Here are videos of the entire 30 January 2012 Regular Session of the Greater Lowndes Planning Commission (GLPC). You’ll have to figure out what they’d doing, because they don’t post agendas or minutes.
Here’s a video playlist:
Videos
Regular Session, Greater Lowndes Planning Commission (GLPC),
Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia, 30 January 2012.
Videos by Gretchen Quarterman for Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE).
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Whatever happened to the agendas and minutes of the Greater Lowndes Planning Commission (GLPC) that used to be on the SGRC website? Gretchen asked at the January GLPC meeting whether they would be posted again. The chair said he didn't know. County Planner Jason Davenport added:
The regional commission used to do the minutes on the website for us. We have the minutes. Ms Gretchen, if you'll email us, we have the ability to email those minutes back to you, but we don't have plans right now to put those minutes back on the web.
The chair suggested "Maybe at some point in the future would be good." Jason Davenport reiterated that they had no plans to do that.
Here's the video:
Minutes on website?
Regular Session, Greater Lowndes Planning Commission (GLPC),
Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia, 30 January 2012.
Video by Gretchen Quarterman for Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE).
That's similar to what he told me by email back on 28 November 2011:
Last year the agreement between the SGRC and the various local governments regarding the GLPC responsibilities changed. This website is a result of those changes. I have your request and will plan on getting direction and clarification about how to deal with these types of requests.
There has been a little bit of improvement. The GLPC chair faxed LAKE the April agenda.
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Here are videos of the entire Regular Session of the Valdosta City Council of 5 January 2012.
There were actually two meetings:
Here’s a video playlist:
Videos, Regular Session, Valdosta City Council (VCC),
Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia, 5 January 2012.
Videos by Gretchen Quarterman for Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE).
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Here are videos of the entire March regular meeting of the Greater Lowndes Planning Commission (GLPC). I would include a link to the agenda, but they don’t publish those anymore. They don’t even have a website anymore. So you’ll need to watch and try to figure out what’s going on.
They meet again tonight. For that meeting, we’ve got an agenda.
Here’s a video playlist for their March meeting:
Videos, Greater Lowndes Planning Commission March 2012-03-26
Regular Session, Greater Lowndes Planning Commission (GLPC),
Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia, 26 March 2012.
Video by Gretchen Quarterman for Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE).
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Here are videos of the entire
“first annual Valdosta-Lowndes Governmental Leadership Meeting”
that was held 6:30 PM 29 March 2012 in the Lowndes High School Lecture Hall.
Here’s
the announcement.
The meeting was introduced by Dr. Steve Smith, Superintendent, Lowndes County Schools. Lowndes County Schools had a written position statement, with everything from a broad variety of test scores and other metrics to specific examples of existing collaborations such as loaning busses to the Valdosta School System for away sporting events.
Dr. Smith
clarified that:
This is not a community forum, it is not an open dialogue.He told me before the meeting started that he was concerned that if they opened it up to questions from the audience it would take all night and it had been hard enough to get the various elected officials to show up at all without expecting them to stay for that. I didn’t see but maybe a dozen non-elected audience members, so I wonder whether that really would have happened, but I applaud the various governments for collaborating at all. He did say if you had a question you could write it down and hand it to a member of your elected government or school board. He also indicated that committees might form, not that evening, but perhaps growing out of that evening’s meeting. He reiterated this meeting was for brainstorming among the elected officials.
The elected officials included Valdosta Schools Superintendent and many VBOE members, Lowndes School Superintendent and Superintendent-elect and many LCBOE members, Valdosta Mayor, City Manager, and many city council members, and Lowndes County Manager, Clerk, and voting commissioners, but not the Chairman.
Wes Taylor, Lowndes High School Principal & Lowndes County Schools Superintendent Elect
talked about finances.
Valdosta Mayor John Gayle said
we’re regional now (regional hospital, regional university, etc.).
He talked about how Troup County went about landing the Kia plant,
which had to do with each governmental entity taking a role and collaborating.
(It had nothing to do with school consolidation.)
VBOE member Vanassa Flucas said they try to put everything related
to their schools on their website, in an effort of transparency for
parents and students. Plus:
We noticed that since we put our strategic plan on our website approximately three years ago, it was very well received. It was very heartening; people could find the information that they wanted.Imagine that! Continue reading
Breaking from the agenda of the first annual Valdosta-Lowndes Governmental Leadership Meeting, Valdosta School Superintendent Bill Cason rose above tactics and talked about vision and the root of the matter: poverty.
Supt. Cason started talking about teenage pregnancy and drug use, and then got to the heart of the matter:
They come to school hungry; they come to school homeless.Last year we identified more than 200 homeless kids in our school district. We can talk about all of these other things, but until we can address those as a group, every public entity in this room, is willing to get together as a team and address those issues, we forgot the most important thing we deal with, that is our students.
[applause]
They will be the future leaders of this community. And if you want to see Valdosta take a backwards slide, then let this problem run as it is and you will see. I’ve seen it before in other communities, and I’m seeing it here now. This is not something we can wait on; it has to be done now. So if we want to really be serious about what we’re talking about tonight, educating our children, having a viable community, having a good community, having recreational facilities everybody can use, then you need to begin to address these problems not only with our mouths, but with our money and with our resources. And until you do this, then we’re going backwards.
Poverty is the root of the matter. It’s great that the local goverments and school boards are talking, and they can tinker around the edges all they want, but until they get serious about poverty in our community, educational improvements and the future of the community will be severely limited.
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Your county commission might have a problem with transparency when no item in a voting session takes more than a few seconds longer than the invocation and pledge. Or perhaps a public hearing in which the public is not invited to speak.
Another five minute meeting, like the previous morning’s four (Chairman’s count) or five (VDT’s count) minute work session. They did not spend even one minute on any item of the agenda.
We did get to learn that the cryptic
7.a. Seminole Circle Property
is owned by the county which wants to sell it off. Commissioner Richard Raines even read from Georgia Code the reason why the county could do that without putting it up for bids. If you did have any objection, or maybe you wanted to buy it, you’re too late, because a few seconds after we learned what it was, they sold it off. That was the longest item, at 1 minute and 20 seconds.
They didn’t mention that the subject property is apparently a splinter of a much larger 538.31 acre parcel, 0172 119, which is presumably the “land application site” they referred to. According to the 8 December 2009 minutes they use it as a hay field. After land application of what? Continue reading
Lowndes County Clerk Paige Dukes handed out this document, Lowndes County’s Report for Initial LOST Negotiations: April 9, 2012, at that first LOST meeting yesterday. When I spoke to her later, I mentioned that I thought it was the very model of how to write such a document: clear, complete, pithy, and easily understandable. She did not have a readily-accessible electronic copy, so I’ve posted these scanned images on the LAKE website.
The document includes a summary of the negotiation procedure (60 days to negotiate, after which it goes to mediation, then Superior Court “baseball arbitration”), plus how and how much LOST can reduce property taxes.
The rest of the document is the county’s position, which includes that the county provides services such as sheriff, courts, public health, and animal control that benefit the entire county, and the county could claim 72% of LOST. However, the county is only asking for the same 58% as negotiated in 2002.
A few things I did not know include that the dedicated millage for Parks and Rec (VLPRA 1.5mil) and the Industrial Authority (VLCIA 1 mil) come out of county property taxes, not out of any city property taxes. Also VLCIA’s millage started since 2002, before which VLCIA was funded out of hotel-motel taxes, including Valdosta hotel-motel taxes.
I also remarked to Paige Dukes that I wished the cities had prepared 
similar position statements. She said they may be depending on LOST negotiating documents by the Georgia Municipal Association (GMA), and that there were similar documents by the Association of County Commissioners of Georgia (ACCG), both which you can find linked in on the LAKE website.
The ACCG guidelines include this interesting passage:
Continue readingAs I walked in the door, a couple minutes late due to construction on the hospital parking lot, Commissioner Crawford Powell said,
John, you’re late!
They were milling about and looked like they were about to start. But no, they had started early and Chairman Paulk told me the meeting had lasted four minutes because there hadn’t been much to say. So there are no videos of this morning’s Lowndes County Commission Work Session.
I remarked that it had seemed like a fairly complicated agenda, but he didn’t think so.
I asked him about this mysterious item:
7.b. Request from LCSO — GOHS Grant #2013-TEN-0077-00 & #2013-GA-0040-00
He said it is about some equipment to automate Sheriff’s deputies checking license plates against databases. I told him I had assumed they had already been doing that. He said they could do it by hand, but they’d get really tired trying to do as many as this device could do.
Presumably it’s similar to the Automatic License Plate Reader (ALPR) described by Doug Nurse in the AJC 20 March 2009, New police license plate scanner eyes criminals.
Alpharetta Police Officer John Allen said that a few weeks after the system became went online last August, he was driving home after a shift when the system alerted him that he had passed a stolen car. He wheeled around, and after a chase, arrested the thief.
“I never even saw the tag myself,” Allen said. “I would have just kept going. It catches things I would be unable to see.”
While I don’t know that I’m in favor of ALPR, it’s common enough elsewhere that I was actually surprised the famously drug-interdicting LCSO wasn’t already using it.
To the Chairman’s credit, as soon as I asked about the LOST meeting with the mayors, he said it was at 9:30 in the room next door, and the public was invited. I took videos of that LOST meeting, and they will appear soon.
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Kay Harris wrote Saturday in the VDT, LOST talks set to begin: County, cities to meet Monday,
Well, that’s interesting. When is this meeting? Ah, the time of day wasn’t included in the article.As required by state law, Lowndes County issued a letter to the mayors of all the municipalities in the county, requesting they attend a renegotiation meeting Monday, April 9 to discuss LOST (local option sales tax) distributions.
“This has to be done and approved by the end of the year in order to stay in place, so we have to start the process now,” said Commission Chairman Ashley Paulk.
There’s a clue in David Rodock’s 31 March 2012 writeup about the Commission retreat, Continue reading