{"id":2125,"date":"2011-04-25T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-04-25T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2011\/04\/runaround-leigh-touchton.html"},"modified":"2011-04-25T08:00:00","modified_gmt":"2011-04-25T12:00:00","slug":"runaround-leigh-touchton","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2011\/04\/runaround-leigh-touchton.html","title":{"rendered":"Runaround —Leigh Touchton"},"content":{"rendered":"Leigh Touchton responded to\nValdosta Mayor John Fretti’s response\nto her previous post.<\/a> -jsq\n
\nHappy Birthday, Mayor Fretti, and thank you for posting publicly.\n

\nHowever, I wish you would stop trying to pass Mayor and Council’s\nportion of responsibility for the biomass incinerator to the Industrial\nAuthority. I delivered a letter to Mayor and Council Thursday night\noutlining 10 reasons your Utilities Director can legitimately give when he\n(hopefully) follows Mayor and Council’s recommendation to refuse to sell\ngray water to the proposed biomass incinerator. I and many other citizens\nare tired of the run-around and the shifting of responsibility for this\n“biomess” from one public official or group to another.\n

\nA councilmember told me that Council would never vote\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n

\non selling gray\nwater but that the Utilities Director, Henry Hicks, now has the say-so on\nwhether the gray water gets sold. Is he going to do as Brad Lofton did? By\nthat I mean, is he going to sell the incinerator the gray water and then\nresign and move his family to a less polluted community? (Mr. Hicks,\nI mean no disrespect, but apparently your employers are making you the\nfocal point for this decision and telling me that it’s all up to you.) It\nis hard to believe that an employee of this city is now being publicly\ndescribed by at least one Council member as the decision-maker as to\nwhether gray water gets sold to the plant. No one else on Council told\nme any differently when I brought it to their attention Thursday night,\nnot one of them chose to address it during Council Comments.\n

\n\n<\/a>\nIt is my understanding that selling gray water for purposes of incinerator\ncooling has never been done in Valdosta before, that the concentrated\ntoxic slurry leftover from that vaporization process has never been\nprocessed by the Mud Creek Wastewater Treatment plant before, and that\nno one has provided an impact study on the facility’s infrastructure to\nsee if this slurry would be safe for the plant. I don’t want our City\nto have to spend millions to repair degraded machinery as a side-effect\nof this decision. The amount of money the City might realize from the\nsale of the gray water might be miniscule compaired to the repair costs\nresulting from this decision. Penny wise is pound foolish.\n

\nI thank you for your courtesy when Dr. Noll comes to CTBH, I wish that you\nhad exhibited this same courtesy six years ago to the SCLC and NAACP. It\nwill be six years May 5 since you arrested 15 of us, including all the\nofficers in both organizations, for asking to rename a park. A street got\nrenamed Thursday night and no one had to go to jail, so that’s progress.\n

\nI thank you for your invitation at the end of CTBH for people to leave\nif they choose. We are cognizant that we often pack the room and make\nit difficult for people to get in and out of the pews when they need to\nproceed with their own agenda items, and we are respectful of all citizens\nwho wish to participate in their own government. I wish the Tea Party\nwere as respectful of us and our children to tell their president Roy\nTaylor to govern himself accordingly, I was astonished at him yelling “and\nshe’s really attractive too” to the young mother whose child won an award\nThursday night. Perhaps if the Tea Party cannot appeal to Mr. Taylor’s\nsense of propriety, then Council might be called upon to insist that\nhe show the proper respect to other citizens at Council meetings. There\nwere children present. I don’t want my daughter thinking that her City\nCouncil tolerates outbursts that are sexist, all the women in that room,\nand many if not most of the men, were insulted.\n

\nThank you for your attention to these issues, and for your courtesy to\nus at CTBH.\n<\/blockquote>\nShe also posted several more comments, which you can see\nhere<\/a>\nand\nhere.<\/a>\n-jsq\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Leigh Touchton responded to Valdosta Mayor John Fretti’s response to her previous post. -jsq Happy Birthday, Mayor Fretti, and thank you for posting publicly. However, I wish you would stop trying to pass Mayor and Council’s portion of responsibility for the biomass incinerator to the Industrial Authority. I delivered a letter to Mayor and Council […]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[97,120,48,40,20,2951,22,2822,3,54,4099,4596,55],"tags":[8738,3862,4020,8863,8700,8727],"class_list":["post-2125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-activism","category-biomass","category-code-enforcement","category-community","category-law","category-naacp","category-politics","category-sclc","category-transparency","category-valdosta-city-council","category-vcc-5-may-2005","category-vcc-21-april-2011","category-water","tag-biomass","tag-john-fretti","tag-leigh-touchton","tag-naacp","tag-transparency","tag-water"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p585fK-yh","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2125"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2125\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}