Tag Archives: Valdosta

Planning Commission meets tonight: no agenda @ GLPC 2012-08-27

This month LAKE didn’t get an agenda from GLPC, but they are meeting tonight at 5:30 PM. According to the City of Valdosta’s calendar,

Greater Lowndes Planning Commission

Date: 7/30/2012 5:30 PM
Location: Lowndes County South Health District Administrative Office
325 W. Savannah Avenue
Valdosta, Georgia 31601

The Lowndes County Commission’s calendar does not list this meeting; it doesn’t list any Planning Commission meetings. The county website also has no description of GLPC that I can find. It does get a mention three levels deep, under Planning.

Valdosta’s description page for GLPC has the information appended below.

Greater Lowndes Planning Commission

Purpose:
The mission of the Greater Lowndes Planning Commission (GLPC) is to look beyond short-term solutions in planning for the future of the Greater Lowndes community; to improve the public health, safety, convenience and welfare; and to provide for the social, economic and physical development of communities on a sound and orderly basis, within a governmental framework and economic environment which fosters constructive growth and efficient administration.

Members:

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VLCIA to sue Sterling Power about biomass site?

I’d heard a rumor that some sort of lawsuit about the biomass site was the subject of some of the Industrial Authority executive sessions for real estate discussions. VLCIA has finally said in public what their position is.

Jason Schaefer wrote for the VDT today, Authority weighs suit for biomass land: Slow progress leads to default, contract argument

The Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial Authority plans to send a petition to Lowndes County Superior Court to sue Wiregrass Power, LLC, for a clear title on the land purchased for the development of a biomass energy plant.

The Authority believes Wiregrass defaulted on a lease agreement to build the plant, placing ownership of the 22.22-acre tract back in their hands, but Wiregrass denies the allegations. This denial casts “a cloud” of suspicion on the Authority that may prevent it from re-marketing the property, according to the petition, leading to the suit.

Sounds like they’re publicizing their intent to try to scare Sterling off without having to sue. I’m for that.

This may explain a flurry of special called meetings they had in May and June 2011.

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LAKE videoing George videoing Gretchen canvassing @ GretchenForLowndes.com 2012-08-25

Gretchen Quarterman canvassed on Summerlin Street in Valdosta Saturday:

The number one thing we need to do is to make the government accessible and transparent, so that the business of the people goes on in public.

Here’s a video playlist:

LAKE videoing George videoing Gretchen canvassing on Summerlin Street in Valdosta,
Canvassing, Lowndes County Commission (GretchenForLowndes.com),
Videos by John S. Quarterman for Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE),
and by George Boston Rhynes for bostongbr on YouTube,
Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia, 25 August 2012.

Gretchen mentioned she’d been going to County Commission meetings for about four years now, and thought it was her turn to serve. George asked why she was canvassing on the west side of Valdosta, and she answered:

The thing that is important for people to know is that every single citizen in the county gets to vote, Whether you live in Valdosta, Hahira, Lake Park, Dasher, Remerton, or the unincorporated areas. Every single person who lives in Lowndes County who is a registered voter gets to vote.

You have until October 8th to register to vote for the November 6th election. You can register at the Board of Elections at 2808 North Oak Street, or there are people going around with forms you can fill in and mail in or they will hand carry down there.

Participatory media! Doing what traditional media could do, George Boston Rhynes interviewed Gretchen Quarterman as she canvassed on Summerlin Street in Valdosta Saturday. Doing what traditional media can’t do, I videoed George videoing Gretchen, and he later videoed me helping Gretchen canvass.

-jsq

Lowndes County Commission meetings cancelled @ LCC 2012-08-27

Where and when did the preliminary information or discussion happen? And among whom? According to the county's website:

Lowndes County Work & Regular Session Meetings Cancelled (8/28/2012)

Due to lack of agenda items requiring additional information or discussion, the Lowndes County Work and Regular Session meetings for August 27-28, 2012, have been cancelled. For more information please call County Clerk, Paige Dukes, at 229-671-2400.

According to Georgia's new sunshine law modifications, as explained by VLCIA's attorney in an open meeting, open meetings now include any time a quorum discusses business, even if there was no scheduled meeting.

And if you wanted to address the Commission about a matter of interest to the public? Not this week.

The scheduled next meetings on their calendar are a Work Session on Monday 10 September 2012 and a Regular Session on Tuesday 11 September 2012.

-jsq

 

4G data caps and prices

It may be fast, but there are some drawbacks to 4G wireless Internet access, namely data limits and significant prices. Here’s Verizon’s table for their HomeFusion Broadband.

Monthly Data Allowance Monthly Access
10GB $60
20GB $90
30GB $120

I would bet the other companies’ caps and prices are pretty much the same. For web browsing, you’ll probably never run over that lowest 10GB/month limit. So if you want to tweet or facebook or tumblr or email with your friends, 4G probably will work fine for you.

If you do a lot of Skype or listening to music over the net, you might run over. If you watch a lot of videos, or you want to do video conferencing, you can definitely run over. Here’s Verizon’s table of estimates, and they have a calculator along with that:

Email (Text Only) = 10 KB
Typical Web Page Lookup* = 1MB
Audio Streaming = 51 MB/hr
Video Streaming (Standard Def) = 500MB/hr
Video Streaming (HIgh Def) = 1.6GB/hr
Digital Photo Download/Upload (Hi-Res) = 5 MB
4G VoIP = 67MB/hr
4G VoIP with Video = 254MB/hr

1 MB = 1,024KB
1 GB = 1,024MB

Videos of a single VLCIA meeting can run 2 gigabytes, and there are lots of other meetings going on around here. Not every local elected or appointed board has 5 minute meetings like the Lowndes County Commission. Many run for an hour or more.

Even though I’m a pretty intensive Internet user, I’m considering getting 4G home service. Someday AT&T may get around to running fiber for their uverse service out here in my sparsely populated area of the county, and then we might be able to get 3-24Mbps down (and unknown speeds up) for $38 to $63/month. Some year. Or never, if wireless speeds continue to leapfrog even fiber speeds. OK, real fiber speeds such as in Finland, Japan, France, Korea, or dozens of other countries are 100Mbps or up, but U.S. telcos and cablecos are not going to offer speeds like that until they’ve milked every penny they can get out of slower speeds first. Not to mention what the U.S. carriers are really selling with fiber is TV, which is a dying broadcast medium, fast being left in the dust by the participatory social Internet. Who do you know under 30 who gets their news from TV anymore?

Anyway, I don’t know whether 4G Internet service would work for you, but at least it’s another option.

-jsq

LOST Lawsuits Ahead?

Looks like history may repeat itself like last decade, now that LOST negotiations between the cities and the county have failed. Except this time apparently the law has changed so they can’t sue each other directly. Gretchen on LOST Instead next it goes to Superior Court “baseball arbitration”. However, I bet that still involves lawyers at taxpayer expense, not to mention the Court’s time.

Greg Gullberg reported for WCTV yesterday, Tax Negotiations Hit Another Dead End In Lowndes County, and asked Gretchen down at the County Extension, who said,

It’s sort of sad because it is a waste, if you will, of taxpayer dollars. That the elected officials can’t get together and come to some agreement to say that they all understand how the money has to be divided up Yeah, it’s sad that more money has to go to lawyers insted of being spent on services.

I continue to think the local governments could spend their time together better trying to increase the size of the pie instead of squabbling over slices of it.

-jsq

Distributing information to citizens —George Boston Rhynes

Received yesterday on Valdosta LMIG resurfacing and transparency. -jsq

Thanks you so much for keeping us informed and it is still a disgrace that our elected officials cannot publish their meetings to all citizens. When will our Mayor; Council and County Commissioners start informing all the citizens and not just a select few of conservatives?

When will it all end? The time has come for change to take place in Valdosta for the good of all citizens and visitors. We need and should demand television, radio, internet and other means of distributing information to citizens.

How sad in 2012?

George included a video of his thoughts on elections hereabouts and elsewhere: Words from our YOUTHS….and where are you? Indeed George Rhynes is out there reporting the truth as he sees it, this time along with two VSU students.

-jsq

WSJ misunderstands why T-SPLOST was defeated

Inaccurate labelling is the reason T-SPLOST was defeated, along with Atlanta is not all of Georgia, but the Wall Street Journal doesn’t understand that.

Cameron McWhirter wrote for the Wall Street Journal 1 August 2012, Tea Party Ties Up Tax to Ease Atlanta Traffic

ATLANTA—Money and heavyweight endorsements don’t secure an election — especially when you propose higher taxes in a deeply conservative state with a robust tea-party movement.

A plan for a transportation sales tax was endorsed by Georgia’s Republican governor and the Democratic mayor of the state’s largest city. It was backed by the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce and the area’s top businesses. It was pushed by top political consultants funded by more than $8 million in corporate and other donations.

Those against the plan were a loose coalition of tea-party activists, some environmentalists and a local branch of the NAACP. Their total raised? About $15,000.

But David slew Goliath.

That’s lazy reporting. Those “some environmentalists” included the Georgia Sierra Club, an organization which reportedly has more members than the state Democratic Party. And that’s just in Atlanta.

Opponents in our region included Democrat Ashley Paulk, who was on the T-SPLOST executive committee and is the current Chairman of the Lowndes County Commission, Democrat Gretchen Quarterman, who is the Chairman of the Lowndes County Democratic Party (LCDP) and is running for Chairman of the Lowndes County Commission, as well as Nolen Cox, Chairman of the Lowndes County Republican Party (LCRP), and Roy Taylor, LRCP First Vice Chair and well-known Tea Party activist, along with a wide range of other opponents.

Look at the difference between that Region 11 T-SPLOST vote map and this map of the Atlanta Metro T-SPLOST vote. Atlanta metro is clearly centered around Atlanta. Region 11 isn’t an economic region: the vote was split right down the middle between No on the east and west and Yes in between.

Region 11 throws together three population centers: Lowndes, Tift, and Ware Counties, with their largest cities Valdosta, Tifton, and Waycross. Lowndes and Tift are at least connected by I-75, and they and most of the ones around them voted against (Ben Hill, Turner, Berrien, Cook, Lanier, Echols, and Brooks). Ware County and all the counties east of it (Pierce, Brantley, and Charlton) voted against. In between there’s a complete barrier of counties that voted for T-SPLOST (Irwin, Coffee, Bacon, Atkinson, and Clinch). Those No counties completely separate the eastern Ware County group from the western Lowndes-Tift group.

The perception around here is that T-SPLOST was made up to affect metro Atlanta, and the rest of the regions were Continue reading →

4G wireless Internet speeds

How fast is 4G wireless Internet, anyway? Mark Sullivan wrote for PCWorld 7 May 2012, 3G/4G Performance Map: Data Speeds for AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon,

We saw three major patterns in our 4G test results. In five cities (Atlanta, Boston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and San Francisco), AT&T swept the 4G upload and download competitions; in four (Denver, New Orleans, San Jose, and Seattle), Verizon swept both; and in the remaining four (Chicago, Dallas, New York, and Washington, D.C.), AT&T won for downloads and Verizon prevailed for uploads. Notably, in two of the cities where Verizon ruled (Denver and Seattle), AT&T doesn’t offer 4G LTE service.

And you’ll notice a pattern right away: they only tested big cities. So your mileage may vary around here. However, PCWorld’s observed average 4G speeds for Verizon were 7.35 Mbps down and 5.86Mbps up, and for AT&T 9.12Mbps down and 4.91Mpgs up. Verizon’s HomeFusion Broadband web page claims:

HomeFusion Broadband* is a residential Internet solution that uses Verizon’s 4G LTE network to bring reliable, high-speed Internet service to customers with limited broadband options.

Features

  • Fast Internet access with average speeds of 5-12 Mbps download and 2-5 Mbps upload
  • Wi-Fi connectivity for up to 20 devices
  • Wired (Ethernet) connectivity for up to 4 devices
  • Up to 5 email accounts included

That’s faster than Mediacom and way faster than AT&T’s alleged 3Mbps DSL I’m using at the moment, which shows 3.5Mbps down and 0.38Mbps up. Prices start at $60/month, the same as for Verizon’s Mobile Broadband 5G, which with EVDO typically does around 1Mbps down and 0.7Mbps up and with 4G typically does 5Mbps down and 3Mbps up.

Why do these speeds matter? Well, for video blogging, videos of a one hour meeting can take 8 hours to upload at 0.38 Mbps. At 5Mbps they should take less than an hour. That makes it a lot easier for LAKE to get you coverage of local events.

If you’re not video blogging, you still might like to be able to see George Rhynes’ excellent video coverage of events in Lowndes, Brooks, Lanier, and other counties. And nevermind video: a lot of people around here have no Internet access at all. This would be one way to get it. Some people around here already use Verizon’s mobile devices at home, because otherwise they’re stuck with dialup.

Then there’s reliability. I, for one, would like not to see ATM Cell Header Errors anymore, nor the “page not found, retry?” errors every few minutes. If you don’t know what those are, you probably don’t have AT&T DSL. It’s sad that wireless might be more reliable than copper. But I’m also glad about that because wireless doesn’t require running wires. And did I mention 4G wireless appears to be faster?

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PSC rubberstamps Vogtle costs; next day Fitch affirms Southern Company ratings

Need any more proof that Southern Company’s nuclear boondoggle only works with Georgia Power customer and taxpayer subsidy? PSC rubberstamps one day and Fitch affirms ratings the next day. Maybe we should elect Public Service Commissioners who will serve the public.

Georgia Power PR 21 August 2012, Georgia PSC approves Vogtle construction costs

The Georgia Public Service Commission (PSC) today in a 5-0 vote approved Georgia Power’s spending on Plant Vogtle units 3 and 4 for the period including July 1, 2011 through Dec. 31, 2011.

The next day, Fitch PR 23 August 2012, Fitch Affirms Ratings for Southern Company and Subsidiaries,

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