Category Archives: Georgia

Budget hearing public notices @ LCC 2013-06-05

Yesterday’s County Commission meeting was billed as a Budget Discussion Meeting, and apparently it was not a public hearing on the county’s budget, because state law requires such a hearing to be advertised in the newspaper or published as a news story, a week in advance. This is different from public notice for other Commission meetings: for budget hearings the notice has to be not just sent to the newspaper: it has to be published, and not in the legal notices section, and it has to appear at least a week before the hearing. It’s also illegal to refuse to provide a copy of the submitted draft budget to the public or the news media:

O.C.G.A. 36-81-5.(d) On the day that the proposed budget is submitted to the governing authority for consideration, a copy of the budget shall be placed in a public location which is convenient to the residents of the unit of local government. The governing authority shall make every effort to provide convenient access to the residents during reasonable business hours so as to accord every opportunity to the public to review the budget prior to adoption by the governing authority. A copy of the budget shall also be made available, upon request, to the news media.

LAKE is a news medium, according to federal law.

Georgia Department of Audits and Accounts has Georgia Law on Local Government Budgets: Continue reading →

How much will trash collection rates go up in Lowndes County? @ LCC 2012-10-09

Speaking of Veolia winning its high bid for garbage collection, here’s a clue to how much more its rates may go up.

Remember ADS Veolia was bought hardly a month later by ADS, owned by Highstar Capital of New York City? Look at ADS’s bid for Proposal D: $18.39.

That’s $220.68 a year. Which is even higher than Wakulla County, Florida’s $196 a year, which Gretchen warned us all about more than a year ago. And more than double the $100 a year for the former county waste collection sites.

Want to guess how much ADS’s monthly rates will rise? Maybe Continue reading →

LOST decision coming from GA Supreme Court

Local Lowndes County and city officials are awaiting breathlessly the news from Atlanta today about new rules on LOST negotiations. Currently, negotiators have to choose one of the positions submitted by the contending parties. The GA Supreme Court may decide to let negotiators pick some other division of LOST funds. Valdosta Mayor John Gayle cancelled a meeting here yesterday so he could be in Atlanta for this court decision. Lowndes County Commissioners are rumored to be planning a meeting tomorrow morning after the decision.

Fox 31 posted 30 May 3012, Supreme Court of Georgia to hear Turner County LOST case

On June 4th, the Georgia Supreme Court will hear the case between Turner County and three cities over the distribution of Local Option Sales Taxes. Below is the entirety of the facts in the case as released by the court:

In this dispute between the governments of Turner County and three cities over how Local Option Sales Tax (LOST) proceeds should be distributed, the county is appealing a superior court ruling which picked the cities’ plan for distribution over the county’s.

There’s much more detail in that article. Also, Tim Omarzu wrote for timesfreepress.com 9 May 2013, Georgia top court to consider LOST negotiations.

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County picked the highest bid from Veolia for trash pickup @ LCC 2012-10-09

The facts don’t match County Chairman Bill Slaughter’s assertion (according to the VDT Thursday):

That decision was made in a good-faith effort to find the lowest possible rate for garbage service for the citizens of Lowndes County, he said Tuesday.

Commissioner Richard Raines moved and the Commission voted to approve 9 October 2012 Proposal D and awarded it to the lowest bidder for that specific proposal, which was Veolia. But that wasn’t the lowest-priced proposal, according to the sheet of choices they were using in that meeting:

Continue reading →

County told VDT curbside pickup would be non-exclusive @ LCC 2012-03-31

Former Chairman Ashley Paulk may say he didn’t tell Cory Scarborough of Deep South Sanitation that any contract by the county for curbside pickup would be non-exclusive (VDT 30 May 2013), but David Rodock reported for the VDT from Ashley Paulk’s guest house at a Lowndes County Commission retreat chaired by Ashley Paulk that:

Commissioners decided that getting out of the “trash business” was best and that a non-exclusive agreement with current curbside pickup companies (which about 12,000 citizens already employ) would provide service without putting any people out of business.

The VDT reported ( Commission tackles key issues: Waste management, tax lighting districts and SPLOST discussed at retreat by David Rodock, 31 March 2012) Commissioners “decided”. Yet there is no vote recorded, in contravention to Georgia open meetings law and a recent Georgia Supreme Court decision.

How is this doing “the people’s business”? Maybe if they took a vote and recorded it properly we’d all know what they said.

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State law requires public hearing before trash decision

Counter to state law, Lowndes County did not hold public hearings within 45 days before the decision to close the waste collection centers.

Georgia Comprehensive Solid Waste Management Act of 1990 GEORGIA COMPREHENSIVE SOLID WASTE MANAGEMENT ACT OF 1990 AS AMENDED THROUGH 2004: An Abstract from OFFICIAL CODE OF GEORGIA ANNOTATED Volume 10 Title 12 Article 2 Part 1 Conservation and Natural Resources:

§ 12-8-24.2. Public hearing prior to entering contract regarding landfill

The governing authority of any county or municipal corporation and the directors or managers of any local authority or special district shall hold a public hearing before entering into a contract for the sale, lease, or management of a landfill or solid waste disposal facility owned by such county, municipal corporation, local authority, or special district. The party responsible for holding such a public hearing shall cause notice of the hearing to be posted at the site of the landfill or facility and to run in a newspaper of general circulation serving the county, municipal corporation, local authority, or special district not less than 30 nor more than 45 days prior to the date of the hearing.

Can anyone argue that “or solid waste disposal facility owned by such county” does not include Lowndes County’s former solid waste collection centers? Continue reading →

Bubba McDonald’s solar evangelism

I’ve thanked Bubba McDonald for being serious about solar. However, 500 MW by Georgia Power in several years is nowhere near enough, when New Jersey has 1,000 MW already installed. What we need in south Georgia is distributed solar power for local jobs and direct reduction of electricity bills. Making a solar monopoly as in HB 657 wouldn’t solve that problem; it would actually hinder a real distributed solution. Instead we need to reform that antique 1973 Territorial Electric Service Act to enable financing for distributed solar.

Jim Galloway wrote for the AJC yesterday, GOP revolutionaries push Georgia Power to embrace solar energy,

Lauren “Bubba” McDonald Jr. has spent more than four decades in and around the state Capitol. That fact alone should automatically disqualify him as a rabid revolutionary.

And yet here he is, attempting to force real, radical change upon one of this state’s most staid and revered institutions. McDonald is the leader of a new and very Republican effort to require that Georgia Power give solar energy a chance.

Continue reading →

VDT should dig deeper into county trash

The VDT should dig deeper into the finances of Lowndes County trash collection. Nobody has ever seen an accounting of where where the money went for the county’s former waste collection sites, so nobody knows whether the county was really losing money or how much, and the county’s version of how those sites had to be paid for doesn’t match state law.. Sure, Bill Slaughter defending a decision made when Ashley Paulk was chair is amusing, but instead of transcribing what county officials tell it, the VDT could find lots more under the county’s garbage with a little digging.

Jason Schaefer write for the VDT Thursday, Concerns continue over garbage agreement: Business owner argues case against County

The County is not required under Georgia law to issue RFPs to any company for waste disposal services, according to Slaughter. That decision was made in a good-faith effort to find the lowest possible rate for garbage service for the citizens of Lowndes County, he said Tuesday.

Is that the point of county government, to act like Wal-Mart? Is money the only value the county government can name? Everyone I talked to about the trash issue in 2012 who already had a waste collection card said they’d be willing to pay more to keep the sites open. Maybe if the county had held public hearings they would have learned that.

And does anyone believe ADS’s rates are going to stay that low? Look at Wakulla, Florida, where it’s $196/year. But the bigger question is why did the county privatize trash collection anyway?

Continue reading →

Privatize TVA? Southern Company would like that

The hydropower assets of the Tennessee Valley Authority would give Southern Company a way to avoid doing distributed solar for a while. Will SO CEO Tom Fanning and Georgia Power CEO Paul Bowers bit the bullet and go straight for distributed solar instead of helping Duke privatize TVA for a short-term stopgap that would set both of them farther behind the disruptive solar curve?

SolarCity and Southern Company stock
Blue line: SCTY; red line: SO, chart by Google Finance.
May 16th: Goldman Sachs invested $500 million in SCTY.
May 22nd: SO stockholder meeting.
May 24th: S&P downgrades SO.

Wes Patoka wrote for Motley Fool 24 May 2013, Who Benefits the Most if the TVA Is Privatized,

Continue reading →

SolarCity disrupting utilities in Massachusetts; how about Georgia?

Why is great big Southern Company afraid of tiny SolarCity? Look at these 2.6KW of solar panels on a house in Bedford, Massachusetts. Think about much more sun in Georgia, financed by Google and Goldman Sachs, turning into votes for solar power. Big coal and nuclear boondoggles already don’t look so attractive anymore to investors.

By Giles Parkinson wrote for Reneweconomy on 9 October 2012, SolarCity’s big challenge: Prove that energy bills can fall,

A 2.6kW SolarCity installation in Bedford, Massachusetts SolarCity sees the traditional utilities as their biggest competition. “We compete with them on price, predictability of price and the ease by which customers can switch to electricity generated by solar systems,” it says.

“We have disrupted the industry status quo by providing renewable energy directly to customers for less than they are currently paying for utility-generated energy. Unlike utilities, we sell energy with a predictable cost structure that does not rely on limited fossil fuels and is insulated from rising retail electricity prices. As retail prices for electricity increase and distributed solar energy costs decline, our market opportunity will grow exponentially.”

Bloomberg New Energy Finance analyst Anthony Kim said the SolarCity filing could be a “game-changing moment for the solar industry” because it shows “how plummeting component costs benefit a company operating on the downstream side of the solar business.”

That article was posted before SolarCity’s stock went public, and before Goldman Sachs invested half a billion dollars in SolarCity. Six months later, we know Southern Company and Georgia Power are paying attention, because both SO CEO Tom Fanning and Georgia Power CEO Paul Bowers said so at the Southern Company stockholder meeting.

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