Tag Archives: Withlacoochee Wastewater Treatment Plant

Videos of Candidates and Mayor Gayle about SPLOST @ LCDP 2013-09-09

In which we discover one candidate works for the City of Valdosta and opposes SPLOST. Candidates took questions directly from the audience and answered them, unlike at later candidate forums. Candidates from the smaller cities started their tradition of not showing up for forums outside their cities. Here’s the list of qualified candidates. See also the videos of the 30 Club forum 2013-10-21 and the videos of the AAUW forum 2013-10-15.

Opening

Call to Order, Moment of Silence for Congress, Pledge, Approval of Minutes, Treasurer’s Report.

SPLOST VII

30 Club Candidate Forum @ 30Club 2013-10-21

The candidates were almost unanimous on SPLOST VII and how to prevent JK situations, but more varied on other questions. Roy Copeland, billed as “Valdosta attorney” (but perhaps known better to LAKE readers as VLCIA board member and former Chairman) was the moderator, assisted by Valdosta Fire Chief and Thirty Club member J.D. Rice. They took questions from the audience and recognized their host, Pastor Floyd Rose of Serenity Church. You may wonder as I do why city council candidates were answering about graduation rates.

Matthew Woody wrote for the VDT 21 October 2013, ‘Let the games begin’. Here’s the list of qualified candidates. As usual, nobody showed up from the smaller cities, although at least one Valdosta candidate, Richard Miller, spoke up for the smaller cities about SPLOST.

Valdosta City Council District 2

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The SPLOST Debate –Tim Carroll

Received 27 October 2013. -jsq

I have had a number of folks contact me about the upcoming SPLOST VII referendum and inquiring about a MOST. Trying to talk about all of this in as few a words as I can is not easy. But to give you some perspective—the city’s general fund budget is $32M. $5.9M of the revenue for this fund comes from property taxes. Based on the city tax digest a mill is worth $1.5M. The experts say 50.2% of the sales tax is paid by out of towners. In the opinion of some folks, it is closer to 30%. Pick the experts or local guesses ….it still is a significant amount. It clearly is very beneficial to the citizens of Valdosta and Lowndes County.

By now many have heard about a MOST or Municipal Option Sales Tax.

In the first part of this year—the city of Valdosta was faced with Continue reading →

WWTP surveying, Norwood withdrawn, Colbert on agenda, radar, benefits, and parking @ VCC 2013-10-10

Valdosta wants to survey to prepare for moving and upgrading the Withlacoochee Wastewater Treatment Plant. The City Council is awarding retirement benefits, and the employee of the month is three people this month. One rezoning has been withdrawn and another is up for action Thursday. Plus somebody didn’t like the Valdosta Historic Preservation Commission actually requiring preservation and is appealing to the City Council. It would be interesting to see what’s in that WWTP surveying and engineering contract and which parking is being appealed, but Valdosta City Council doesn’t publish its agenda packets online, unlike for example Augusta, which has the second highest high tech job growth in the country.

Here’s the agenda. They also have a Work Session Tuesday 8 October 2013 at 5:30 PM, inconveniently the same time as the Lowndes County Commission Regular Session.

AGENDA

REGULAR MEETING OF THE VALDOSTA CITY COUNCIL

5:30 P.M., Thursday, October 10, 2013
COUNCIL CHAMBERS, CITY HALL
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Flood control measures encourage settling too close and provoke severe flooding events

Flood control to keep water out of houses seems like a good idea, but it turns out that it causes the flood control measures to keep needing to be raised higher, and it encourages people to build too close to flooding areas, plus “rare and catastrophic events take place”. Like the 2009 “700 year flood” and the four or more floods this year that have overflowed the Withlacoochee Wastewater Treatment Plant. In our case, there are also the issues of widespread clearcutting and buildings and streets with impervious cover. The local runoff containment requirements in the various local government zoning codes may be like levees: “flood control structures might even increase flood risk as protection from frequent flooding reduces perceptions of risk”.

This encourages human settlements in floodplain areas, which are then vulnerable to high-consequence and low-probability events.
Much simpler just not to give out building permits for flood zones. Or we could put medical buildings right next to a creek, assuming because it’s never flooded it never will….

Socio-hydrology: conceptualising human-flood interactions, G. Di Baldassarre, A. Viglione, G. Carr, L. Kuil, J. L. Salinas, and G. Bloschl, Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 17, 3295–3303, 2013 doi:10.5194/hess-17-3295-2013, © Author(s) 2013. CC Attribution 3.0 License.

Abstract. Over history, humankind has tended to settle near streams Continue reading →

Fourth or fifth flooding at Valdosta’s Withlacoochee Wastewater plant this year?

So many I’ve lost track; somebody help me….

Valdosta City PR Friday, Public Notice for Permit Violation at WWTP,

Due to continued heavy rains in Valdosta and surrounding areas in recent days, moderate flooding of the Little and Withlacoochee Rivers caused a hydraulic overload at the Withlacoochee Wastewater Treatment Plant. As a result of a peak hourly flow of 15.58 million gallons, the incident led to a discharge of total suspended solids in excess of the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit limit.

The total suspended solids result for the effluent sample collected August 22, 2013 was 203 milligrams per liter. This is greater than Continue reading →

Flooding again at Valdosta’s Withlacoochee Wastewater Treatment Plant

Third major spill this year, after March by Valdosta and April by Lowndes County. Or did I forget some? Lookout, Florida!

Eames Yates wrote for WCTV today, Nearly Eight Million Gallons Of Raw Sewage… Straight Into Area River,

Almost eight million gallons of raw sewage flooded here at the plant and made it’s way directly into the Withlacoochee River. Which is about a half mile away. Which makes the city’s plans to relocate this plant all the more relevant.

Since the beginning of this year more than Continue reading →

Portland’s Clean Economy of Place

Ironically, Portland is the prime example in both Amy Liu’s slides and the book The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy by Jennifer Bradley and Bruce Katz.

Here’s Bruce Katz in the Guardian 23 April 2012, Urbanization and Inventing a Clean Economy of Place,

Portland, Oregon, is also internationally renowned for its commitment to sustainable development. The Portland metropolis has an expansive public transit system and an urban growth boundary to control development at the urban periphery. The city boasts a green investment fund to provide grants for residential and commercial building projects.

Now the city is striving, like Copenhagen, to reap the economic rewards of sustainable development through business formation, firm expansion, job growth and private investment. In February, Portland released its first regional export plan to double exports over five years by building on the region’s distinctive economic and physical attributes. A critical pillar of this strategy involves increasing the export orientation of firms in the burgeoning clean technology sector to serve growing markets in Asia, Latin America and elsewhere.

Hm, a clean economy of place; there’s an idea. Here’s one of Portland’s green investments: 12W (Indigo) Project Report, Continue reading →

Valdosta Utilities Department 5-Year Action Plan

Received 26 April 2013. Basically Valdosta is accelerating its plans to do something about wastewater, including adding pumpstations and force mains, as well as relocating the Withlacoochee Wastewater Treatment Plant uphill. Here are the summary pages; there’s much more detail in the plan. -jsq

Utilities Department 5-Year Action Plan:

Since 1992, the City has received $179 million in SPLOST funding and over the same time period has invested nearly $168 million in capital projects for the Water and Wastewater system. This includes SPLOST funding, system revenues, bonds, and GEFA loans.

Since 2009, the Utilities Department has expended over $49 million on sewer system improvement with approximately $5.6 million spent on the Withlacoochee Treatment Plant. When the projects listed below are completed by December 2018, the City will have invested approximately $230 million in capital projects for its Utilities system from 1992 to 2018, a 26-year period.

PUMP STATION, FORCE MAIN, HEADWORKS AND EQUALIZATION BASIN PROJECT

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Circular wastewater firing squad continues

The VDT's Sunday front page was covered with wastewater stories, continuing the circular firing squad of the local powers that be. Meanwhile in Dublin, GA, they're breaking ground for solar panels at the local high school, using a bond financing model that we could use here, if local leaders would look up.

In addition to some detail about the city's FEMA application and following up on flooded yards, the VDT followed up on its EPD and EPA scrutiny story with one saying City received help from EPD to keep EPA away. It's good the VDT is covering these issues, but it's still leaving out important parts of the local water story.

Apparently firing back at Thursday's Valdosta City Council session, perhaps especially Robert Yost's very pointed criticisms of the VDT, the VDT concluded its rather rich Sunday editoral:

City leaders, please, no more of the blame game. The citizens of this community are imploring you to just accept responsibility and fix it.

Yet the VDT has spent the last week blaming the city, and has accepted no responsibility for its own role, or that of its editor, Kay Harris, in the recent loss of the SPLOST referendum that would have further funded wastewater work in Valdosta.

Now, I agree with the VDT that Continue reading →