This time, 24 March 2011,
Angela Manning, minister of the 1500-member New Life Ministries
in Valdosta near the proposed site for the Wiregrass Power LLC biomass plant,
read from the Valdosta City Council’s own mission statement and
asked,
How do you adhere to your mission statement?Here’s the video: Continue reading
As Dr. George said Continue reading
Dr. George gets to the point!
After talking to several Valdosta City Council members, he has
observed that people make up their minds regardless of evidence.
So he wants to know:
What evidence would you need to see to conclude this is a bad idea?
Dr. George also gets at something even deeper that Council might
consider a wakeup call:
The public outcry about this across the political spectrum, from conservative to liberal.People against the biomass plant are not just black or white or young or old or conservative or liberal or college professors or unemployed: they are all of those things. The intransigence of elected and appointed officials is causing citizens to stand up and be heard on this and other issues around the county. This issue is serving as a catalyst for people to demand more transparent and responsive government.
Here’s the video:
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Let’s meet
the CUEE board and ask them a simple question.
The Chair, Leroy Butler, named them in this order: Rusty Griffin (Vice-Chair), George Bennett, Tom Kurrie, Walter Hobgood, Johnny Ball, Jack Edwards, Jud Rackley, Gene Godfrey, and “last but certainly not least” Ruth Council. (Not named but listed on CUEE’s website are David Durland, Terry Hunt, and Ronnie Mathis.)
As I told Rusty Griffin, I congratulate CUEE on holding public meetings about their plans.
Here’s the question:
How many of the current CUEE board are from the county outside of Valdosta?Continue reading
Wiregrass Technical College wants to expand onto some land owned
by the Industrial Authority, using
SPLOST funds.
Chairman Jerry Jennett:
The point is they’re landlocked.More transcription after the video:And so what you want to do is you want to take what your tract is now and have the ability to expand your building in the future. You want to move your training facility now and….
Roy Copeland: Continue reading
Dr. Noll raised a number of issues about community priorities
at the Lowndes County Commission meeting of 22 March 2011
and asked what are our priorities?
The Sierra Club letter he mentions was posted last week. For NOAA Weather Radios see previous posts. Here is the video:
Ed Lightsey writes in GeorgiaTrend for March 2011,
Valdosta/Lowndes County: Taking Off
about many good developments in Lowndes County.
But among them is this:
About two years ago, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) began looking for sites on which to build a prison, and after an 18-month search chose Lowndes County, a decision that promises 400 to 600 new jobs. “It’s a $150-million investment,” Lofton says. “That’s the second largest investment in the history of the county. And of those promised jobs, about 120 will require post secondary education; they are nurses, physician assistants, dieticians and vocational rehab folks.”So why do we need them here? Continue readingCCA is the fifth largest penal system in the country, behind Florida, Califor-nia, Texas and the Federal Bureau of Prisons, according to Lofton. “They have about 20,000 employees across the country,” he says.
Roy Copeland had a question about Project Excel,
the
private prison that Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) wants
to build in Lowndes County,
at the
15 March 2011 VLCIA board meeting.
Q: He wanted to know if there are other communities competing for the project, and whether they had also paid a second extension.
A: Col. Ricketts answered that there is another community competing, but he did not know whether they had made that payment: Continue reading
Regarding the
private prison that Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) wants
to build in Lowndes County,
at the 15 March 2011 VLCIA board meeting,
Col. Ricketts gave an update,
saying CCA had made a second payment as stipulated in the purchase
and development agreement:
The story continues in later posts.
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Previously we asked if
public objections caused VLCIA to change its tune about
letting CCA build a private prison in Lowndes County, Georgia.
OK, that was a rhetorical question: of course not!
Speaking at the Lake Park Chamber of Commerce annual dinner, 28 January 2011, Brad Lofton praised the private prison project:
“…we hope will be under construction in the next 18 months. It will be about $150 million dollar project; anywhere from 4 to 600 new jobs. A lot of communities in Georgia are built around state prisons. A hundred of those 400 will be post-secondary, nutritionalists, physicians, nurses, vocational rehab, so we’re proud of that project. You’ll start to hear a little bit more about that. There will be about 300 construction jobs over about a 24 month period, which will have a major impact on the community.”
That was part of Lofton’s famous “jobs, jobs, jobs” speech. Lofton is gone now, but apparently VLCIA still plans the prison.
The story continues in later posts.
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