All Meetings will be held at 5:30pm in the Industrial Authority Conference Room, 2110 N. Patterson Street, unless otherwise notified.I would post a link to their agenda, if they had it online, but they don’t.
Meanwhile, here they are.
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Roy Copeland |
Tom Call |
Mary Gooding |
Norman Bennett |
Jerry Jennett, Chairman |
Floyd Rose
spoke to the Valdosta City Council, 10 February 2011.
First he told the bus story, which is about how he became an activist
many years ago.
Then he said this part,
transcribed by George Rhynes:
“I came home to Valdosta in 1995, and I found just outside of these walls; a plaque that read; the mayor and council shall make all appropriate and necessary laws; for the control of slaves; and free men of color.That plaque was removed reluctantly; at the urging of Mr. George Rhynes; while the plaque; has been removed! I have discovered; that the policy that gave birth to that plaque are still in place; and one of the policies is the one that I told you about two weeks ago; or perhaps three weeks ago now. That would not; and could not abide by; because it was designed only for the purpose of controlling the citizens of this city and that I would never be bought and I would never be bossed as a matter of conscience.
Now it was suggested; at the end of the last meeting; that some of us come before you; ah making a grand stand; and somehow creating theater. It was suggested that Floyd Rose just wants to be arrested. I have been arrested before; I spent twenty-five long hours in solitary confinement in the Lowndes County Jail; because of you; and anybody with any common sense; would never want to go to the Lowndes County Jail to spend any time. That is foolishness and it’s crazy!
On the front page of the paper VDT today County Manager Joe Pritchard
proposes further restrictions on citizens in public County Commission
meetings:
“We cannot stop anybody from taking video of a session; but we can limit them to one area; it’s distracting to us and to citizens to have somebody running around the session trying to get different angles,” said Joe Pritchard, county manager.The only person I’ve seen running around the session trying to get different angles is Paige Dukes, County Clerk. Will she now be prohibited from coming out from behind the bar to take pictures of awards and such?
Why they can’t stop anybody from taking video, according to Georgia law, O.C.G.A. § 50-14-1-c.:
“Visual, sound, and visual and sound recording during open meetings shall be permitted.”Some courts do put some restrictions on visual recordings, such as prohibiting pictures of jurors. But the Lowndes County Commission is not a court. It is the only elected body for the entire county, and thus the only public forum at which citizens can peacefully assemble to petition their local government for redress of county-wide grievances.
Does the Commission really want to put more restrictions on citizens in its meetings,
even though a constitutional scholar is questioning
the constitutionality of
the rules they recently passed?
Rules which limit the number of speakers in Citizens Wishing to be Heard to 10
and
Continue reading
Update 13 Feb 2011: A very nice biography and tribute in the VDT today. His birth year is corrected in the title of this post.
At approximately 11 a.m. Saturday morning, emergency personnel responded to the residence of G. Robert Carter, former Lowndes County Commissioner and Sheriff. Carter, who was recently hospitalized for an unnkown illness, has reportedly passed today.
Two weeks ago
he spoke as he was being honored
at the Lake Park Chamber of Commerce Annual Dinner:
I’ve lived long enough to appreciate the Greatest Generation, but also to appreciate the younger ones coming along to take our place.Here are videos of all the tributes to Sheriff Carter that evening. Continue reading…
I’m not totally out of business; I might be able to help you somewhere down the line. As I told Crawford, don’t wait until you get in trouble. Come to see me before you get in trouble.
George Rhynes
posted the appended on his blog
the same day he
spoke on the same subjects
at the Valdosta City Council, 10 February 2011.
Excerpts from his blog post: Continue reading
Sure, everyone wants jobs for the people right now and jobs
so the children don’t have to go somewhere else to find one.
But what good is that if those jobs suck up all the water
those children need to drink?
This is the problem:
“What I believe the three most important things are, not only for our community, and our state, and our country, but for our country, thats jobs number 1, jobs number 2, and jobs.”
I shook Brad Lofton’s hand after that speech and told him I liked it, because I did: in general it was a positive speech about real accomplishments. I’ve also pointed out I had a few nits with that speech. This one is more than a nit. This one is basic philosophy and policy.
Now one would expect an executive director of an industrial authority to be all about jobs. And that would be OK, if Continue reading
The
Longleaf Alliance
came up with some doozies of old fire-suppression propaganda
at the
Longleaf Workshops at Wiregrass Tech today.
Just in case you couldn’t visualize this enemy well enough, how about as a pale skeleton on a white horse with a B-movie torch?WOODS FIRES
EVERYMAN’S ENEMY
Ooh, those shadowy letters!DEATH RIDES
THE FOREST
If all else fails, go for fake religious injunctions, such as Continue reading
This sums it up:
“Taking fire out of the longleaf forest is like taking rain out of the rain forest.”But there’s a lot more to learn about the formerly largest-ranging forest in North America. The Longleaf Alliance is doing a series of Longleaf Workshops around Georgia, in conjunction with the Georgia Forestry Commission
I went to the one at
Wiregrass Technical College at Valdosta.
Here is EJ Williams giving an overview:
Good crowd: more than 50 people.
More later.
We’re on break now.
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Shortly after GA EPD approved the
final air quality construction permit for the proposed
biomass plant, new contracts were signed between Wiregrass Power LLC
and the Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial Authority (VLCIA).
Update 10 Feb 2011: JPEG images of each page are also available now.
Here they are, as PDFs generated from scans of paper copies.
These documents were obtained by an open records request by a citizen who then gave copies to LAKE.
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Buddy Boswell of Daily Dinners Personal Chef Service
talks about eating better by cooking fresh food.
He reminisces about what his grandmother taught him.
And he says a gourmet is just somebody who likes good food
with good fresh ingredients.
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