Tag Archives: Valdosta

Verizon or AT&T 4G in Lowndes County?

Maybe one solution to county-wide fast Internet access is 4G wireless? According to their online coverage maps, both AT&T and Verizon now offer 4G in Valdosta and almost all of Lowndes County and many surrounding counties.

IT News Online PRNewswire 15 August 2012 Verizon Wireless Introducing High-Speed 4G LTE Data Network In Valdosta,

ALPHARETTA, Ga., Aug. 15, 2012 /PRNewswire/ — Verizon Wireless customers will be able to experience the blazing fast speeds and Verizon 4G coverage map capabilities of the company’s 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) network in Valdosta when the service launches there on Thursday, Aug. 16. The introduction of the company’s 4G LTE network is part of Verizon Wireless’ announcement today introducing its 4G LTE network in 34 new markets, including Valdosta, and expansion in 38 other markets. The nation’s largest 4G LTE network will be available in a total of 371 markets and cover more than 75 percent of the U.S. population, including major metropolitan areas, small cities and many suburbs.

Customers who live in or visit areas including Valdosta, Lake Park, Hahira, Morven, Moody Air Force Base as well as along I-75 from Lake Park to Hahira and along State Road 125 from Moody Air Force Base to Barretts now will have access to the nation’s fastest 4G network.

Verizon’s 4G coverage map does seem to indicate the same thing.

AT&T 4G coverage map I see no announcement from AT&T, but their online map does indicate coverage here. My AT&T Android phone has a 4G light that sometimes lights up in Valdosta, but I sure don’t see it out here on the edge of the county. Maybe they just haven’t gotten to it here.

Sprint and T-Mobile do not seem to offer 4G around here. Still, 2 out of 4 would be more choice than we’ve had before.

-jsq

Transit-Oriented Development or Communities not Cul-de-Sacs

It’s not just VLCIA’s Community Assessment that argues for a public transportation system in Valdosta-Lowndes County. Getting people to work without requiring cars is an even bigger problem in larger metropolitan areas, but many of the issues are the same here.

Nancy Andrews and Audrey Choi wrote for Huffpo 20 Aug 2012, How Transit-Oriented Development Can Help Get America To Work,

To truly get America back to work, we have to focus on more than jobs, jobs, jobs. It is about integrating jobs, transportation, housing and community services in ways that work equally well for lower- and upper-income families.

Vibrant communities where residents can walk to shops, restaurants, grocery stores and community services; and where public transportation provides convenient connections between home and work can be built. Planning community development with public transportation as a central consideration — transit-oriented development or TOD — can spur economic growth, sometimes dramatically. But that approach has not been systematically applied to communities of all income levels.

For these reasons, it is important for government, public transit agencies, nonprofits, foundations and the private sector to come together so that thriving communities for families of all economic levels can be created.

It’s a safety issue, too. Far more Americans die in traffic accidents than in foreign wars, and widening roads farther out just makes the problem worse. Currently, Lowndes County says that’s not pertinent.

Maybe we should change that. What if we built communities, not cul-de-sacs?

-jsq

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

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Rockin’ for a Cause: Literacy Volunteer Program —Tom Hochschild

Seen 10 August 2012. -jsq

Friends,

On Friday, October 5th I will be hosting a fundraiser called “Rockin’ for a Cause” to help fight illiteracy in South Georgia. Working with Dr. Marty Williams and Charlie Oliver, we hope to raise $6,000 for the Literacy Volunteer Program (LVP) of South Georgia. The LVP provides one-to-one tutoring to improve the reading, writing, and arithmetic skills of functionally illiterate individuals 16 years of age and older in South Central Georgia.

The ticket price for the event is $20 and includes an evening of good-time music from The Backstreet Blazers band, one raffle ticket for a chance to win a variety of great prizes, and an assortment of delicious appetizers. Dr. James LaPlant has graciously agreed to emcee the event.

“Rockin’ for a Cause” will take place on Friday, October 5th at The American Legion Post 13 located at 1301 Williams Street (behind Bazemore-Hyder Stadium) from 7:00-10:30 pm. In addition to an air-conditioned dance hall, the American Legion has a cash bar for beer and wine.

If you are interested in purchasing tickets before the night of the event, you may contact one of the following:

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Runoff still undecided, Republican Primary, Lowndes County Commission District 5, 21 August 2012

Hall and Page examining precinct results With all precincts reporting in the Republican Primary Runoff for Lowndes County Commission District 5 (West half of the county), the numbers are:

Jody T. Hall 48.06% 855
John P. Page 51.94% 924
Total votes 1,779

So how is the election not decided yet? Provisional ballots, which won’t be completely sorted out until Friday. Those are for people who may have been in the wrong district or there was some other irregularity that must be deciphered. It’s unlikely there are enough of those to swing this election, but it’s possible. I congratulated both candidates.

There is no Democratic candidate, so less than 2,000 people are deciding who will be the County Commissioner representing about 55,000 people.

More pictures below.

Go to your precinct. Trinity Presbyterian polling place

Greg Gullberg of WCTV interviewing TP official signs

Back at the Board of Elections.

Jody Hall truck John Page truck

Deb Cox is Lowndes County Supervisor of Elections.

Hall, Deb Cox, Page

Pictures by John S. Quarterman for Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE),
Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia, 21 August 2012.

One of those last two people, as County Commission Chair, will have to organize the Commission including whoever wins this race. I got them to grin by saying “Ashley Paulk.”

-jsq

 

VLCIA meets tonight, about what, we can’t tell @ VLCIA 2012-08-21

According to its website:

The Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial Authority’s Regular Monthly Meeting is scheduled for Tuesday, August 21, 2012, 5:30 PM at the Industrial Authority Conference Room, 2110 N. Patterson Street.

Last meeting, VLCIA Executive Director Andrea Schruijer told me the results of the focus groups would be presented this month. Maybe she meant at this meeting. On the VLCIA facebook page, there’s this paragraph from 14 August 2012:

We are excited to present our final Target Business Analysis to the community at the end of August. We took at 360 degree approach to targeting economic development activity concentrating on employment, workforce skill, investment, and innovation to identify clusters of economic activity and developing targeted strategies for economic development.

It links to this (unembeddable) video of Andrea Schruijer talking about cluster analysis. It’s good they’re branching out to new ways of doing PR. It would be even better if they also published agendas and minutes with content.

Here’s the (content-free) agenda for today’s meeting:

Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial Authority
Agenda
Tuesday, August 21, 2012 5:30 p.m.
Industrial Authority Conference Room
2110 N. Patterson Street
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ALEC, private prisons, fossil fuels, and charter schools

It’s good to see someone trying a coordinated strategy for something good in multiple states, as Our Children’s Trust is doing for air as a public trust. We already knew going to multiple states at once works, because ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange, gets reactionary results that way.

How does ALEC do it? By

So once again, it’s refreshing to see somebody successfully try multiple states for something worthwhile!

The above ALEC projects are just some I’ve run across while researching local topics. It often seems as if every rock I turn over has the ALEC millipede scurrying around under it. Far more about ALEC is available through ALEC Exposed.

ALEC Exposed has a list of companies that have dumped ALEC recently. Georgia Power’s parent The Southern Company and UPS are still not on that list. You can help. Let them know you want them to dump ALEC!

-jsq

 

There are no private schools in Finland: the opposite of Atlanta-imposed charter schools

Privatizing isn’t the answer, rote tests are irrelevant, and competition doesn’t help win. Those are a few of the lessons Finland learned that made its schools world leaders in education. So why would we consider letting Atlanta force privatized charter schools on us?

Anu Partanen wrote for the Atlantic 29 December 2011, What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland’s School Success

“Oh,” he mentioned at one point, “and there are no private schools in Finland.”

Pasi Sahlberg, director of the Finnish Ministry of Education’s Center for International Mobility and author of the new book Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland, said that offhand while talking at a private school in New York. Nobody seemed to pay much attention. Maybe we should.

He also noted Finland has no standardized tests until the equivalent of high school graduation, and they don’t have any particular system for accountability for teachers or administrators.

“Accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted.”

So why do teachers and administrators in Finland so successfully take that responsibility?

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The sun came up on a different world —Julian Assange

Julian Assange of Wikileaks spoke from the Ecuadorean Embassy in London today (video, text):

The next time somebody tells you that it is pointless to defend the rights we hold dear, remind them of your vigil in the dark outside the Embassy of Ecuador, and how, in the morning, the sun came up on a different world, and a courageous Latin American nation took a stand for justice.

The British government made a stunning mistake in throwing away the worldwide goodwill just gained through the London Olympic Games, by actually beginning to storm a sovereign embassy in violation of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations that was observed throughout the Cold War. How could they be so foolish? This man, this reporter and publisher, they think is somehow more dangerous to them than the armed might of the Soviet Union was? This is as if JFK arrested MLK after John Glenn’s first orbital flight (a step which JFK fortunately did not take).

There is something you can do, even when the world is turned upside down:

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Another sewage overflow after FEMA finally decides about Valdosta wastewater plant

Since the floods of 2009 Valdosta had been waiting on FEMA to say whether it would grant some funding for improving the wastewater treatment plant that flooded then. Finally, FEMA gave a decision, no, which allowed the Valdosta City Council to choose another path. But not in time for improvements before the same plant had another wastewater overflow.

WCTV posted PR from the City of Valdosta of 17 August 2012, Major Sewage Overflow from Withlacoochee Water Pollution Control Plant,

At approximately 1 a.m. on Aug. 16, 2012, the pumps in the Influent Pump Station of the Withlacoochee Water Pollution Control Plant (WPCP) stopped working.

An emergency bypass pump system was placed into service at 12:45 a.m., on Aug. 17; and as a result, the sewer spills are no longer occurring. Contractors are currently on site investigating the cause of the failure, which has not yet been determined, while also making necessary repairs to the damaged equipment.

Sewer overflows were recorded at the following locations within the sewer collection system:

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