at its work session Monday morning and will vote at its
regular session Tuesday evening.
This is about emergency response calls, such as for the fire
in Remerton, when Remerton called Lowndes County, which called
Valdosta, which sent fire trucks to Remerton.
Why the indirect time-consuming call while a fire doubles in size every minute?
Remerton didn’t have a mutual aid agreement with Valdosta, but
did with Lowndes County.
This is the same Commission that went on for 11 minutes
in the
21 February 2011 work session
about a Homeland Security grant for an emergency vehicle,
worring that the county might have to pay to maintain it and might
have to share it with other municipalities.
And then rejected it the next day, if I recall correctly.
What will they think of this mutual aid agreement?
LOWNDES COUNTY BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS
PROPOSED AGENDA
WORK SESSION, MONDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 2012, 8:30 a.m.
REGULAR SESSION, TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2012, 5:30 p.m.
327 N. Ashley Street – 2nd Floor
The only thing a board member said about it was Chairman Roy Copeland
reminding me that the board didn’t answer questions in Citizens Wishing
to be Heard.
Col. Ricketts added that in staff’s discussions with CCA,
CCA had indicated they were mulling it over internally, and
VLCIA should “stand by” for CCA’s next move.
That’s right, your local Industrial Authority, whose staff and land purchases
are funded by your tax dollars, should stand by waiting for a private
prison company to tell them what to do.
And the Industrial Authority board’s silence is an answer:
they said nothing different from their previous vote for the contract
to bring in this private prison;
nothing different from their previous acceptance
of the first and second option extensions;
and nothing in objection to what Col. Ricketts said.
So your tax-supported Industrial Authority wants a private prison in
Lowndes County, Georgia.
Do you want that?
Do you want a private prison with fewer guards per prisoner
Continue reading →
Do you know why the county sold this property for less than the assessed
price to the current owner in 2007 minus the wetlands that interject? Did
they know it would be considered for a private prison at that time? Now
the current owner will make the million dollar profit instead of the
county. Since this is considered industrial park acerage owned by the
county why would the county sell it if an industry/business was not
promised at that time? What is the 100 acres the development agreement
says the owner will be given? Is that the 119 acres of wetlands? If
the county decides not to allow the private prison what happens to the
earnest money that has been deposited to date since that would not be
an action by the buyer or the seller?
The seller was not the Lowndes County Commission, which would start with
“LOWNDES COUNTY”, and it’s not the City of Valdosta, which wouldn’t be
hyphenated with the county name like that.
Could it be the Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial Authority?
The Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial Authority is having
a retreat 9AM-2PM today.
They have a facilitator, who is going through what looks like the usual facilitated procedures.
She claims to be camera-shy, but Chairman Roy Copeland tells me he
wants the Industrial Authority to be transparent and to be seen as transparent.
Here the facilitator is
getting the board and staff to answer some initial questions.
Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial Authority Retreat, 101 N Ashley St., Valdosta, GA
Pictures and videos by John S. Quarterman for LAKE, the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange, 23 February 2012.
After they gave individual answers, they broke into groups each including board
and staff:
Continue reading →
Yesterday Andrea Schruijer promised to get an agenda for
tomorrow’s 2PM Thursday 23 February 2012 Industrial Authority board meeting (101 N. Ashley Street)
online.
It’s
there,
and it has content!
What it does not have is any mention of
anything about Project Excel, or CCA, or the private prison,
even though Ms. Schruijer told me yesterday to expect the board
to say something about that.
You can still
express your opinion to them before then.
And since this agenda says
**TENTATIVE**
maybe that item will get added before tomorrow afternoon.
What this agenda does have is numerous specific items
under the usual broad headers such as
Existing Industry/Project Report.
So instead of listening to Col. Ricketts
and trying to figure out what he’s talking about,
you can see such things as
“e-Snychronist® Existing Industry Retention
and Expansion business information system (BIS)” in writing.
You still don’t see names of the
“five (5) Prospects”
or the “three (3) companies that are developing expansion plans”.
Maybe I buy the competitive information argument for the prospects,
but I’m not so sure about the three expanding companies, especially
if they’re already local.
And considering the things VLCIA has tried to sneak in under cover
of not mentioning competitive information, such as biomass and a private prison,
I’m not sure I buy that argument at all.
Also on the plus side, the agenda includes an actual schedule for bids
Continue reading →
The board will entertain proposals at the regularly scheduled meeting
in February. Please email proposals to the following no later than 12:00
p.m. on March 16, 2012:
I asked Andrea Schruijer about those two dates just now on the telephone.
She said they would look at any proposals they have received by the
time of
Thursday’s board meeting,
but they would not vote on them then.
Their March board meeting is scheduled for
20 March 2012,
which is after the March 16th due date.
…the calendar is not
produced for civic roundtable, it is just a project of mine for the many
counties that lost a source of information when 2-1-1 was discontinued.
LAKE will attempt to remember to update new ones in
this web page
as Miss Jane sends them.
We hope you, dear readers, will remind us if we don’t.
Moody AFB helps USAF lead the military and the country in solar installations
by adding solar thermal.
Did you know?
Federal mandates require that 25% of Air Force facility energy use
comes from renewable energy sources by 2025 and Moody will help….
It’s a shame we have to go to Binghamton and Ithaca, New York, to get the equipment.
You’d think we could build solar thermal hot water heaters right here
in sunny south Georgia, and install them, too.
The architect, however, was local.
Congratulations to Moody AFB and Slone Associates for installing solar hot water!
The installer, Intelligent Green Solutions (IGS) of Ithaca, New York,
has the details:
The installation is a large solar thermal system that includes:
The meeting tonight was the first of a series of meetings that are
geared toward getting public involvement in the upcoming Parks and
Recreation Comprehensive Master Plan. The VLPRA has contracted with
the Nashville-based architectural and land planning group
Lose and Associates,
to conduct the comprehensive plan. Lose is pronounced
more like the geologic term defining windborne silt (loess), and less
like how we identify the team that scores fewer goals in a soccer match
(lose). The meeting tonight, which was led by two Lose planners, was
focused on evaluating current VLPRA programs and facilities and
offering suggestions for future improvements.
This evening’s group of about 15 participants consisted of
First of two reports on last night’s VLPRA steering committee received today. -jsq
If you attended any of the CUEE meetings the format was exactly the
same. We were divided into groups. Each person wrote down their
answers to a list of questions they handed out. Then each group was
told to combine their answers into a group list which was written on
poster size dry erase sheets. Then the sheets were displayed on the
wall in front of all the groups & the answers were discussed. I had to
leave when they were discussing the answers to the first question which
was: List the 5 things you think are most important to improve the
parks & recreation program. I am assuming the group lists were
combined into a master list for that question. They were doing each
question all the way through before going to the next question. I
brought the list of questions with me intending to share what they were
but I left my notebook in the car trunk of the person I was riding with
& forgot to get it when we left the Law Enforcement Appreciation
Dinner. I will not retrieve the notebook until Tuesday, but if you
want to know the questions I will send them to you then. If you want
more info in the meantime Karen Noll was there also. She came late &
probably stayed the entire time. We had interesting discussions at our
group table & I’m sure a lot of interesting subjects were covered.
However,
6.c. Statewide Mutual Aid Agreement
