Tag Archives: Government

Communities watching boards

Susan Hall Hardy says that in most places industrial authority executives don’t interact with their communities. Well, paraphrasing what Yakov Smirnoff used to say, in Lowndes County, community interact with officials!

Here is her comment from 15 March 2011 on this blog:

Not to be rude, although honesty is very often perceived that way these days, but, the industrial authority executives rarely thank their communities. In the six states I’m most familiar with, these fellows see themselves as beholden only to their employers. After all, they work with their directors, elected officials, a few bankers and city/county department heads. Rarely do they come in direct contact with the average voter, employee or homeowner, although all those people often pay a large part of their salaries and office operating expenses. Despite the public funding, these groups are usually tight lipped about how they do business and rarely provide the public with records or audits. We’ve all put up with that manner of doing business for so long we now see it as just that — the way you do business. We’d never accept that from a nonprofit organization, a charity group or most elected officials. Shame on us all.
Susan, you’re helping by reading, and you’re helping more by posting. Many local officials have noticed LAKE and this blog because they know people read it.

Anyone who wants to help still more, you, too, can go to a meeting. The Industrial Authority is a good one to attend, but I hear the Tree Commission isn’t trying as hard to enforce things, and does anybody know anything the Hospital Authority does? The Airport Authority? Continue reading

Stonewalling costs Erie County, NY

Matthew Spina writes in the Buffalo News, Fighting jail suit was costly to county: Bill for protecting records tops $27,000
The Chris Collins team last summer tried to block the New York Civil Liberties Union’s attempt to find out how much Erie County spends fending off jail-related lawsuits.

Collins’ county attorney at the time, Cheryl A. Green, refused to turn over a trove of county records that would answer the Civil Liberties Union’s questions. She was then brought into court and thumped so soundly Erie County was ordered to both turn over the documents and pay the opposition’s legal fees.

But Erie County also was paying $250 an hour to an outside law firm in its effort to keep those public records from public view. With that bill recently paid, the cost of the failed Collins-Green stonewall can now be tallied: $27,523.

Continue reading

Covering the planners to connect the dots

Monthly LAKE Meeting
When: 5:30 PM, Tuesday 4 January 2011
Where: Smok’n Pig B-B-Q Express at Bemiss
3960 Macey Drive, Valdosta GA

Help cover food, water, transportation, incarceration, solar energy, biomass, and regular local government meetings. If you can take notes, pictures, or videos at meetings, or find out who’s meeting when, or talk about how things got the way they are, or if you have ideas about how to improve things locally to everyone’s benefit, you can help. See LAKE’s website or this blog, On the LAKE Front, for more ideas, or bring your own.

If you like, you can sign up for this event on LAKE’s new facebook page, which I hope you will like. Continue reading

Communities, not Cul de sacs

Update: Trees make streets safer and Fixing a perfect storm of bad planning and design.

Eric M. Weiss writes in the Washington Post on 22 March 2009 about In Va., Vision of Suburbia at a Crossroads: Targeting Cul-de-Sacs, Rules Now Require Through Streets in New Subdivisions

The state has decided that all new subdivisions must have through streets linking them with neighboring subdivisions, schools and shopping areas. State officials say the new regulations will improve safety and accessibility and save money: No more single entrances and exits onto clogged secondary roads. Quicker responses by emergency vehicles. Lower road maintenance costs for governments.
Banning cul-de-sacs was one of the New York Times Magazine’s 9th Annual Year in Ideas, because it’s safer and less expensive: Continue reading

Industrial Authority Projects

Kara Ramos writes in the VDT today about Building industry: A look at current Industrial Authority projects. The Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial Authority has quite a few interesting projects projected. It will be interesting to see which of them pan out.
Members were in agreement that while there are many students graduating from area colleges, they are moving to other cities to find higher paying jobs. Some board members agreed the local workforce needs improvement to enhance the work of current employees, improve the skills of unemployed individuals, and create more job openings.
Can’t argue with that.

The controversial aspects of the Wiregrass Power, LLC biomass project are not discussed in the article. Instead, the tiny accompanying solar plant gets some press: Continue reading

New Stories of Lowndes County

Here’s the Lowndes County Commission (most of it), posing about the new StormReady County designation:

StormReady County

We love the Valdosta Daily Times (VDT), WCTV, and WALB, but if they published anything about that, we missed it. They have space constraints, and we don’t. Local governments do a lot of good things (and other things) that don’t get reported in the traditional press. This is where LAKE comes in. Continue reading