Tag Archives: Economy

Retreat tab?



Local governments here probably don’t want to get into the news
for the cost of their upcoming retreats, Lowndes County Commission
this month, and Valdosta City Council next month,
like Roswell alrady did.

Pat Fox wrote for the AJC 15 Feb 2013,

Record shows $4,800 tab for Roswell retreat,

Roswell city officials ran up a tab of at least $4,800 for their
three-day work retreat this month at the Reynolds Plantation, 106
miles away in Greensboro.

Financial records from five north Fulton cities show these planning
sessions can run the gamut, from a shoestring event for $700 in
Sandy Springs to more than $10,000 for Johns Creek.

The Roswell retreat, held Jan. 31-Feb. 2, included nine people
— Mayor Jere Wood, six council members, City Administrator Kay
Love and a facilitator, who did not charge for his services. All
spent two nights at the Reynolds facility near Lake Oconee.

Perhaps stay close to home where hotels aren’t necessary.

-jsq

Internet speeds into jobs

Something good out of Chattanooga?
The city with the fastest metropolitan Internet access
plans to turn that into jobs.

Elizabeth Prann wrote for Fox 26 January 2013,

City turns Internet speeds into jobs, that Chattanooga



is home to most advanced smart grid in the nation, customers are
enjoying Internet speeds that are almost 100 times faster than the
national average. Most Internet users in the U.S. have access to
about 4.5 megabits of Internet speed.

We wish!
OK, you can get spees that fast here:

with Verizon 4G LTE,
not too many places via land access.

So what’s Chattanooga got that’s better?

Continue reading →

Speakupaustin: a major MSA and local government transparency

The

Austin reporting program is in addition to
the posting a City Council agenda more than a week in advance


(here’s the 28 Feb 2013 agenda already on 16 Feb 2013)
and
including the entire board packets

with working papers and other backup documentation
with the minutes.
Austin

televises and webcasts its meetings live,
with close captioning and transcripts online.
They don’t limit the number of citizens who can speak,
or the subjects they can speak on, and they televise and webcast
all of them as well.
Plus citizens can speak on specific agenda issues,
and Austin

has an online forum for citizen suggestions on which citizens can vote
on the ones they like.

Is there still back-door politics in Austin? For sure.
But you can see a lot more of what is going on in Austin
than they can about the local governments here,
and citizens have a lot more input.

If Valdosta and Lowndes County
(and Hahira and Lake Park and Dasher and Remerton)
want to be treated like a major MSA,
they might consider following Austin’s lead.
Instead of decreasing citizen input by exiling
all citizen speakers to the end of a meeting and limiting the number
who can speak, while not even putting board packets online,
consider continually increasing local government
transparency and citizen input.

-jsq

Energy efficiency rebates, Austin, Texas



The central city of a major MSA,
Austin, Texas, publishes its own video reporting on
local issues, like this one on local energy efficiency.

AustinEnergy has brought back its best offer ever deal,
which allows customers to receive both rebates and a loan
to make energy efficiency improvements.
The rebates can total as much as $3200,
and can cover as much as a third of the cost of the improvements,
including the air conditioning unit.
Remaining costs after the rebates can be financed through a
low interest loan through the Austin Credit Union.

The best offer ever is financed in part by a $10 million
better buildings grant from the U.S. Department of Energy….

Here’s

the video:

Continue reading →

Renewable energy much needed in Georgia —John S. Quarterman

My op-ed in the VDT today; I’ve added links, plus some more after the op-ed.



Finally! Kewaunee, Calvert Cliffs, and now Crystal River
permanently closing say it’s time for Georgia to stop wasting money
on Southern Company’s already over-budget and increasingly-late
nukes and get on with solar power and wind off the coast: for
jobs, for energy independence, and for clean air and plenty of
clean water.

February 2013:

Duke Energy is closing the Crystal River nuclear
reactor

(Tampa Bay Times, 6 Feb 2013),
160 miles south of us, because

nobody wants to pay to fix it:
between “$1.5 billion and $3.4 billion,
plus what it costs to buy power to replace
what Crystal River would have produced while it is
being repaired”

[Charlotte Business Journal, 11 Jan 2013].
November 2012:

NRC terminated Maryland’s Calvert Cliffs 3

(NRC 1 Nov 2012)
after

Constellation Energy dropped out because the cost “is too high
and creates too much risk for Constellation”

[Bloomberg 10 Oct 2010].

Continue reading →

As went Maine Yankee, so goes San Onofre: another reactor will close


San Onofre 4 will stay down,
if opponents can stop the hidden experiment shell game.
Maine Yankee was down for about a year, and never started up again.

Front page of the Bangor Daily News 28 May 1997,

Maine Yankee plant may be closed down: Owners weigh repair costs, deregulation,


Page 1A Bangor Daily News 28 May 1997

Maine Yankee President Mike Sellman said that spending
will be reduced by about 20 percent, or $41 million, from
June through December.

“I think every plant that I’m aware of that has made the decision
to essentially curtail start-up activities has then gone ahead
shut down permanently,” said Sellman.

Maine Yankee has been off line since Dec. 6, 1966.
Several repair and improvement projects had been planned so the plant’s
operators could seek Nuclear Regulatory Commission approval to
restart and return the plant to service.

See also
“It has to close because of the pocketbook.” —Kyle Jones on Maine Yankee nuclear power plant.

-jsq

“It has to close because of the pocketbook.” —Kyle Jones on Maine Yankee nuclear power plant

Instead of demonstrating to influence legislators, sometimes it's better
to get elected and legislate: that's what Kyle Jones did in Maine,
and he closed the Maine Yankee nuke,
de-monopolized the state's electrical utilities,
and instituted a 30% renewable energy goal.
All this was helped by the nuclear industry's own incompetence.

Bangor Daily News, Page A2, 28 May 1997,

Maine Yankee plant may be closed down: Owners weigh repair costs, deregulation,


Page 2A Bangor Daily News 28 May 1997
Cracking in the plant's steam generator tubes, which carry the superheated,
radioactive water, was first discovered in 1990.
In 1994, Main Yankee officials predicted that the plant's problems
were over after they plugged more than 300 of the cracked tubes.
However, testing of the tubes during a shutdown for refueling in 1995
revealed as many as 10,000 additional cracked tubes.

Sounds a lot like

San Onofre.

At the time, it was estimated that permanently shutting down
the plant would cost at least $316 million while,
after 23 years of operation, Maine Yankee had collected only
$100 million to pay for its decommissioning. The most recent
estimate for decommissioning is $369 million, of which
only $169 million has been raised as of this month.

Facing the accumulation of these engineering and operational difficulties,
the owners of the plant signaled a departure from business-as-usual
and, earlier this year, brought in the New Orleans-based Entergy Corp.
to provide management services at Maine Yankee.

Oh, my!
The same Entergy that's now

likely to close Vermont Yankee.
And Vermont Yankee wasn’t the first to follow this financial path to closure:

Continue reading →

No list of who bought waste collection center cards? @ LCC 2013-02-12

How can Lowndes County not have a list of who it
sold waste collection center cards to?
How can it not provide it in response to an open records request?

In the

9 October 2012 Regular Session, Lowndes County Manager Joe Pritchard
said:


Just under 5,000 residents who have purchased the cards

That was in his curiously redacted summary of the history of
solid waste handling in the county, and he was referring to the
access cards to the waste collection centers.


Paige Dukes to April Huntley 2013-01-28
Yet when April Huntley submitted an open records request asking
for the names of the 5,000 people who would be affected by the
waste collection centers, this is what County Clerk Paige Dukes
replied:

In regards to your open records requst for a copy of the 5,000 residents
in unincorporated Lowndes County who will be affected by the closing of
the recycling centers, the document you have requested does not exist.

Maybe this explains part of why

Veolia, excuse me, ADS, seemed so confused yesterday morning.
Come tonight to see if any Commissioners ask about this.

-jsq

Vermont Yankee may be next nuke to close



UBS predicts Entergy will close its Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant soon:
that’s the same Entergythat couldn’t keep the power on during the SuperBowl
and that

can’t keep Pilgrim 1 nuclear reactor up in Massachusetts during a winter storm
(down 3 days now, for the third downtime in a month).
A few days later, UBS
set Entergy up on a quarterly earnings call to mention that
Vermont Yankee had already been taken off the New England energy
capacity auction, which would make it easy to replace.

San Onofre still down in California,

Dominion Power closing Kewaunee in Wisconsin,

NRC terminated Calvert Cliffs in Maryland,

Duke closing Crystal River in Florida,
and maybe Vermont Yankee next?
How about

we pass HB 267 to stop Georgia Power charging for cost overruns
for Vogtle 3 and 4 and see how long before Southern Company stops that project?

Andrew Stein wrote for vtdigger 6 February 2013 (updated 7 Feb),

In report, financial firm forecasts that Entergy may close Vermont Yankee,

In an investment research letter, the Swiss financial services
company UBS Securities anticipates Entergy Corp. will retire one of
its nuclear power plants in 2013, and it cites “Vermont Yankee
as the most tenuously positioned plant.”



UBS representatives met with Entergy’s new leadership team on Feb.
1, the same day Leo Denault became CEO and chair of the board for
the Louisiana-based company that operates the Vermont Yankee nuclear
power plant.

And that’s how a clean-broom new CEO often signals his intentions:
by bringing in outside experts to provide him cover for what he
already intends to do anyway.
And this new-broom CEO

is Entergy’s former Chief Financial Officer
who as CFO has repeated fiddled with Vermont Yankee to try to
make it less unprofitable.
What did those experts say?

Continue reading →

Ways to fix the trash problem

I commend Commissioner John Page for
his op-ed in the VDT today,


attempting to do what no other Commissioner has tried:
to explain the trash issue.
Indeed, like him, most of the people I talked
to while campaigning for Gretchen were for keeping
the waste collection centers open, and of those
the vast majority were willing to pay more,
which is the main reason the previous Commission
made a big mistake in closing those centers.
Unfortunately his letter seems to indicate nothing can be done.
Well, here are some things that can be done.

Let the contract lapse.

Commissioner Joyce Evans insisted on the contract
with the sole provider being only for one year.
Let it lapse after that year!

Publish the contract.

What’s in the contract?
How do we even know it’s for only one year?
The new Commission already had to

do over a decision of the previous Commission
(remove license fee from Sunday alcohol sales)
because the ordinance written up afterwards wasn’t what
they thought they passed.
Publish the contract and let everyone see!

Publish an accounting for the waste collection sites.

Commissioner Page wrote:

The county was losing hundreds of thousands
of dollars each year because the fees for the permits
were not bringing in enough money to fully fund
the sites.

How do we know that?

Continue reading →