Tag Archives: LAKE

Meet the Candidates –Chamber

Go hear what they have to say, to help you decide who you’re going to vote for. here’s the list of candidates who qualified.

Here’s the Chamber’s event description:

Event Name: Meet the Candidates
Event Type(s): Chamber Calendar
Community Calendar
Description: The Valdosta-Lowndes County Chamber will host a Meet the Candidates event on Tues. Oct. 1 from 5-7 p.m. at the VSU Continuing Education Building located on 903 N. Patterson Street. The event is an opportunity for the public to meet and hear from candidates running in the Nov. 5 general election. Attendees can speak one-on-one with candidates and candidates will be given three minutes to discuss his or her main initiatives.
Event Date: 10-01-13
Event Time: 05:00 PM – 07:00 PM Eastern
Location: VSU Continuing Education Building (Auditorium)
903 N. Patterson St.
Valdosta, GA 31601

click here for Google Maps
click here for Mapquest
Contact Person: Patty Martin
(phone: 229.247.8100)
Outlook/vCalendar: click on the date(s) to add to your calendar:
10-01-13

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Two Lowndes, two Valdosta variances @ ZBOA 2013-10-01

Today: setbacks and nonconforming use in the county, and setbacks and buffers in the city of Valdosta, at the Valdosta-Lowndes County Zoning Board of Appeals. They start in a few minutes from now at the Valdosta City Annex.

Here’s the agenda.

Valdosta – Lowndes County Zoning Board of Appeals
Matt Martin, Valdosta Planning and Zoning Administrator
300 North Lee Street, Valdosta, Georgia
(229) 259-3563 		Carmella Braswell, Lowndes County Zoning Administrator
327 North Ashley Street, Valdosta, Georgia
(229) 671-2430
AGENDA
Tuesday, October 1, 2013
2:30 p.m.
Continue reading →

Videos: ZBOA approved UHS Pruitt variance at Two Mile Branch on Lee Street @ ZBOA 2013-09-10

The Zoning Board of Appeals approved a variance on stream buffers for the medical expansion across Two Mile Branch, as promised at the Planning Commission and Valdosta City Council.

Here’s the agenda with a few links and notes.

Valdosta – Lowndes County Zoning Board of Appeals
AGENDA
Tuesday, September 10, 2013
2:30 p.m.
  1. Call to Order

CITY OF VALDOSTA CASES:

  1. APP-2013-09 – RREMC Restaurants LLC (Denny’s; 1328 N St Augustine Road)
    Variance to LDR Section 214-7 as it pertains to exterior building materials

    Approved unanimously, plus some after-discussion about sheet metal.

  2. APP-2013-10 — UHS-Pruitt Corporation (Parkwood Developmental Center; 1501 N Lee St.)
    Variance to LDR Section 214-1 Table 2 as it pertains to rear yard setbacks in O-P Zoning and to LDR Section 310-112(A)(1) as it pertains to stream buffers

    Approved with two dissenting votes, by Nancy Hobby and Gretchen Quarterman.

OTHER BUSINESS:

Continue reading →

General broadband adoption improves rural economic health

Want more income, jobs, and creative workers? Get as many people as possible to use fast affordable Internet connections: that’s the result of a nationwide detailed study. Adoption matters more than availability, and speed matters for creative workers.

No Broadband Availability by Metro Status, 2010 Broadband’s Contribution to Economic Health in Rural Areas: A Causal Analysis Brian Whitacre, Oklahoma State University; Roberto Gallardo, Mississippi State University; Sharon Strover, University of Texas at Austin, presented at the Telecommunications Policy Research Conference, September 2013.

Conclusion and Policy Implications

Title slide with Brian Whitacre This research yields important findings on the effect of broadband on economic gains, namely on household income and employment levels. The ability to do matched county comparisons, specifically in non-metro counties, demonstrates the influence of adoption (as opposed to availability) in producing these positive outcomes, and constitutes another indication that development efforts should focus on mobilizing populations to subscribe to and use broadband capabilities. Again, cultivating local leadership, mobilizing the services of cooperative extension educators nationwide, and working more closely with each State Broadband Initiative could be fruitful avenues for targeting adoption.

We’re in a fertile field for economic improvement this way:

County-level Household Broadband Adoption Rates, 2010

Figure 1 displays Continue reading →

AT&T can do gigabit when competing with Google Fiber

A challenge gets the incumbents beyond selling slow and expensive as long as they can. Both these networks will use fiber optics, and that plus fast wireless to reach everybody else would be very interesting.

Roger Cheng wrote for Cnet yesterday, AT&T attempts to out-Google Google in Austin fiber race: The telco says it will begin offering its “GigaPower” service to Austin and surrounding areas this year, with further expansion and a 1-gigabit connection planned in 2014. But how much will it cost?

The company said on late Monday that it would launch its “GigaPower” super-fast home Internet service on December 1 in Austin, a city that Google has said it would deploy its own speedy Google Fiber service.

GigaPower would start with speeds of 300 megabit per second, or roughly 40 times the speed of the average U.S. Internet home connection, before upgrading customers to 1 gigabit per second next year. Google also plans to offer its own 1-gigabit connection some time next year.

By moving first Continue reading →

New Nottinghill tabled @ GLPC 2013-09-30

The new Nottinghill development on Orr Road (instead of Cat Creek Road) has been tabled at request of the developer and county staff; something about signature collection, Gretchen reports from the GLPC meeting. More later.

GLPC didn’t list any street numbers of parcel numbers, but there’s only one property on Orr Road that’s 14.99 acres, owned by William Henry Wright, backing up to his property on Stafford Wright Road.

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Orr, Barrington, Whitewater, New Statenville + VLD * 2 + Dasher + Hahira variance @ GLPC 2013-09-30

A county developer has moved roads, plus 3 out of 5 local cities at the Greater Lowndes Planning Commission tonight, plus “Attendance policy for appointed Boards”: are we going to expect them to show up now? A Hahira variance, a Valdosta conditional use permit and a rezoning, a Dasher zoning text amendment, and rezonings on four Lowndes County roads, including New Statenville Highway, Whitewater Road @ Williams Road, Barrington Drive @ Bemiss Road, and Orr Road.

That Orr Road one uses the same name, Nottinghill, as one that on Cat Creek Road that previously got tabled and never came back. GLPC didn’t list any street numbers of parcel numbers, but there’s only one property on Orr Road that’s 14.99 acres, owned by William Henry Wright, backing up to his property on Stafford Wright Road. Have the Nottinghill developers made a deal with him for Orr Road since the neighbors didn’t want them on Cat Creek Road?

Here’s the agenda. Continue reading →

Cash for Trash –Deep South Sanitation

The longer you drag on that lawsuit, Lowndes County Commission, about your bogus exclusive franchise that benefits nobody but ADS investors in New York City, the more good PR local company DSS gets. We could use better than trash government around here.

Advertisement by Deep South Sanitation in the VDT yesterday: Continue reading →

Florida Power and Light selected Sabal Trail for pipeline through Georgia

A Florida company selected a Texas company that can use eminent domain in Georgia to take your land. Does that seem right to you? Florida PSC has to review this pipeline. Where’s Georgia PSC on this?

FPL PR 26 July 2013, FPL selects Sabal Trail Transmission and Florida Southeast Connection to build new natural gas pipeline system into Florida,

Florida Power & Light Company today announced that its evaluation of proposals for additional natural gas transportation capacity determined that the best, most economical solution for ensuring Florida’s continued access to the clean, affordable, U.S.-produced fuel necessary to meet the growing electricity needs of the state’s residents and businesses is a combination of a natural gas pipeline and interconnection hub to be built by Sabal Trail Transmission, LLC, and a second natural gas pipeline to be built by Florida Southeast Connection, LLC….

Both Sabal Trail and Florida Southeast Connection will be interstate natural gas pipelines subject to Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approval and oversight.

In conjunction with today’s public announcement, FPL filed a petition for prudence review with the Florida Public Service Commission (PSC). Subject to PSC approval, Continue reading →

Bloomberg discovers mandated prison beds for CCA profit

The feds also fell for CCA’s prison snakeoil; it’s not just for states like Georgia.

William Selway & Margaret Newkirk wrote for Bloomberg 24 September 2013, Congress Mandates Jail Beds for 34,000 Immigrants as Private Prisons Profit,

Noemi Romero, who came to the U.S. illegally at age 3, was arrested in January working at a Phoenix grocery store, where she used someone else’s name to get the job.

Romero, a 21-year-old who likes to draw and dance, spent the next four months behind bars, almost half of it in a cramped cell at a 1,596-bed detention center in Eloy, Arizona, run by Corrections Corp. of America. The company, with Geo Group Inc. (GEO) and other for-profit prison operators, holds almost two-thirds of all immigrants detained each day in federally funded prisons as they face deportation, U.S. data show.

Under law, taxpayers must pay Continue reading →