:30 PM Regular Session,
as alluded to at
yesterday morning’s Work Session.
Is this a second Budget Hearing?
Does it count if it’s not advertised as a Hearing?
And it turns out the proposed budget is on the county’s website,
just not where they previously said it would be.
[5:00-5:30PM] Tuesday, June 23 Continue reading
Adoption of the Fiscal Year 2016 Budget to be considered Monday
morning and voted on Tuesday evening (see LAKE videos of Budget Hearing of two weeks ago), plus
a
GEFA Loan Modification
(thought they approved that 26 May 2015 for the Alapaha Water Treatment Plant),
a
Justice Assistance Grant,
a
SCADA lease-purchase agreement,
and the annual controversial
Mosquito Contract.
Two appointees each to KLVB and the Library Board. We don’t know who, because the county posted the agenda only in PDF, with no item sheets.
Public Hearing approved last month for the Abandonment of Buck Cato Road: what’s causing all of these in the last couple years? And they’ve found an excuse for their long-desired Continue reading
For the budget they will vote on Tuesday June 23rd,
two weeks ago
Finance Director Stephanie Black said:
“This is the public hearing”
What happened to the requirement for two budget public hearings?
The County Chairman said they had $7 million in requests above the expected revenue, so they had had a difficult time coming up with a budget. For (some of) how they did that, see the LAKE videos of the 18 May 2015 Budget Work Session.
Half of this budget hearing consisted of the same presentation from that previous meeting. Then County Manager Joe Pritchard added Continue reading
Late o
tonight’s agenda but big on their minds, and described and pictured by
Stuart Taylor, VDT, 31 May 2015,
as consisting of:
Here’s the agenda:Valdosta-Lowndes Development Authority’s Business Retention Action Team, or BRAT, brings together a number of local and state organizations to offer services, information, solutions and contacts that a company might need.
“We’ve always had an existing industry program,” said Meghan Duke,VLDA marketing and community relations. “These organizations have always worked together, but now we’re formalizing it.”
Valdosta-Lowndes Development Authority
Tuesday, June 16, 2015 5:30 p.m. Continue reading
While electric bills still are tilted against local solar generation
and Georgia Power continues to levy its stealth CWIP tax for its
nuke boondoggle, yet solar power is rising this year on
Southern Company and Georgia Power.
Bret Wagenhorst posted on facebook 9 June 2015:
I find it decidedly ironic that a large portion of my last month electric bill went toward paying for a nuclear power plant that is hundreds of millions of dollars over budget, and which will no doubt cost millions of dollars a year to run and to manage its potentially deadly waste. I wonder if the money spent on the nuclear plant were used to purchase rooftop solar panels for all certified energy efficient Georgian homes if we citizens might not be better off in the long run. Thoughts?
Look for Nuclear Construction Cost Recovery Rider on that bill: Continue reading
It’s no wonder the Planning Commission wanted more time for these complicated
proposed county code changes to the Moody Activity Zoning Districts (MAZ).
The county could have just as easily put
the PDF of this item online with
the agenda.
They didn’t, so LAKE filed an open records request, which no only makes
these maps and text available to the public, it demonstrates
the county can supply electronic format via email.
Here’s plain text for the Board packet agenda item sheet and the Planning Division Amendment Notes, and images of all the other pages from the PDF.
See also the Continue reading
Another battery entry, Ambri with a liquid metal battery and $50 million startup funding, understands it’s the battery market vs. fossil fuels. And batteries plus sun, wind, and water power will win.
Jeff McMahon, Forbes, 4 June 2015,
Want To Build A Better Battery? Don’t Talk To Battery Experts,
Like Tesla’s Powerpack, Ambri’s liquid-metal battery is designed to provide grid-level storage that can supplement intermittent renewables like solar and wind, making a grid that depends on renewables as reliable as one that depends on fossil fuels or nuclear reactors.
Wednesday night, [Ambri founder MIT Professor Donald] Sadoway welcomed Tesla’s entry to the grid-level battery industry. The competition, he said, is not between batteries, but between batteries and fossil fuels.
Today at 2:30 PM,
Fairway is back with a new billboard request.
Also in the county, a
building location variance.
Since
Laverne Gaskins declined to be reappointed,
there’s a new ZBOA member.
John Hogan III, who ran for Valdosta City Council in 2015,
was appointed to ZBOA by that Council 7 May 2015. Continue reading
Last month,
Unscheduled:
Laverne Gaskins announced she did not want to be reappointed to ZBOA.
Fairway got to put its
billboard
back up at the new overpass, but only at 50 feet high.
Plus in the county, a
building location variance
and a
Family Ties variance
were both approved unanimously.
They meet again today at 2:30PM. Continue reading
“Once you put in your transfers in and out, you have a balanced budget,”
said Finance Director Stephanie Black.
Transfers in from where?
How does this magic work?
Even the Commissioners had no agenda to look at, although they did have printed copies of the draft budget, which the public could only see as it scrolled by on the screen at yesterday morning’s Lowndes County Commission Budget Work Session, which was over by 10AM even though it was announced as 8:30AM to 5PM. However, it is good that they had this Work Session in public. County Clerk Paige Dukes told Gretchen afterwards that no draft budget would be available to the public until after two changes requested by the Chairman were incorporated. She did not say when that would be finished or when the draft budget would be available so taxpayers could comment. She did refer people to last year’s budget. The slides that Finance Director Stephanie Black presented do provide an interesting high level overview. Other than Commissioners and very few staff, the only people in the room were VDT reporter Joe Adgie, someone unidentified, and Gretchen taking these LAKE videos so you can see what happened. Continue reading