Ordinance or policy?
That question comes up for at least two items,
Special assessment
and
Speed control devices,
in the
minutes of the 10 January 2011 Work Session
of the Lowndes County Commission.
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LOWNDES COUNTY BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS
MINUTES
WORK SESSION
Monday, January 10, 2011
Director Lisa Biagiotti
spent two years travelling around the South
interviewing people about AIDS to make a film,
deepsouth.
She found rural AIDS is a bigger and faster-growing problem
than AIDS in center cities,
yet most health and prevention funding goes to urban areas.
The root cause seemed clear to her: poverty.
Here’s some deeper dirt (literally) on rural poverty in the U.S.,
and one thing we know can help with that: distributed solar power,
for jobs, for reduced electrical bills, and for energy independence.
What politician wouldn’t want jobs for their constituents?
The director said the screening at
VSU at the end of November drew more people than the
day before in Little Rock.
There were clearly more than 150 in the audience in Valdosta.
It’s a topic very relevant to here, as
Dean Poling wrote in the VDT 26 November 2012,
Organizers note that Georgia is ranked sixth highest nationally for
its cumulative number of AIDS cases reported through December 2009.
More than 40,000 known HIV/AIDS cases were reported in Georgia as of
2010.The South Health District’s 10 counties, which include Lowndes and
surrounding counties, report 950 confirmed cases of HIV/AIDS, while
many more are likely infected and risk becoming sick because they
are not being treated. More specifically, there are about 460
reported cases in Lowndes County.In reporting these numbers, HIV is the virus (HIV disease) and AIDS
is the medical diagnosis made by a doctor of the symptoms, according
to South Health District.
It’s a great movie and I highly recommend it.
Director Biagiotti spent a substantial amount of her own money and two years to make
this film, yet there are aspects she could only note in passing,
such as incarceration.
She can’t be expected to have researched every aspect;
maybe somebody else can step up and help follow more threads.
The movie starts with some maps about poverty and AIDS in the South.
It did not, however, look outside the South for poverty.
Here are better
poverty maps, from the CDC:
Susan Crawford has a plan
for getting us fast Internet access for jobs, community, education,
and health care.
Susan Crawford wrote for Wired 2 October 2012,
We Can’t All Be in Google’s Kansas: A Plan for Winning the Bandwidth
Race,
about how the incumbent telephone and cable companies that provide
our Internet access aren’t going to help:
They have no incentive to do so. Because they never enter one
another’s territories, they don’t face the competition that might
spur such expansion.Instead, incumbent internet access providers such as Comcast and
Time Warner (for wired access) and AT&T and Verizon (for
complementary wireless access) are in “harvesting” mode.
They’re raising average revenue per user through special pricing for
planned “specialized services” and usage-based billing,
which allows the incumbents to constrain demand. The ecosystem these
companies have built is never under stress, because consumers do
their best to avoid heavy charges for using more data than they’re
supposed to. Where users have no expectation of abundance, there’s
no need to build fiber on the wired side of the business or build
small cells fed by fiber on the wireless side.If the current internet access providers that dominate the American
telecommunications landscape could get away with it, they’d sell
nothing but specialized services and turn internet access into a
dirt road.
So what is her plan?
Affordable high-speed Internet access would bring us
jobs, community, “online commerce and services, the ability to reach world
markets, to invent and innovate, to learn and communicate” and
“a wealth of economic activity and information”
writes Susan Crawford, a very savvy and experienced communications law professor
who has been recommended by many as a potential chair of the FCC,
who also explains why we aren’t currently getting it.
The Diane Rehm Show 10 January 2013,
Susan Crawford: “Captive Audience”,
and that’s the title of her book,
Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age,
excerpted here:
The sea change in policy that led to the current situation has
been coordinated over the past twenty years by legions of lobbyists,
hired-guneconomists, and credulous regulators. The cable companies
have no incentive to upgrade their core network hardware to ensure
that advanced fiberconnections are available to every home
throughout the country. Communications companies describe globally
competitive high-speed access as aluxury, just as the private
electricity companies did a century ago.Yet communications services are now as important as electricity.
Today if you asked American mayors what technology they most want
for their city, the majority would say, “affordable high-speed
Internet access.” And they want these networks not simply for
the jobs created to construct them but because the Internet brings
the world to their community.
High-speed Internet access gives towns
and cities online commerce and services, the ability to reach world
markets, to invent and innovate, to learn and communicate. It brings
a wealth of economic activity and information.
But despite these
manifold benefits, Americans continue to treat such services as the
exclusive domain of private monopolies and as luxuries
obtainable only by the wealthy.Not coincidentally, the United States has fallen from the forefront
Ron Borders
introduced
Congressman Austin Scott (R GA-08) who
made some remarks
on the front porch at the Chamber of Commerce Thursday 10 January 2013.
Bookended by some formulaic remarks about debt
(without mentioning
that
it’s already mostly solved),
the Congressman noted he is on the Committee on Armed Services.
He said there is no current
BRAC (Base Realignment and Closure Commission),
although one has been asked for.
He said a BRAC wouldn’t do anything for near-term debt, anyway
(but he didn’t say anything about ending the war in Afghanistan
or stopping funding for un-needed weapons systems as ways of saving money).
He said he is the chair of a House Agriculture Subcommitee
(Horticulture, Research, Biotechnology, and Foreign Agriculture).
He said he was for research, for the agricultural extension,
and for agricultural exports.
Here’s
the WCTV news report, with responses by Gretchen Quarterman,
Chair of the Lowndes County Democratic Party (LCDP).
Here’s
a video playlist:
Because Atlanta can’t get a grip on its water usage, the Georgia legislature
is still trying to suck up Tennessee River water.
If the legislature is willing to try that, how long before they
try sucking up our Floridan Aquifer water for Atlanta?
Prefiled in December to be up early as the Georgia legisture starts meeting
today, is a bill to try to move the northern border of Georgia to match
an eighteenth century boundary that just happens to include a bit of the
Tennessee River in Georgia.
HR 4,
Georgia and Tennessee; boundary dispute; propose settlement,
was filed by
Rep. Harry Geisinger, R – Roswell, District 48,
and says in part:
WHEREAS, the State of Georgia proposes to the State of Tennessee
that the dispute be resolved by the states agreeing that the current
boundary between the two states reflecting the flawed 1818 survey be
adopted as the legal boundary between the states except for an area
described as follows which shall be made a part of the State of
Georgia by which Georgia shall be able to exercise its riparian
water rights to the Tennessee River at Nickajack:
Georgia is already in a
three-decade-long dispute with Alabama and
Florida over the Chattahoochee River.
Does adding a dispute over the Tennessee River
seem like a good idea to you?
And how can we best stop Atlanta from coming for our Floridan Aquifer?
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Valdosta resident Forrest H. Williams replied in the VDT today to
my op-ed of 6 January.
His information seems a bit out of date.
For example, he cites
Progress Energy’s Crystal River nuke
as a good example, when it’s been
down since 2009
and is still
producing zero percent power,
both according to the NRC.
Readers of this blog know that
the blog version of my op-ed
already links to sources for everything I said.
I may respond more later, but no doubt there are other people
who want to get involved in this discussion.
And I do thank Forrest H. Williams for airing the sort of disinformation
that is out there, so others can dispel it.
Oh, and saying water that is evaporated is not lost is like saying trees that are burned are not lost. Evaporated water is not available for agricultural or wildlife or drinking water use, and thus is indeed lost.
Hearing a representative was in town, Gretchen took the LAKE video camera
down to the Chamber of Commerce.
Greg Gullberg of WCTV invited her to rebut Rep. Austin Scott (R GA-08)
in her role as Chair of the Lowndes County Democratic Party (LCDP).
After some back and forth,
the WCTV story
shows transparency winning, and Gretchen with the last word.
But their [sic] is one thing they both agree on.
“I quite honestly think both sides ought to put their budgets on
C-Span and maybe we ought to have those negotiations on C-Span,”
said Scott.“So I’m all for having everything all out on the table for all
citizens to see,” said Quarterman.
Hey, what if
the Lowndes County Commission put its board packets and budgets out on the web
for all us taxpayers to see?
Here’s
the WCTV video.
The video Gretchen took will follow.
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
Once a year busloads of people go to Atlanta from Lowndes County and Valdosta
to lobby their legislators with small birds.
It’s curious we only hear about this from Valdosta, not Lowndes County.
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Bird Supper 2013 Tickets on Sale Now
Posted Date: 1/3/2013
Sementha Mathews, Public Information Officer
Phone: (229) 259-3548
E-mail:
smathews@valdostacity.comTickets are on sale for the 2013 Bird Supper, scheduled for
Wednesday, Feb. 27, 2013, at the historic Georgia Railroad Depot, in
Atlanta, beginning at 5 p.m. The tradition—over 50 years
old—brings together hundreds of state officials and local
business, professional and government personnel for a dinner of
quail and important conversation.The event, sponsored by the City of Valdosta and the Lowndes County
Board of Commissioners, allows local professionals the opportunity
to have an impact on the current legislative agenda through
face-to-face conversations with those who will make some very
important decisions impacting our local area and entire state.Tickets may be purchased
