Tag Archives: Health Care

Hospital Authority meets Wednesday @ VLCHA 2013-01-16

Apparently the Hospital Authority is meeting tomorrow morning, although I can’t find any public notice and it’s not listed in the VDT’s calendar. In case you’re curious who these board members are, I’ve looked them up below.

According to its web page:

Hospital Authority

As a public hospital, an eight-member Hospital Authority governs SGMC. Both the City Council of Valdosta and the Lowndes County Board of Commissioners appoints the representatives who serve on the Authority. Each group appoints four representatives who each serve a 5-year term. Authority members are community leaders who serve the hospital voluntarily. It’s a labor-intensive job for which no Authority member receives any monetary compensation.

In terms of governance, the Authority has the ultimate decision-making ability when it comes to the hospital. The Authority is subject to the Hospital Authorities Law of the Code of Georgia.

Notification of Open Meeting of the Hospital Authority

Regularly scheduled meetings of Hospital Authority occur on the third Wednesday of each month at 9:30am in the SGMC Executive Board Room unless otherwise posted.

Hospital Authority of Valdosta and Lowndes County Members

Here I’ve annotated the list from the Board’s website with pictures and some additional information of the sort that maybe the Authority would like to put on its website so we the taxpayers would know.

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$30,000 saved by library furloughs, $millions for building construction —Idelle Dear @ LCC 2013-01-08

Idelle Dear noted we’re up to 12 library furlough days, and reported a flaw in that picture to the 8 January 2013 Lowndes County Commission Regular Session.

I looked across the street and there are millions of dollars being spent on the construction of the hospital, construction of the VSU Health Sciences building. And yet what is happening, because this is a mandatory furlough for all employees, is that people who are employed by the South Georgia Regional Library, most of whom are minimum wage, work part time, rely on the income: they are going to lose out….

We’d heard about these state-mandated furlough closings at a library board meeting. Idelle Dear spelled out some of the consequences, and made some telling comparisons.

Something is wrong with this picture, and I realize there are different kinds of money, but something is wrong with this picture if we can spend millions and millions of dollars on construction of these buildings and yet shut down the library and the employees who are in low income are going to be affected.

She said she wasn’t sure most people even knew about all this. And she heard somebody had said most people have Internet at home, but

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Help Sierra Club send a message to Georgia Power CEO Bowers

Georgia Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign probably contributed to Georgia Power’s recent decision to shut down some coal plants. Now Sierra Club offers a petition to ask Georgia Power CEO Paul Bowers to go farther, and replace those coal plants with solar offshore wind power for jobs and health for Georgia.

Dirty Coal is Out, Help Usher Clean Energy In!

Georgia Power recently announced their plans to retire three of their oldest and dirtiest coal fired power plants. Now, we must send a clear message to Georgia Power’s leadership that we want to keep Georgia Jobs by investing in homegrown clean energy and energy efficiency to power our homes and businesses.

Send a message to Georgia Power CEO Paul Bowers telling him to replace dirty coal with investments in homegrown clean energy and energy efficiency that can produce thousands of lasting Georgia jobs.

It’s a petition; details here.

Seth Gunning explained why in Sierra Club PR:

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Renewables are Winning, Nukes are Dead, and Coal is Crashing

Somebody is willing to read the sunshine writing: Renewables are Winning, Nukes are Dead and Coal is Crashing, as Kathleen Rogers and Danny Kennedy wrote for EcoWatch 14 Dec 2012.

As I wrote back in April when formerly coal-plotting Cobb EMC went solar:

Coal is dead. Nuclear is going down. Solar will eat the lunch of utilities that don’t start generating it.

Can Georgia Power and Southern Company (SO) read that handwriting on the wall? They can’t fight Moore’s Law, which has steadily brought the cost of solar photovoltaic (PV) energy down for thirty years now, and shows no signs of stopping. This is the same Moore’s Law that has put a computer in your pocket more powerful than a computer that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in 1982 and was used by an entire company. Solar PV costs dropped 50% last year. Already all the new U.S. electric capacity installed this September was solar and wind. As this trend continues, solar will become so much more cost-effective than any fossil or nuclear fuel power that nobody will be able to ignore it.

Rogers and Kennedy explained this phenomenon:

The seismic shift in how we all use cell phones and mobile technology to access the internet almost snuck up on the incumbent technologies and the monopolies that made money selling us landline telephones and a crappy service. Now, we’re all using apps on smartphones all of the time. So too, the shift to a scaled, solar-powered future built around the modular technology at the heart of solar power—the photovoltaic solar cell—will come as a surprise to many. We call it the solar ascent, and it is happening every day in a million ways.

Will SO and Georgia Power continue to prop up that 1973 legal wall that inhibits solar financing in Georgia? Companies and even economic development authorities are starting to find ways around it, and of course there’s Georgia Solar Utilities (GaSU) trying to wedge into the law as a utility. After Hurricane Sandy, rooftop solar for grid outage independence has suddenly hit the big time (Austin Energy caught onto that back in 2003). The U.S. military got solar and renewable energy back in Afghanistan and are now doing it bigtime everywhere.

SO and Georgia Power can try to ignore Continue reading →

Augusta high tech job growth: second in the country

What is Augusta doing that attracts so many high tech jobs?

Orlando Montoya wrote for GPB News 7 December 2012, Augusta High Tech Ranks Nationally,

A national group working to promote entrepreneurship says Augusta has the second highest growth rate of high tech jobs in the past five years.

Only Boise, Idaho grew tech jobs faster.

San Francisco based Engine Advocacy says between 2006 and 2011, Augusta increased its technology sector jobs by 81%.

City officials credit the area’s low cost of living.

If that was the only key, Lowndes County and Valdosta MSA would lead the country…. What else?

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How to implement trash, health, and safety?

Disposal of solid waste (trash/garbage) is a matter of community public health and safety and providing such service is the responsibilty of the local governing bodies. How should trash health and safety responsibly be implemented?

We cannot be left in a situation where residents are either “forced to buy” service from a provider, or have no option but to burn their trash. The government can levy a tax, but they cannot say that residents are forbidden to buy a service from an independent provider.

Such a ruling is

  • unfriendly to those who currently own, or want to start a waste collection business in our county,
  • unfriendly to the residents who are counting on the government to follow the state-legislated goals to
    “protect the health safety, and well-being of its citizens and to protect and enhance the quality of its environment” ,
  • unfriendly to the environment as trash ends up on the side of the road or polluting the air by being burned and leaves us to face a new problem on a different day.

Residents in the unincorporated areas of the county who want curb side collection, for the most part, already purchase it. Those of us using the collection centers do so because it is our preference.

The county should (in my opinion) create a special tax district for waste disposal (it already makes special lighting districts) and tax the residents for the maintenance of the collection centers.

-gretchen

Board of Health members

Here is a list of the members of the Lowndes County Board of Health:

Board Members

William R. Grow, MD, FACP
District Health Director
Mark Eanes, MD
Chair, Physician
Mary Margaret Richardson, EdD
Vice Chair, Licensed Nurse
Randy Smith, DDS
Secretary, Consumer Advocate
Sheila Warren
Advocate for Needy,
Underprivileged or Elderly
Richard Raines
Lowndes County Commissioner
John Gayle
City of Valdosta Mayor
Wes Taylor
Lowndes County Schools
Superintendent
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Who implements trash, health, and safety?

As we’ve seen, solid waste is a matter of public health, safety, well-being, and the environment, according to Georgia state law. Whose responsibility is it to protect the environment and the public health, safety, and well-being from solid waste?

Many health and safety issues are handled through the health department, Diagram of the waste hierarchy including the Georgia Department of Public Health, and the South Health District (Ben Hill, Berrien, Brooks, Cook, Echols, Irwin, Lanier, Lowndes, Tift and Turner Counties). Particularly, water quality (septic tanks, well water), food safety, cleanliness of hotels, motels, restaurants, swimming pools and so on are the responsibility of the local health department, such as the Lowndes County Health Department.

However, disposal of solid waste (trash/garbage) is handled by the local municipality or governmental body (county).

The EPA has a variety of documents available about solid waste.

So does the state EPD, as enabled through Georgia Legislation: Existing Rules and Corresponding Laws.

So, where does this leave us? See next post.

-gretchen

Trash, health, and safety

Solid waste is a health and safety issue, according to Georgia law.

According to the Georgia Department of Natural Resources copy of the GEORGIA COMPREHENSIVE SOLID WASTE MANAGEMENT ACT OF 1990 AS AMENDED THROUGH 2004,

O.C.G.A. § 12-8-21. Declaration of policy; legislative intent

a) It is declared to be the policy of the State of Georgia, in furtherance of its responsibility to protect the public health, safety, and well-being of its citizens and to protect and enhance the quality of its environment, to institute and maintain a comprehensive state-wide program for solid waste management and to prevent and abate litter, so as to assure that solid waste does not adversely affect the health, safety, and well-being of the public and that solid waste facilities, whether publicly or privately owned, do not degrade the quality of the environment by reason of their location, design, method of operation, or other means and which, to the extent feasible and practical, makes maximum utilization of the resources contained in solid waste.

Emphasis added on the parts about health, safety, well-being, and the environment. Those are the goals of this legislation, stated twice in the first paragraph. Georgia being a home rule state, the implementation of these goals is now left to the local governing bodies. More on that next.

-gretchen

Grant funding opportunities: deadlines very soon

Received today from Bryan Zulko of USDA. -jsq

Community Food Projects Competitive Grants Program – Application deadline: Nov 28, 2012
Grants to plan or implement food projects designed to meet the needs of low-income individuals and increase community self-reliance concerning food and nutrition.

Great American Main Street Awards (GAMSA) – Application deadline: Dec 3, 2012
Grants to recognize exemplary and innovative revitalization achievements in revitalization of historic and older neighborhood commercial districts using a community-driven, historic-preservation based approach.

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