Tag Archives: History

New judge, river gauge, park deed, personnel costs, and pest control @ LCC 2013-08-26



The
request for a new State Court Judge
by Judge John Kent Edwards Jr. took 27 and a half minutes,
plus his

eight minute explanation of fines moving from Sheriff to State Court.
More people might have showed up to hear if anybody had known about
these items.
Commissioners asked a surprising number of questions about them
and about
the
Little River stream gauge
and the
opaque pest control bids.
Of course, then people might have seen

the proposed third no-bid contract to the same firm this month.
They vote tonight.

Here’s

the agenda, with links to the videos and a few notes:

LOWNDES COUNTY BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS

PROPOSED AGENDA

WORK SESSION, MONDAY, AUGUST 26, 2013, 8:30 a.m.

REGULAR SESSION, TUESDAY, AUGUST 27, 2013, 5:30 p.m.

327 N. Ashley Street – 2nd Floor


  1. Call to Order

  2. Invocation

  3. Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag



  4. Special Presentation

    See

    separate post    .

  5. Minutes for Approval

    As is his custom, Chairman Bill Slaughter directed Commissioners
    to tell the Clerk of any changes, so we don’t know what they are.
    Then he introduced the special presentation
    out of agenda order.

    1. Work Session — August 12, 2013

    2. Regular Session — August 13, 2013
  6. For Consideration



    1. Environmental Engineering Services for GDOT Land Deed for Parks and Recreation

      Invisible Engineer proposed a third no-bid contract for same firm proposed this month;
      see

      separate post      .




    2. USGS Funding Agreement for Hwy 122 Stream Gauge

      This time Emergency Director Ashley Tye said it’s on the Little River,
      why it’s there, how it’s maintained, etc.
      See

      separate post      .




    3. Budget Adjustment — Personnel Costs

      Judge John Kent Edwards Jr. explained that many of the people
      going through his court or paying fines in Lowndes County
      don’t live here; they come off of I-75,
      and now the fine-collecting needs to move from the Sheriff’s office
      to the Clerk of Court;
      see

      separate post      .



  7. Bid-Pest Control Service

    Pest control for an unannounced amount with no bond from one of two
    unannounced bids.
    See

    separate post    .


  8. Reports-County Manager

    County Manager Joe Pritchard requested an Executive Session
    for pending litigation and they adjourned into that.

  9. Citizens Wishing to be Heard Please State Name And Address

Here’s

a video playlist:



Work Session, Lowndes County Commission (LCC)

Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia, 26 August 2013.

Videos by Gretchen Quarterman for Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE).

-jsq

Fine collection moving from Sheriff to State Court @ LCC 2013-08-26



Could you have guessed what this was about from the agenda item?
Why do we the taxpayers of this $130,000 or $173,000 have to guess?
They vote tonight about what was proposed
at the

26 August 2013 Work Session of the Lowndes County Commission.

6.c. Budget Adjustment — Personnel Costs

Judge John Kent Edwards Jr. explained that many of the people
going through his court or paying fines in Lowndes County
don’t live here; they come off of I-75.
The Sheriff’s office, in attempting to comply with state law,
decided it didn’t want to continuing handling fines.
There’s a piece of new legislation proposing to
have the Clerk of Court process and retain all the relevant information;
Judge Edwards thinks it will pass next year.
This requires shifting funding from the Sheriff’s office
to the Courts.
But it will simplify processing (and presumably costs)
by not having it go through both Sheriff and State Court.
Meanwhile, Judge Edwards is not aware of any other county
that still does this processing through the Sheriff’s department.

Here’s

Part 1 of 2: Continue reading →

Gauging the Little River west of Hahira @ LCC 2013-08-26



After the 2009 floods, Lowndes County agreed to help USGS fund a stream
gauge on the Little River west of Hahira.
It’s time to renew that.
They vote tonight about what was proposed
at the

26 August 2013 Work Session of the Lowndes County Commission.

6.b. USGS Funding Agreement for Hwy 122 Stream Gauge

This time Emergency Director Ashley Tye said it’s on the Little River.



He said during ihe 2009 floods the county only had a gauges on the
Withlacoochee River at Skipper Bridge and US 84, and no way to
monitor the level of the Little River,
so he contacted USGS, who supplied and installed the equipment.
The county since then pays for the maintenance.
If something breaks, USGS comes and fixes it.
He’s also worked with the National Weather Service to establish flood stages
for better warning for residents.
It’s time to renew the funding.

Commissioner Demarcus Marshall wanted to know how many inspections
were carried out by USGS.



Answer: Continue reading →

Solar will overtake everything –FERC Chair Jon Wellinghof

“Everybody’s roof is out there,” for solar power,
so natural gas or oil pipelines are a waste of time.


Solar prices dropping exponentially drive solar deployment up like compound interest, eventually onto everybody’s rooftops,
where eventually means in about a decade,
after which we’ll be ramping down natural gas like we’re already ramping down coal.
It’s time for Georgia Power and Southern Company and all of Georgia’s EMCs
to get on with solar and stop wasting resources on dead ends,
especially that bad idea of fifty years ago, nuclear power.

Herman K. Trabish wrote for Green Tech Media yesterday,

FERC Chair Jon Wellinghoff: Solar ‘Is Going to Overtake Everything’:
One of the country’s top regulators explains why he is so bullish on solar.

“Solar is growing so fast it is going to overtake
everything,” Wellinghoff told GTM last week in a sideline
conversation at the National Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas.

If a single drop of water on the pitcher’s mound at Dodger Stadium
is doubled every minute, Wellinghoff said, a person chained to the
highest seat would be in danger of drowning in an hour.

“That’s what is happening in solar. It could double every two
years,” he said.

Indeed, as GTM Research’s MJ Shiao recently pointed out, in the next
2 1/2 years the U.S. will Continue reading →

Down, up, down again: Arkansas Nuclear One

Entergy announced August 8th that its Arkansas nuke was back up

after a man died there in March, but it only made it to 87% power
on August 12th and then back to zero yesterday.
There’s no NRC event for yesterday’s downtime: what’s going on?
Meanwhile, the dead man’s family is suing Entergy, and Entergy
is suing its contractors.
Sounds like the Plant Vogtle circular firing squad.


ANO Feb-Aug 2013

THV11 wrote 8 August 2013,

Nuclear One unit back on after deadly accident
and
EBR staff wrote more detail for Energy Business Review 9 August 2013,

Entergy restarts Unit 1 at Arkansas Nuclear One power plant,

Prior to restart, the unit needed an extensive restoration,
including damage evaluation, repairs to non-nuclear plant components
and rescheduling its refueling activities.

The restoration was made compulsory following the collapse of a
contractor’s crane on 31 March 2013, while shifting a generator
stator out of the turbine building.

Hm, “made compulsory” by whom?
NRC?
OSHA, which
also investigated?
Arkansas?
Other? Continue reading →

Climate change adversely affecting U.S. power grid

Yes, and moving away from baseload coal, nukes, and natural gas
and towards distributed solar and wind power will help with that,
both directly by making the grid more resilient, and indirectly
by slowing climate change.

Clare Foran wrote for NationalJournal 12 August 2013,
Climate Change Is Threatening the Power Grid:

So says the White House, in a new report that recommends strengthening the grid.



Just days away from the 10-year anniversary of the worst power
outage in U.S. history, the White House and the Energy Department
released a report on Monday evaluating the resiliency of the
nation’s electric grid and recommending steps to prevent future
blackouts.

The report called storms and severe weather “the leading cause of
power outages in the United States,” and warned against the steep
cost of weather-related damage to the electric grid. It put the
price tag for electrical failures caused by inclement weather at
between $18 billion and $33 billion annually, and noted that costs
have increased in recent years, jumping from a range of $14 billion
to $26 billion in 2003 to $27 billion to $52 billion in 2012. Storms
exceeding a billion dollars in damages (electrical and otherwise)
have also become more frequent in the past decade, as the chart
below shows.

Well,
Entergy’s Arkansas Nuclear 1 (ANO1) is still down

more than four months after a fatal accident
(hey,

look at that; Continue reading →

New nukes make no financial sense –financial expert to GA PSC

If new nukes make no sense because of natural gas prices,
they make even less sense with continually-dropping solar power prices.

Ray Henry wrote for AP yesterday,

Regulator: New nuke plant now wouldn’t make sense,

If Georgia was starting from scratch, it would not build a nuclear
power plant….



An analyst working for state regulators, Philip Hayet, said in
written testimony that the total costs of building two more nuclear
reactors at Plant Vogtle (VOH’-gohl) is more expensive than the
next-best option, constructing natural gas plants.

Still, Hayet said it is cheaper in most scenarios to finish the
nuclear plant rather than halt the project and instead build natural
gas plants.

But it’s not cheaper to finish a nuke than to halt it and
get on with wind offshore and distributed solar power throughout Georgia.

GA PSC didn’t publish Hayet’s calculations, using the old excuse of
“they involve proprietary financial information from Southern Co. subsidiary Georgia Power”.
But Edison Electric Institute didn’t need any proprietary financial
information to compute that Continue reading →

REZ-2013-09 Moody Housing, Val Del Rd @ LCC 2013-08-12



County Planner Jason Davenport said the proposed
Moody Family Housing was “in the Nelson Hill neighborhood”,
and there were at least 30 pages of updates, but the
County Clerk wouldn’t show them to LAKE without an Open Records
Request, which hadn’t yet been satisfied at the end of the day.
Commissioners had some questions about acreage and traffic,
some of which were answered by the ubiquitous Attorney Bill Holland,
and others of which were not answered very well by County Engineer
Mike Fletcher, at

this morning’s Work Session of the Lowndes County Commission.

6.b.
REZ-2013-09 Moody Housing, Val Del Rd R-1 to Residential PD, LC Water & Sewer, ~64 acres

Davenport said:

As of last Friday we did receive an updated site plan as well as some
elevations from the applicants to let us know exactly what the houses
would look like, what they’re anticipating.
The site plan did have four changes and I’ll hand these out to you
in just one minute.
We added some notes about the uses.
We wanted to make them show us where
their proposed
signage was and we wanted to make them clarify who would be maintaining
the open space and the green space….

He passed those updates out, but the County Clerk refused to supply
copies for LAKE without an Open Records Request.
Gretchen filed an ORR, but if the county takes the statutory three days,
we won’t get copies, nor will you, before the Commission votes tomorrow evening..

Here’s

Part 1 of 2: Continue reading →

Dump CCA and other private prison stocks now –smart analysts

If business is so good,
why did CCA

lose two contracts for new prisons in Georgia last year


when neither the state nor the feds had enough prisoners to fill them?
And why was

the private prison in Ocilla nearly sold at auction?
Why this year was
Gladiator School closed and two other CCA prisons cancelled?
And all that was before

U.S. DoJ announced today it will “avoid charging certain low-level and nonviolent drug offenders with crimes that carry mandatory minimums”.

Ed Arnold wrote for Memphis Business Journal 23 July 2013,

Corrections Corp. of America debunks Anonymous report,



As reported on Monday, the computer hacking collective known as
Anonymous Analytics published a blog warning investors that a
declining prison population and reforms designed to reduce
incarceration rates in the U.S. point to shrinking revenue for
Corrections Corporation of America (NYSE: CXW) going forward.

CCA flatly denied the Anonymous Analytics conclusions in a
statement.

CCA apparently didn’t dare link to the actual report.
Anonymous Analytics wrote 9 July 2013,

Corrections Corporation of America: The Dismantling of a National Disgrace, Continue reading →

Avoid charging low-level and nonviolent drug offenders –U.S. DoJ

It’s about time!
The War on Drugs has failed, admits the U.S. Department of Justice,
by saying it will “avoid charging certain low-level and nonviolent drug offenders with crimes that carry mandatory minimums”.

Ryan J. Reilly wrote for Huffpo today,

Eric Holder Outlining New Justice Department Drug Sentencing Reforms,



The Justice Department will avoid charging certain low-level and
nonviolent drug offenders with crimes that carry mandatory minimums,
Attorney General Eric Holder will announce Monday. The policy shift
will allow certain defendants — those without ties to
large-scale organizations, gangs or cartels — to avoid what
Holder called “draconian mandatory minimum sentences.”

Holder, in a speech before the American Bar Association in San
Francisco on Monday, Continue reading →