Most of Lowndes County’s boondoggle road widening
projects seem to have been bounced off the list.
This one is still on there:
$8 million to widen old US 41 North.
Some of the other projects may also be boondoggles for all I know,
but at least all the ones to widen roads right to the north edge
of the county and thus drive development all the way into
agricultural and forest areas are gone.
Here’s the list:
Continue reading
For those who miss their regular daily diet of animal shelter issues,
Susan Leavens has started a facebook group called
Georgia’s Regulatory Animal Protection Division the truth behind them.
And who knows? Maybe soon we’ll hear results of that investigation down at the sheriff’s office. Or maybe Gary Black will live up to his campaign promises. Or maybe Lowndes County will let the Humane Society train animal control officers. The more people ask for these things to happen, the more likely they will happen.
-jsq
Leonard Pitts Jr. wrote for the Miami Herald 30 July 2011, NAACP’s paradigm shift on ending the Drug War
Conservative as in:Here’s why this matters. Or, more to the point, why it matters more than if such a statement came from Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton. The NAACP is not just the nation’s oldest and largest civil rights organization. It is also its most conservative.
…denoting a propensity toward caution and a distrust of the bold, the risky, the new. And that’s the NAACP all over.How monumental? Continue reading
…there has always been something determinedly middle class and cautious about the NAACP. This is the group whose then-leader, Roy Wilkins, famously detested Martin Luther King for his street theatrics.
For that group, then, to demand an end to the Drug War represents a monumental sea change.
Interesting how the headline writer watered that down: NAACP called Continue readingIf you grew up at the same time that I did, you’ll remember the “Just Say No” anti-drug campaign that became popular in the mid-1980s and early 1990s.
It manifested itself in many ways, from the posters and talks in class to the “very special episodes” of shows such as “Blossom” and “The Facts of Life,” where a character encounters a kid from the wrong side of the tracks who is pressuring him or her to try drugs. Inevitably, good prevailed and the druggie turned out to be from a broken family and needed only a good face-to-face with Nancy Reagan, the driving force behind the campaign, to overcome his addiction. (She appeared on “Diff’rent Strokes,” and considering the real-life histories of Gary Coleman, Todd Bridges and Dana Plato, she probably should have stuck around for a five-episode story arc.)
“Just Say No” was part of the larger war on drugs the Nixon administration declared in 1971. For grown-ups, that war symbolized a lot more than sappy primetime television. Especially for black adults. For them, it meant stricter laws for those found buying, selling and distributing illegal drugs.
To that end, the NAACP took an interesting step at its national convention last month. It approved a resolution to end the war on drugs because of its devastating effect on the black community.
Lowndes County Clerk, Paige Dukes, provided a PDF of the slides from
the presentation.
They are available
on the LAKE website.
-gretchen
the city of Valdosta. Here are those
job postings.
Meanwhile, Lowndes County also has one job opening, under current posted positions.
-jsq
No, not that city council! No, not that county commission! Not even the state board of corrections. (Although some of them might want to try that bureaucratic shoe on to see if it fits.) Here’s who: Continue readingSchuster told the directors that he thought [that organization] was supplying “vague” information and he directed that henceforth the sides meet monthly in his office for updates on the liquidation process. In short, Schuster is learning first hand — just like members, the media and the public at large have learned — that prying information out of [that organization] is usually about as fruitful as trying to squeeze information out of the Kremlin.
Here’s the agenda:Well, shiver me timbers and bless their little hearts! Their new executive director, Andrew Schruijer, remarked at Tuesday’s board meeting that the agenda for that meeting had indeed been posted since Friday. In Citizens to be Heard I readily admitted I didn’t look too hard for it, and expressed astonishment and pleasure at this positive development. Linked from their front page, there’s now an agenda page:Just joking. They don’t publish their agendas!
It has links to agendas for June, July, and August, each with an agenda in PDF. That seems a bit odd for some of those months, when there were several meetings. But, hey, it’s a start!Agenda
Agendas will be posted one day prior to the Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial Authority regular scheduled monthly meeting.
Here’s the aganda for yesterday’s meeting. That’s in PDF, so here’s a web-readable HTML version:
Continue readingValdosta-Lowndes County Industrial Authority Agenda Tuesday, August 16, 2011 5:30 p.m. Industrial Authority Conference Room 2110 N. Patterson Street
Georgia Tech Professor Ellen Dunham-Jones spole January 2010 at TEDxAtlanta, Retrofitting suburbia
Here’s the video: Continue readingIn the last 50 years, we’ve been building the suburbs with a lot of unintended consequences. And I’m going to talk about some of those consequences and just present a whole bunch of really interesting projects that I think give us tremendous reasons to be really optimistic that the big design and development project of the next 50 years is going to be retrofitting suburbia. So whether it’s redeveloping dying malls or re-inhabiting dead big-box stores or reconstructing wetlands out of parking lots, I think the fact is, the growing number of empty and under-performing, especially, retail sites throughout suburbia gives us actually a tremendous opportunity to take our least-sustainable landscapes right now and convert them into more sustainable places. And in the process, what that allows us to do is to redirect a lot more of our growth back into existing communities that could use a boost, and have the infrastructure in place, instead of continuing to tear down trees and to tear up the green space out at the edges.
Why do you have to take the one politician that actually works for us?
Well, some farmers in Tifton didn’t take kindly to
the main idea Kingston was pushing yesterday.
Said a farmer:
I have tried working with probationers and I’ll just say that it was a very inconsistent supply of workers.Hm, the VDT previously was of a similar opinion, an opinion that got quoted in the AJC. Maybe the VDT didn’t know Kingston was pushing HB 87, even though they sat down with him yesterday morning?
We don’t need an ALEC-organized private prison law like HB 87 to profit private prison company CCA, and we don’t need a CC private prison in Lowndes County. Spend those tax dollars on rehabilitation and education instead.
-jsq