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They come to school hungry; they come to school homeless — Bill Cason @ Joint Governments 2012 03 29

Breaking from the agenda of the first annual Valdosta-Lowndes Governmental Leadership Meeting, Valdosta School Superintendent Bill Cason rose above tactics and talked about vision and the root of the matter: poverty.

Supt. Cason started talking about teenage pregnancy and drug use, and then got to the heart of the matter:

They come to school hungry; they come to school homeless. Last year we identified more than 200 homeless kids in our school district. We can talk about all of these other things, but until we can address those as a group, every public entity in this room, is willing to get together as a team and address those issues, we forgot the most important thing we deal with, that is our students.

[applause]

They will be the future leaders of this community. And if you want to see Valdosta take a backwards slide, then let this problem run as it is and you will see. I’ve seen it before in other communities, and I’m seeing it here now. This is not something we can wait on; it has to be done now. So if we want to really be serious about what we’re talking about tonight, educating our children, having a viable community, having a good community, having recreational facilities everybody can use, then you need to begin to address these problems not only with our mouths, but with our money and with our resources. And until you do this, then we’re going backwards.

Poverty is the root of the matter. It’s great that the local goverments and school boards are talking, and they can tinker around the edges all they want, but until they get serious about poverty in our community, educational improvements and the future of the community will be severely limited.

-jsq

 

 

Videos of Rally for HOPE @ LCDP 2012 03 24

Rain kept the numbers down, but the enthusiasm was strong in Lakeland at the Rally for HOPE, 24 March 2012.

The announcement said:

This will be a Rally for the Hope Scholarship and a Voter Registration. Everyone concerned about HOPE is invited. We will have guest speakers and will hear from those students and families affected by the current status of HOPE.

The featured speaker was Janice Barrocas of HOPE for Georgia, which is running a three year nonpartisan campaign to save HOPE scholarships.

Bikram Mohanty explained that there will be a shortfall of $270 million for the HOPE scholarships in 2012. Janice Barrocas pointed out there were really two HOPEs now: the other one being the Zell Miller scholarships. Bikram showed a map that illustrates that very few Zell Miller Scholarships go to south Georgia.

Janice Barrocas and Bikram Mohanty discussed that HOPE is funded by a lottery, and lottery funds are down in the recession. The blue line on the chart is deposits from the lottery into the HOPE program, the red line is expenditures, and the green line, dropping rapidly, is reserves at the end of the year.

Janice Barrocas noted that

The end users of this program were not at the table

when the recent HOPE changes were passed. Especially students mostly found out when they got stuck with bigger bills they had to pay. Students and their families may still be too polite to mention they have financial troubles, but it’s time to break the culture of silence when it’s a choice between the family eating or the student going to school. Betty Marini pointed out students loans add up to $1 trillion dollars, which is a huge drag on the economy.

Matt Flumerfelt observed that there is a push for divestiture and privatization these days, and he wondered if the silence around the quick passage of the recent HOPE changes wasn’t because it was a money grab for the lottery funds.

Tech school HOPE is grants, and most tech school students get them. If HOPE went away, the lottery would Continue reading →

April 2012 LAKE meeting: China 1, Hahira

See the owl use chopsticks! Come to Hahira Tuesday.

What: Monthly LAKE Meeting
When: 7 PM, Tuesday 17 April 2012
Where: China 1
205 South Church Street
(one block south of Main or GA 122)
(don’t believe google maps)
Hahira, GA 31632

If you follow the LAKE blog, On the LAKE Front, you know what we cover, from elections to gardening, connecting the dots. What else do you want to investigate?

If you’re on Facebook, please Like the LAKE facebook page. You can sign up for the meeting event there, Or just come as you are.

-jsq

 

 

Private capital funding 100 acre 10 MW solar farm with customer Cobb EMC

So Cobb EMC can do something other than coal, and can do it without wasting EMC customers’ money! Private investment is funding a 100 acre solar farm with Cobb EMC as customer.

Urvaksh Karkaria wrote for Atlanta Business Chronicle 12 April 2012, Smart Energy, Jacoby Development plan 100-acre solar farm in Georgia

A 100 acre solar power farm — billed as the largest in in the state — is planned for middle Georgia.

Smart Energy Capital and Jacoby Development Inc., inked a power purchase agreement with Cobb EMC to buy generation from the 10 MW solar farm to be built in Davisboro, Ga. The project, expected to go online in summer 2015, will generate enough power to light up about 1,500 homes.

Smart Energy Capital, a solar development and finance company, and Jacoby Development, will develop, finance and build the facility. The power generated will be sold to Marietta, Ga.-based Cobb EMC.

Imagine if instead of wasting Cobb EMC’s money on a coal boondoggle that Cobb EMC had moved ahead with this sooner.

But it’s finally starting to happen anyway:

Despite anemic subsidies, the absence of a renewable energy portfolio and, what some claim is Georgia Power Co.’s halting embrace of solar power, the Peach State is attracting solar development.

That’s right, in spite of Georgia Power.

Hey, what if Georgia Power stopped dragging its feet and got on with solar for its own profit?

-jsq

Police Them and Us, made worse by War on Drugs

David Rittgers wrote for The Politico 8 June 2011, How Police Are Turning Military

The sheriff’s office in Pima County, Ariz., raided the home of former Marine and Iraq combat veteran Jose Guerena, shooting 71 rounds at Guerena and hitting him with 22. The department is now facing a serious controversy over Guerena’s death.

But the raid isn’t the real tragedy. It’s a symptom of the real tragedy: the militarization of U.S. law enforcement.

Pima County released a video of the raid and supporting documents. The video isn’t anything new — a squad of police officers dressed up for combat. But the statement of the SWAT supervisor is worth reading. After the SWAT team entered Guerena’s home, the supervisor left one or two “operators” with the body while the rest searched the house.

What did he mean by operator? Well, a police officer. But the term connotes something entirely different.

“Operator” is a term of art in the special operations community. Green Berets, SEALs and other special operations personnel often refer to themselves as operators. It’s a recognition of both the elite standards of their units and the hybrid nature of their duties — part soldier, part spy, part diplomat. But importing operator terminology into domestic law enforcement is not a benign turn of the phrase.

Perceiving yourself as an operator plasters over the difference between a law enforcement officer serving a warrant and a commando in a war zone. The former Mirandizes, the latter vaporizes, as the saying goes…. Targeted killing is legal in a war zone but not on the streets of Anytown, USA.

Why is this happening?

The war on drugs has done incalculable damage to the character of law enforcement by encouraging police officers to forget they are civilians.

The police should be us. The War on Drugs has turned them into them against us.

-jsq

USA #1 in youth detention

The U.S. locks up far more juveniles per capita than any other country, and our country and our state cannot afford that any longer: not economically, and not in the cost of incarceration turning children into criminals.

Pete Brook wrote for Wired 11 April 2012, Uncompromising Photos Expose Juvenile Detention in America,

States have turned away from punishing acts such as truancy and delinquency with detention; acts that are not criminal for an adult but have in the past siphoned youths into the court system. Less detention has been accompanied by less violent crime among youth.

“It may seem counter intuitive, but if you look at the types of offenses for which we’re no longer detaining youth, it is not,” says Sarah Jane Forman, assistant professor at the University of Detroit Mercy School of Law and director of the Youth Justice Clinic which provides legal counsel to indigent youth. “The kids who have committed serious violent crimes; they remain locked up.”

Not only is being locked up ineffective as a deterrent in youths who have not reached full cognitive development and don’t understand the consequences of their actions, it can actually make a criminal out of a potentially law-abiding kid.

The U.S. has far more juveniles per capita locked up than any other country, according to Cross-national comparison of youth justice, by Neal Hazel, 2008, www.yjb.gov.uk.

And Georgia has a large proportion of those locked-up youth. On this map of prisons in Georgia, Continue reading →

Industrial Authority board meets Tuesday @ VLCIA 2012 04 17

Industrial Authority board meets about something or other Tuesday; hard to tell what. Maybe this will reveal some sort of strategy:

  • Target Market Study Update

VLCIA’s website is restored enough to say:

The Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial Authority will hold a Regular Board Meeting on Tuesday, April 17, 2012 at 5:30pm in the Industrial Authority Conference room.
They’ve also posted a notice on their facebook page.

The agenda doesn’t say much. I guess that one time they put a lot of information in it was a one-shot. And if you want to see any old agendas, you’ll need to wait until they finish fixing their website. Or look in the LAKE blog….

Now, let’s see, where are those minutes?

Here’s the agenda.

-jsq

Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial Authority
Agenda
Tuesday, April 17, 2012 5:30 p.m.
Industrial Authority Conference Room
2110 N. Patterson Street
Continue reading →

Mars and Arizona Public Service flee ALEC: 10 and counting

Mars makes Skittles. Suddenly it doesn’t want to be associated with ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council. Ditto electric utility Arizona Public Service (APS). That makes 10 if you count the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation along with Pepsi, Coke, Kraft, Intuit, McDonald’s, Wendy’s, and Reed-Elsevier. Keep ’em goin’!

Rebekah Wilce wrote for PRWatch Thursday, Mars and Arizona Public Service Dump ALEC,

Mars had been an exhibitor at ALEC’s 2011 annual meeting in New Orleans. Mars is the maker of Skittles, the snack Trayvon Martin had purchased before he was shot by George Zimmerman, whose arrest was delayed due to an NRA-backed gun law that became an ALEC “model” bill.

APS had been a member of ALEC’s Energy, Environment and Agriculture Task Force, which adopted such “model” bills as the “State Withdrawal from Regional Climate Initiatives Act” and the “State Data Quality Act.” News of its breaking ties with ALEC comes on the heels of a new updated report on ALEC in Arizona published by People for the American Way, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), Common Cause, and ProgressNow.

There’s more about Mars saying it merely decided not to renew its ALEC membership, as part of a general review of memberships. Yeah, right.

Here’s another petition for companies to leave ALEC.

I’m still rooting for UPS, based in Atlanta, to escape ALEC.

-jsq

Underfunded ethics commission makes mistakes

Underfunding of Georgia’s ethics commission has led to numerous inappropriate fines, some of which are still being straightened out after many months. Maybe the legislature should fund the ethics commission to a working level and make it independent of the legislature.

David Rodock wrote for the VDT 29 September 2011, Transparency Confusion: New campaign contributions system leads to officials owing fines,

The Georgia Government Transparency and Campaign Commission posted a seven-page list online earlier this week ethics.ga.gov of local government officials who have supposedly failed to submit their campaign contribution information this year.

According to the state organization’s website, each late filer owes fines of different amounts.

Various elected officials were quoted in that article saying the fines were inappropriate. Many of those fines had already been removed from the list by the time that article was written.

There have been calls to properly fund that agency and to make it independent of the legislature. The Columbus Ledger-Inquirer wrote 25 January 2012, Ethics panel needs funding and independence,

Continue reading →

Even George Will is calling for drug legalization

We can’t afford this anymore:
A $200 transaction can cost society $100,000 for a three-year sentence.
It’s time to legalize, regulate, and tax drugs, taking tax money away from private prisons and police militarization, and freeing it up for education, health care, and rehabilitation.

George F. Will wrote 11 April 2012, Should the U.S. legalize hard drugs?

Amelioration of today’s drug problem requires Americans to understand the significance of the 80-20 ratio. Twenty percent of American drinkers consume 80 percent of the alcohol sold here. The same 80-20 split obtains among users of illicit drugs.

About 3 million people — less than 1 percent of America’s population — consume 80 percent of illegal hard drugs. Drug-trafficking organizations can be most efficiently injured by changing the behavior of the 20 percent of heavy users, and we are learning how to do so. Reducing consumption by the 80 percent of casual users will not substantially reduce the northward flow of drugs or the southward flow of money.

Will-like, he ignores the real reasons we’re locking up so many people (corporate greed), but he does get at the consequences: Continue reading →