Students Against Violating the Environment (SAVE) is having
an Earth Day event
5:00pm until 8:00pm today, Friday 26 April 2013 on the VSU front lawn.
Come celebrate Earth Day with us! The event is open to campus and the community. There will be raffles, information tables, speakers, food, and live music. Don’t miss it!
Here’s their facebook event and Flyer.
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As long as we leave it to Georgia Power and Southern Company, Georgia will remain far behind in solar power jobs, profits, and energy independence. Hear Southern Company CEO Thomas A. Fanning say:
We remain very bullish on solar. When we think about renewables, I think renewables are exceedingly important to this nation’s future. My sense is until we see significant technology innovation, my sense is that that will probably very late in this decade or beyond that, we still are gonna get by far the lion’s share of electricity from central stations.
SO’s “bullish on solar” means nuclear, “clean coal”, and natural gas
big baseload power stations, and forget about solar or wind.
That’s why
Georgia Power has raised customer rates to pay for gas and nuclear plants
while complaining about solar.
Here’s Georgia Power CEO Paul Bowers:
“Renewable (energy sources are) going to have a sliver,” Bowers said of fuels to create electricity. “Is it going to be 2 or 4 percent? That’s yet to be determined. Economics will drive that. But you always remember (that renewable energy is) an intermittent resource. It’s not one you can depend on 100 percent of the time.”
What is to be done?
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Apparently whoever is responsible for a major spill into Georgia waters
needs to immediately tell GA EPD DNR and the local health department
and post a sign, and
the sewage leak at GA 133 into the Withlacoochee River
qualifies as a major spill.
The City of Valdosta reported it as such, but it’s not clear it was their spill (update: it was Lowndes County’s spill).
Excerpts below from GA DNR’s guidelines.
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Water Quality: A Guide for Municipal Compliance by Mick Smith, Environmental Engineer.
Continue readingSpills and Major Spills
Spill
- Any discharge of raw sewage < 10,000 gallons to waters of the state
Major Spill
- Any discharge of raw sewage > 10,000 gallons to waters of the state
- BOD5 or TSS = 1.5 x weekly avg. permit limit
- Any discharge resulting in a water quality violation
Valdosta (update: it was Lowndes County’s spill) is famous in Florida again for sewage in our rivers.
Last month it was flooding at the Withlacoochee Wastwater Treatment Plant. This month it’s a broken sewer line. WTXL reported yesterday, Sewer line burst in Valdosta — Sewage spewing into river,
Nine hundred gallons of sewage is spewing onto the ground and into the Withlacoochee river, every single minute.
Here’s Valdosta’s Report of Major Spill from yesterday:
Continue reading
Want to help your community and find out how local politics works
without even having to run for office?
You can apply to be appointed to a local board or authority.
Here are (most of) the local boards and authorities. Budgets range from zero to more than $3 million a year. Influence ranges from unknown to very high. Your interest you have to determine for yourself. Maybe start by going to see the CDBG Citizens Advisory Committee in action Monday. Bring back some video, will you?
Here’s a list of openings to be filled by the City of Valdosta soon. The deadline for applications is 5PM 1 May 2013; that’s next Wednesday. HTML version is below. (I would link to a similar list for Lowndes County, but that Commission doesn’t post such a list.)
Continue reading
A new citizens committee
is meeting Monday:
CDBG Citizen Advisory Committee
Date: 4/29/2013 5:30 PM – 6:30 PM
Cost: FREE
Location: Valdosta City Hall Annex Multi-Purpose Room
300 N. Lee StreetThe Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) Citizens Advisory Committee is charged with providing recommendations to the Mayor and City Council regarding the use of the federal entitlement funding received by the City of Valdosta through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
For more information, contact the Neighborhood Develoopment at (229) 671-3617.
Who’s on it? Hard to say, although Continue reading
California and Texas ahead of Georgia in solar power, sure, but Maryland and Massachusetts, small and far to the north with less sun? Does that seem right to you?
According to the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA),
Georgia should be number 5.
Georgia should be moving up the rankings as fast as any state except
maybe Arizona or Colorado, according to
an Arizona State University study of two years ago that said
Georgia was third among state that would
benefit from solar deployment through generating and exporting energy to other states.
The U.S. as a whole
keeps installing far more solar power each year,
but Georgia Power and Southern Company keep holding Georgia back.
It’s great that Valdosta will soon get
2 more megawatts of local solar power.
But while we’re waiting for Georgia Power to slowly get around to doling out
277 megawatts over several years,
New Jersey has 1,000 megawatts already installed.
Georgia is #22, behind #21 Connecticut.
Why do we let that continue?
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Interesting stuff (audit and internal controls,
many meetings,
2 megawatts of solar power,
searching for and
finances of a new office
from
a mysterious seller)
in the items missing from the posted agenda yet presented anyway,
while two staff were elsewhere.
Here’s the agenda with a few notes and some links to the videos. * marks items that were not in the posted agenda.
Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial AuthorityContinue reading
Agenda
Tuesday, April 16, 2013 5:30 p.m.
Industrial Authority Conference Room
2110 N. Patterson Street
Water issues strongly affect economic development, so I talked about
the new WWALS Watershed Coalition at the
16 April 2013 Board Meeting
of the Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial Authority.
The VDT declined to speak, so I did. After apologizing for no okra today, I commended the Authority for talking about the missing agenda items and for mentioning due diligence and flood control.
Mostly I talked about the new WWALS Watershed Coalition, www.wwals.net, incorporated in June 2012, which is about watershed issues such as flooding, water quality, and invasive species related to the Withlacoochee, Willacoochee, Alapaha, and Little River System. I mentioned arsenic in some local well water, which the Department of Health has finally said should be tested, three years after Janet McMahan discovered it was a problem. I invited VLCIA board and staff to two upcoming WWALS events: Continue reading
The Industrial Authority was very forthcoming
about everything about their new office purchase
except who they were buying it from;
this was at the
16 April 2013 Board Meeting
of the Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial Authority.
The seller turns out to be a household name hereabouts.
Chairman Roy Copeland talked about the at least five year process
for finding “a new home” for VLCIA.
He noted that before he joined the board they were considering
buying a property he and his wife own.
He and former Lowndes County Chairman Ashley Paulk looked
at another property near the Courthouse.
VLCIA even toured the historic Lowndes County Courthouse
but concluded it couldn’t be renovated for their purposes.
Jerry Jennett noted the search had gone on even longer than five years.
Copeland said the parameters they had set were, as far as he recalled, Continue reading
