Tag Archives: Planning

Remerton Mill demolition –WCTV

Maybe Nina King’s elegy on the sad demolition of Remerton’s Strickland Mill will spur enough people to get involved in the community
so next time a monument is threatened with demolition we can find
the resources to save it, and we can bring things
the community needs now, like fast affordable Internet access for all.


Nina King
Greg Gullberg reported for WCTV 11PM News last night,

Demolition Of Remerton Mill Has Begun,
in which Nina King said:

“Well, it breaks my heart, and it’s so sad.
And I don’t understand why anybody would want a historic
old building torn down like this.”

Continue reading →

Bicycle Workshop June 10th –VLMPO

Biking is the lead story in

the Spring Transportation Newsletter from the

Valdosta-Lowndes Metropolitan Planning Organization
and

the Southern Georgia Regional Commission.



Regional Bicycle Workshop On Monday, June 10, 2013, from 2 p.m. to 4
p.m. the Southern Georgia Regional Commission will host a Regional
Bicycle Workshop to discuss local bicycle infrastructure planning
and safety efforts.

Bicycling is becoming a more popular mode of transportation
throughout the nation and here in Southern Georgia. Our pleasant
climate and relatively flat landscape makes bicycling popular for
both commuting and recreation. Individuals of all ages are bicycling
more for various reasons, whether it be to save money on gas, to get
to work or the store, for exercise, or to go see a friend across
town.


GA Bicycle Route 10
This event will feature speakers on the topics of challenges to
building bicycle friendly infrastructure, bicycle safety and how our
communities can be healthy, happy, wealthy and wise when it comes to
bicycling. Brent Buice, from Georgia Bikes! will help lead a
discussion on what our communities can do to become more bicycle
friendly.

To RSVP for this event, please contact Corey Hull at chull@sgrc.us
or at 229-333-5277.

The newsletter also has a list of bike trails, with a pointer to

Public Hiking and Walking Trails of Southern Georgia.
The state also has

maps of bicycle routes, including

this one for the Valdosta area:

Continue reading →

Owners want out of uranium enrichment company



Maybe Southern Company and Georgia Power should listen to Urenco’s owners:
the nuclear industry is flatlining after Fukushima.

Stanley Reed wrote for Dealbook.Nytimes.com 27 May 2013,

Powerhouse of the Uranium Enrichment Industry Seeks an Exit,

The company that operates this uranium enrichment center, Urenco, is
the world leader in the field. It is also plumply profitable. So why
are its owners eager to sell it?

The answer, as with many things involving nuclear power, is a
combination of economics, geopolitics and the Promethean prospect of
an energy source that is as potentially green and abundant as deadly
dangerous….

Continue reading →

Sinkhole costs, and prevention vs. reaction



The day after the VDT ran

Lowndes County’s admission that the sewer line break was theirs, not Valdosta’s,
did the VDT start a series of financial investigation

like they did about Valdosta’s water issues?
Nope, they ran a piece about how much weather costs the county,
with no recognition of watershed-wide issues,
nor of any need for the county to participate in proactively
dealing with them, to reduce costs, for better quality of life,
to attract the kinds of businesses we claim we want.
Nope, none of that.

Jason Schaefer wrote for the VDT 27 April 2013,

What natural events cost Lowndes taxpayers,



In the Deep South, near a river plain where floodwaters rise and ebb
from season to season and wetlands that distinguish the region from
anywhere else in the nation, flooding makes a significant portion of
the concern for Lowndes County emergency management.

OK, that’s close to getting at some of the basic issues.
We’re all in the same watershed, and we need to act like it
instead of every developer and every local government
clearcutting and paving as if water didn’t run downhill.
Does the story talk about that?
After all, the county chairman attended the

11 April 2013 watershed-wide flooding meeting
that led to the

city of Valdosta’s likely participation in flodoplain planning.
Nope; according to the VDT,
everybody around here seems to be hapless victims of weather:

Continue reading →

Valdosta Plans Flooding Discussions


Valdosta is finally announcing the

11 April 2013 watershed-wide flooding meeting organized by
the Army Corps of Engineers.


WCTV yesterday carried a press release from the City of Valdosta;
PR which, oddly, does not appear to be on the city’s website.
I have added a few links. Prominently missing from the PR is any mention
of water quality, the Floridan Aquifer, or sinkholes. -jsq

The City of Valdosta initiated planning discussions recently that
brought together representatives from key local, state and federal
agencies to seek solutions to a regional flood issue.



The 50-year flood event that occurred in late

February,
early

March
2013 was a vivid reminder of the 2009 flood event that significantly
impacted south Georgia. Since 2009, the city has worked to help


identify potential causes and the scope and area of the regional
flooding that occurred. This information has been shared with
various state and federal officials and agencies in the hopes of
gaining their interest and support to work together to address the
regional flooding. Since Valdosta is located

Continue reading →

Southern Company Stockholder Meeting @ SO 2013-05-22



Spring means soon time for the Southern Company Stockholder meeting!
See what one of the biggest electric utilities in the world is up to,
and maybe make a few suggestions.

Here are
videos of what you missed last year,
and here is the official SO notice for this year
(I got a link to it because I’m a shareholder):

Notice of Annual Meeting of Stockholders of The Southern Company

DATE: Wednesday, May 22, 2013
TIME: 10:00 a.m., ET
PLACE: The Lodge Conference Center at Callaway Gardens

Highway 18

Pine Mountain, Georgia 3182



It includes a list of Items of Business, which doesn’t mention that
stockholders are usually allowed to ask questions.
Those questions are usually answered by Thomas A. fanning,
Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer,
who included a letter (text below) in which he recites

his usual list of energy sources, in his usual order: Continue reading →

Banks as slumlord renters reducing property values

Lou Raguse write for WIVB.com 4 April 2013,

Cheektowaga picks fight with big banks,



CHEEKTOWAGA, N.Y. (WIVB)—Neighbors in Cheektowaga say empty
houses are ruining the value of their neighborhoods and bringing in
unwanted guests.

Residents want to know why these properties, seized by banking
giants, have been left to crumble. The town board says they have
serious issues with the homeowners.

“In normal life, you would call them slumlords,” says Town Board
Member Charlie Markel.

Those so-called “slumlords” are big banks like Bank of America and
Chase. Markel says in too many cases, a homeowner falls behind on a
mortgage and the bank begins to foreclose. But then, it stops short.
He says the bank continues paying property tax but allows the homes
to fall into disrepair, never allowing them back on the market for
sale, or to be auctioned.

Let’s remember what

last year’s study of America’s richest and poorest cities found
about the Valdosta MSA:


Despite these positives, 14.4 percent of housing units were vacant
last year [2011], higher than the national vacancy rate of 13.1
percent.

I wonder how big national and multinational banks are serving our area?
And with a vacancy rate that high, and
housing prices still dropping,
why are we building more houses?

-jsq

SB 104 that changed comprehensive plan rules: good or bad?

The Georgia legislature overwhelmingly passed a rather brief

bill that changes


the requirements for Comprehensive Plans by local governments.

ACCG
and

GMA both supported it.
It seems to be related to recent

Department of Community Affairs (DCA)
rulemaking that was mostly positive.
Does that make it a good law?
Opinions seem to differ.
Here’s what I’ve found.

The Bill: SB 104

Continue reading →

Who’s inaccurate: VDT, Valdosta, GEFA, Chamber, County?

Both Chamber of Commerce Chair Myrna Ballard and Lowndes County Manager
Joe Pritchard say the VDT is inaccurate.
The VDT took offense at Ballard’s assertion.
Which do you believe?


I believe I’d like to see the evidence, not just the VDT’s assertions.
And this junior high school cat fight the VDT insists on is not
helping fix the real problem with water and wastewater in Valdosta
and Lowndes County: the widespread and longterm damage to our watersheds
that turned a normal rain in 2009 into a 700 year flood, and caused
another flooding of the Withlacoochee Wasterwater Treatment Plant this year.
I’m all for investigative reporting, but I have not yet once seen
the VDT investigate the real underlying issues of longtime clearcutting
and building of roads subdivisions, and parking lots without adequate
consideration of water flows.

The VDT front page today has yet another story attacking the City of Valdosta,

Loan info from GEFA contradicts City:
$11 million awaits disbursement, loan amounts don’t match.
I can’t make much sense out of it, because while Jason Shaefer has
dug up a lot of interesting information, he doesn’t include dates
for much of the financial detail he attributes to GEFA.
Let’s see the VDT publish the documents they are referring to.
The city does publish its

Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports.
The VDT has a website, and could publish whatever records
it got from GEFA, which after all were produced using our tax dollars,
and are therefore public records.
Or if the documents are somewhere on

GEFA’s website, the VDT could publish links to the specific documents.
The VDT did publish

a timeline of correspondence with the City about loans,
so it could just as easily publish the GEFA documents and its
own page-by-page and chart-by-chart comparison so we could all see
for ourselves.

The VDT prepended this blurb to its timeline:

It has come to the attention of the Times that the Chamber of
Commerce has called a special meeting on Tuesday to address what COC
Pres. Myrna Ballard terms as “damage to our community’s
reputation” due to the stories that have appeared in the
newspaper. The invitation for the 9 a.m. meeting at the Chamber
office was extended to only a select group of Chamber members, no
media, and states that Mayor John Gayle and City Manager Larry
Hanson will explain the city’s financial status. The Times takes
very seriously the implication that the newspaper has written
anything that is “inaccurate,” as stated by the Chamber.
As such, the Times has chosen to show the public the information
provided to the newspaper in response to questions posed to the
City, with no editing, to allow citizens the opportunity to see for
themselves if what the Times has written is an
“inaccurate” portrayal of the city’s financial status.

What was that again?

The Times takes
very seriously the implication that the newspaper has written
anything that is “inaccurate,”
as stated by the Chamber.

How about as stated by Lowndes County Manager Joe Pritchard?
In

a letter from him to me of 29 January 2013 Pritchard stated:

Continue reading →

Arkansas tar sands oil spill


Will Exxon clean all these tar sands oil spills like BP “cleaned up” the Gulf?
Meanwhile, a solar spill is called a nice day.



June 2013, pipeline ruptured in
Alberta:
250,000 gallons spilled into the Red Deer River.

27 March 2013, train derailment in

Minnesota: 15,000 gallons spilled.

“Only about 1,000 gallons has been recovered,” said Dan Olson, spokesman for the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. “The remaining oil on the ground has thickened into a heavy tar-like consistency.”

30 March 2013, pipleline rupture,

Mayflower, Arkansas: “thousands of gallons” spilled.

Kimberly Brasington, an Exxon spokeswoman, confirmed the oil from
the ruptured Pegasus pipeline originated in Canada. The oil is
“Wabasca Heavy Crude from Western Canada,” she said in
an e-mail Sunday. Canadian group CrudeMonitor describes Wabasca as a
blend of heavy oil production from the Athabasca region.


Aerial footage of the Arkansas crude seeping through woods, waterways, streets, and yards:

Continue reading →