Tag Archives: LMIG

Emergency no-bid repairs, a bridge where, and unnecessary resurfacing @ LCC 2016-04-25

$89,005 in emergency no-bid repairs on the agenda for Monday morning and voting Tuesday evening.

Also $634,800 for a bridge we can’t tell where, and some unknown fraction of $1,663,888.78 to resurface a road that shouldn’t be used as a highway in the first place.
Who’s in charge of budget planning for the county?

Why is replacing the fiber optic data cable that connects the South Lowndes Data Center and the E911 Center an
emergency repair for $61,020,
when apparently the problem has been going on for years?
Meanwhile, it’s good that it’s not an emergency that the 911 Center
Core Network Equipment
needs replacing for $38,621.
Planning ahead is good.
Is one of these items in the budget and the other not?

Another emergency not marked as such in the agenda is Continue reading →

HB 170: counties vs. cities? @ LCC 2015-02-10

Yesterday a Georgia House subcommittee did exactly what Valdosta

urged it not to do about distributing HB 170 funds.
Given that LMIG mismatch between cities and counties
to replace the previous mismatch of forced double taxation
on cities and counties, is the legislature trying to cause
dissension between counties and their cities, or is it just that inept?
We know Valdosta’s position.
What will the Lowndes County Commission do?

Valdosta City Manager Larry Hanson

wrote to bill’s sponsor: Continue reading →

HB 170 voted out of subcommittee; what will Lowndes County Commission do? @ LCC 2015-02-06

How long will the Lowndes County government and ACCG wait to act,
while the Georgia legislature moves on

its stealth transportation
tax hike for Atlanta that would defund local school boards and city
and county governments?
A House subcommittee has made some changes to the bill,
but it would still force local governments to raise taxes,
and it adds an unrelated repeal of an electric vehicle tax credit
to its boondoggle for trucking companies and Atlanta.
Do we want our local public schools to be defunded like
wildlife programs were through the state’s wildlife license plate revenue
tax taking?
If not, now’s the time to lobby against HB 170, before
the full House Transportation Committee meets Thursday.
Yet there’s still nothing about HB 170
on the county’s agenda for this evening’s voting Regular Session.

Valdosta has already Continue reading →

No T-SPLOST means 30% match for LMIG, and what else? @ LCC 2012-12-10

To pave or not to pave?
That is the question that was danced around by County Engineer
Mike Fletcher and County Manager Joe Pritchard, with interest,
at

yesterday morning’s Lowndes County Commission Work Session,
on agenda item

8.d. Georgia Department of Transportation Local Maintenance & Improvement Grant.

County Engineer Mike Fletcher said
Lowndes County was receiving from GDOT a Local Maintenance
and Improvement Grant (LMIG) of $746,984.75 for FY “two thirteen”.
Because T-SPLOST didn’t pass, the county has to come up with a
30% match, which is $224,095.43.
He said there was a work sheet and project list in the board
packet (which the rest of us don’t get to see).

County Manager Joe Pritchard said with change from LARP
(Local Assistance Road Projects, primarily for resurfacing) to LMIG
the county could now use these funds for any purpose,
and had planned to use LMIG for

Continue reading →

Valdosta LMIG resurfacing and transparency

The City of Valdosta almost wins for transparency
about some upcoming road resurfacing work,
except the details are in some Windows-only non-web format.

20 August 2012,

In the City This Week, Aug. 20-25, 2012,

Aug. 20: LMIG Work Continues Today.

The street resurfacing made
possible through a

Local Maintenance and Improvement Grant (LMIG)
will continue Aug. 20 with the removal and replacement of curb and
gutter on a dozen designated streets in the city. Road resurfacing
of these streets is scheduled to begin on Aug. 27.

Click here for
more information.

That leads to

Project News and Updates
which has a link

LMIG Resurfacing Schedule and Desiginated Areas
which gets:

You have chosen to open

LMIG

which is a: BIN file (63.9 KB)

from: http://www.valdostacity.com

Would you like to save this file?

And that’s actually a ZIP file containing a bunch of XML files.
We should trust Valdosta’s website enough to be secure
that we should download random ZIP files?
Fail!

Gretchen decoded that ZIP bomb and sent it in plain text, which I include here.
My question is: why didn’t Valdosta simply put it on the web that way
to start with?

-jsq

Continue reading →

T-SPLOST: stick or baseball bat? @ SGRC 2011-09-19

Corey Hull explained what the state of Georgia has in store for us if we vote down T-SPLOST:

If the voters do not approve the referendum, then all local governments must match their LMIG funds a rate of 30%. And then we have to wait 24 months to start the process over again. And when I say start the process over again, I mean start the process over to enact this tax.

Nolen Cox, Chairman of the Lowndes County Republican Party (LCRP), remarked:

Is that commonly called a stick?

Gretchen Quarterman, Chairman of the Lowndes County Democratic Party (LCDP), observed:

It looks like a baseball bat.

Now I doubt either were speaking in an official capacity, but I know from talking to them that both individuals oppose this tax, and I’m pretty sure most people in their local parties do, too.

Here’s a longer explanation of what happens, including what LMIG is, April 2011 LCDP meeting.

Here’s the video:

T-SPLOST: stick or baseball bat?

T-SPLOST Public Meeting, Southern Georgia Regional Commission (SGRC),
Corey Hull,
Nolen Cox, Gretchen Quarterman,
Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia, 19 September 2011.
Video by Gretchen Quarterman for Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE).