{"id":2341,"date":"2011-03-07T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-03-07T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2011\/03\/esplost-election-now-until-14-march-2011.html"},"modified":"2011-03-07T10:00:00","modified_gmt":"2011-03-07T15:00:00","slug":"esplost-election-now-until-14-march-2011","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2011\/03\/esplost-election-now-until-14-march-2011.html","title":{"rendered":"ESPLOST election, now through 15 March 2011"},"content":{"rendered":"Update 7 Mar 2011: election date fixed in this post title and text.\n<br>\nHere&#8217;s how to announce public finances:\n<blockquote>\nTo be published on February 11, 18, and 25, 2010 and March 4 and 11, 2010.\n<\/blockquote>\nThat&#8217;s five times the Lowndes County Board of Elections\nis publishing the details of the ESPLOST one percent sales and use tax for educational purposes.\n<ul>\n<img style=\"float:right;border:none;\"\nwidth=\"175\", height=\"139\"\nsrc=\"http:\/\/www.georgiabridgemen.com\/images\/bridgelogo_w278.gif\"><\/a>\n<li>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/govt\/elections\/esplost\/exhibita.php\">\nWhat they&#8217;re publishing.<\/a>\n<li>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/govt\/elections\/esplost\/exhibita.php\">\nThe joint resolution<\/a> of both school boards, Lowndes County and Valdosta.\n<li>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/govt\/elections\/esplost\/\">\nPDF<\/a> of both of those documents.\n<li>\n<a href=\"\/blog\/2011\/03\/precincts-lowndes-county-georgia-january-2011.html\">\nThe precincts where you can vote.<\/a>\nEarly voting is all at the Board of Elections at 2808 N Oak St, Valdosta, GA.\n<\/ul>\n<img decoding=\"async\" style=\"float:right;border:none;\"   src=\"http:\/\/www.valdosta.edu\/ose\/upwardbound\/images\/clip_image003_000.jpg\"><\/a>\nThis is significant money: not more than $165 million dollars over five years,\n$94,875,000 for Lowndes County schools, and $70,125,000 for Valdosta schools.\nThere are only two main ways of raising money for public schools:\nsales taxes, or property taxes.\nThe local school boards use both.\nThis is the sales tax part.\n<p>\nWell, there is a third way.\n\n<!--more-->\nThe Valdosta City School System also proposes to issue &#8220;general obligation debt&#8221;\nnot to exceed $25 million.\n<p>\nThe documents spell out in detail for each school district\nwhat these funds are to be used for,\nsuch as new schools, &#8220;addition, renovation, repair and improvement to existing school buildings and facilities&#8221;, technology, textbooks, band equipment,\nphysical education equipment, etc.\nYou know what you&#8217;ll be getting if you vote for ESPLOST.\n<p>\nIf you don&#8217;t vote for ESPLOST, you&#8217;ll probably be getting a hefty\nlocal property tax hike.\n<p>\nBut you know what you&#8217;re voting on, and you get to vote on it.\nThis is quite a bit different from a certain other local\ngovernmental agency that\n<a href=\"\/blog\/2011\/03\/vlcia-bonds.html\">\nissued $15 million in debt<\/a> with no public vote, no public notice,\nand very little oversight.\n<p>\nThe ESPLOST election day is March 15th, but early voting is already going on.\nI voted.  If you live here, you can, too.\n<p>\nThese documents were obtained from Deb Cox, Elections Supervisor,\nLowndes County Board of Elections, 4 March 2011\nby John S. Quarterman for <a href=\"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/\">LAKE<\/a>, the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange.\n<p>\n-jsq\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Update 7 Mar 2011: election date fixed in this post title and text. Here&#8217;s how to announce public finances: To be published on February 11, 18, and 25, 2010 and March 4 and 11, 2010. That&#8217;s five times the Lowndes County Board of Elections is publishing the details of the ESPLOST one percent sales and [&hellip;]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","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":[15,49,1700,2,1105,3,1106],"tags":[8705,1484,8838,8701,548,8702,12,7,3410,6],"class_list":["post-2341","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-elections","category-esplost","category-government","category-lcboe","category-transparency","category-vboe","tag-education","tag-election","tag-esplost","tag-georgia","tag-john-s-quarterman","tag-lake","tag-lowndes-area-knowledge-exchange","tag-lowndes-county","tag-schools","tag-valdosta"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p585fK-BL","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2341","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=2341"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2341\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2341"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2341"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2341"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}