Category Archives: History

Harrisburg, PA loses solvency and trust over incinerator

Michael Cooper wrote in the New York Times on 20 May 2010 about An Incinerator Becomes Harrisburg’s Money Pit:
HARRISBURG, Pa. — Officials here decided seven years ago to borrow $125 million to rebuild and expand the city’s enormous trash incinerator, which the federal government had shut down because of toxic air pollution.

But the incinerator burned through the money faster than the trash, leaving Harrisburg residents feeling like they were living through a sequel to the 1986 movie “The Money Pit.”

There were contractor troubles, delays, cost overruns and squabbles. The city borrowed tens of millions more, shoveling good money after bad into the job.

The Patriot-News Editorial Board wrote on 12 April 2010 about Harrisburg incinerator fiasco deserves an investigation to understand how it happened:
Over nearly a decade, officials at the Harrisburg Authority and City Hall made a series of decisions that sought to get the trash incinerator working and profitable, but which instead brought Pennsylvania’s capital to the brink of bankruptcy.

The 2003 deal that took on $125 million in debt to repair the incinerator neglected to include a performance bond.

Inexperienced firms were hired. Fees were paid for work poorly done. Loans were taken on disastrous terms.

Officials were aided, or rather misled, by the advice of numerous attorneys, bankers and engineers apparently far more interested in collecting handsome fees than they were in protecting the interests of taxpayers.

As a result, there is a deep distrust of the fundamental institutions that created this fiasco.

Something else sounds familiar about this situation:
While some of the seats have changed, many of the same people in government today had their fingerprints on these decisions.
It’s the same old boy network locally as approved Sterling Chemical, and the chair of the county commission at that time is now on the Industrial Authority. And the VLCIA has taken on what is reputed to be a $15 million bond issue.

How big is Harrisburg? 50,000 people, same as Valdosta. What is Harrisburg considering? Bankruptcy. Who profited anyway? Local developers.

What’s the moral?

All of the guarantees proved worthless.

All of the fail-safes failed.

What say we have the investigation now, before the fail-safes fail?

-jsq

VLCIA biomass event Q&A

Here are videos that illustrate the VDT’s point today in What We Think:
While officials continue to downplay local citizen anger about current projects, citizens are organizing in a variety of ways to affect change the next election cycle. When Sterling Chemical came to Lowndes County in the 1990s, citizens were told the project was a “done deal,” and so it was. Sterling is still here, but those in office at the time aren’t, and the director of the Industrial Authority at the time is no longer here either.

As has been shown worldwide, citizens are tired of being told what’s best for them, having no say so in how their tax dollars are spent, and having their concerns ignored.

Until officials understand that it is coming from all directions and not just led by a few malcontents, the swell will continue to grow. And those who continue to ignore the anger and frustration do so at their own peril.

Maybe the VDT is referring to this kind of response from the VLCIA panel on 6 Dec 2010:
“these things do prop up the local economy, period, end of discussion.”
A previous questioner who had a job in Vietnam notes he was lied to about Agent Orange and asks “can you assure me that I won’t be affected by this?” Continue reading →

“Proposed plant said to be ‘medical atrocity'”

Johnna Pinholster writes in the the Valdosta Daily Times (paper 25 Oct, online 27 Oct 2010) about the the SAVE Biomass Forum at VSU:
A medical atrocity.

That is the phrase Dr. William Sammons used to described biomass energy plants at Monday night’s biomass forum at Valdosta State University’s Student Union theater.

Dr. Sammons answered many of the unanswered concerns about the biomass incinerator, and, unlike the lack of peer-reviewed evidence from the plant proponents: Continue reading →

Michael Bryant: “the appalling silence”

Pastor Michael Bryant expands on his previous letter.

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Dear Pastors and fellow laborers in the Gospel of our Lord and Savior,

I was born and raised here in Lowndes County. Today I am as disturbed as I was in 1973 when I, along with 42 other students, four ministers and their wives, were jailed for protesting unfair treatment of students in the Lowndes County School System. We were arrested while standing in the parking lot awaiting to enter the building for a meeting called by the Lowndes County Board of Education at their office on St. Augustine Road. The meeting was supposed to be a good faith gesture designed to mediate an amicable solution to the picketing which had been in process for nearly six months. After being arrested, we were moved from Big 12 in a prison truck in the dead of night. We were to be housed in the Cook County jail and none of our parents knew where we were. When we exited the truck, both sides of the walk way upon which we had to walk were lined with numerous State Troopers and other Law Enforcement officers sporting riot gear and shotguns. On the following day they refused to feed us breakfast. We began to complain and the judge came upstairs dressed in his robe. He said “I want you to stop making noise, and if you don’t, I can make you stop.”

When we complained again, the cell in which we were jailed was sprayed down with tear gas. We had one toilet and one sink in which to clear our eyes. These are facts that went unreported by the papers. In fact they said we were rabble rousers. The late Ralph Harrington signed all our bonds, and we went through a lengthy trial, represented by the late Mr. C. B. King, Sr., of Albany, GA. At the close of the trial all charges were dismissed and expunged from our records.

As a student then, I witnessed the appalling silence of men and women of God who preached the hell out of people on Sundays, collected their checks, and went home untouched by the happenings in the community. This was much like the appalling silence of ministers who sat on the sidelines while Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., placed his life on the line for “the least of these.”

Some years ago, Rev. Floyd Rose, two of my sisters and several other

Continue reading →

Houston’s Renewable Energy

For those people around Lowndes County who are living in the past and still say solar doesn’t work, Jonathan Hiskes interviews the former mayor of Houston, Bill White, in Grist, 24 Sep 2010, and asks about solar energy and efficiency:
During White’s time as mayor of Houston, the nation’s fourth largest city, he ran a highly successful home-weatherization program and engineered a major purchase of 50 megawatts of clean energy, giving momentum to the state’s booming wind industry.
Hm, so VSU, for example, could buy wind energy from windmills off the Georgia Coast…

Read on about solar. Continue reading →

LBJ about Pollution

It’s a really great speech and still relevant 45 years later. This is just a little excerpt:
In the last few decades entire new categories of waste have come to plague and menace the American scene. These are the technological wastes–the by-products of growth, industry, agriculture, and science. We cannot wait for slow evolution over generations to deal with them.

Pollution is growing at a rapid rate. Some pollutants are known to be harmful to health, while the effect of others is uncertain and unknown. In some cases we can control pollution with a larger effort. For other forms of pollution we still do not have effective means of control.

Pollution destroys beauty and menaces health. It cuts down on efficiency, reduces property values and raises taxes.

The longer we wait to act, the greater the dangers and the larger the problem.

Continue reading →

Ansel Adams and LBJ on A More Beautiful America

A while back, while moving things from one place to another, my sister thrust a book into my hand and said something like “we think you should have this”.

I didn’t pay it much mind and the book ended up in a box with framed photos because it was of a large format and besides, most of my books had already been packed up and moved.

Fast forward to yesterday when I opened the box labelled “framed photos” and the first thing out was a book.

It turns out that the book was “A More Beautiful America”. Commissioned by President Lyndon Baines Johnson, Nancy Newhall and Ansel Adams created a book that is as relevant today as it was in 1965.

Adams’ photos illustrate excerpts from President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Special Message to the Congress on Conservation and Restoration of Natural Beauty

The speech is compelling from beginning to end.

The beauty of our land is a natural resource. Its preservation is linked to the inner prosperity of the human spirit.

The tradition of our past is equal to today’s threat to that beauty. Our land will be attractive tomorrow only if we organize for action and rebuild and reclaim the beauty we inherited. Our stewardship will be judged by the foresight with which we carry out these programs. We must rescue our cities and countryside from blight with the same purpose and vigor with which, in other areas, we moved to save the forests and the soil.

Please consider finding some way that you can be a good steward and help preserve the beauty of our beloved Earth.

—Gretchen

Pastor Michael Bryant: the benefits to be realized

Leigh Touchton sent me this today.

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John,

This letter is from Pastor Michael Bryant, Webb-Miller Community Church, Hahira. He would like to publish on the LAKE blog. Dr. Manning’s response to Brad Lofton is also for publication.

Thank you,
Leigh

Given the complexity of the issue facing us as a community with regard to the Biomass Project, it is incumbent upon all parties involved to recognize that while the populations ill-affected will primarily be our children and elderly, the most vulnerable among us, the real issue is the fact that only 25 job are going to be produced. Likewise, if the facts bear out as proclaimed by both or either of the parties involved, and I believe if an error is made, it should be on the side of safety, the benefits to be realized are not nearly as great as the alternative approach provided by a solar energy plant.

Continue reading →

Biomass plant air quality permit approved, but is that final?

Georgia EPD approved the air quality permit for the Wiregrass Power LLC biomass plant on Perimeter Road just outside Valdosta in Lowndes County, with an effective date of July 19, 2010 (PDF, Word). Somebody may want to do the exercise of comparing the approved permit with the application to see if the process was entirely rubberstamp or whether any changes at all were made after the many questions people asked at the public hearing.

Meanwhile, is that it? Will the plant be built? Not necessarily: Continue reading →

Sunset Hill Cemetery Interactive Map

Heard about this through the Valdosta Planners Post: Sunset Hill Interactive Web Site.
In April 2009, the City of Valdosta was awarded a Georgia Historic Preservation Fund grant by the Historic Preservation Division, Georgia Department of Natural Resources, to produce a Geographic Information Systems (GIS)-enabled web site to be used by family members, historians, genealogists, and anyone interested in learning about the generations of Valdostans laid to rest at the city-owned Sunset Hill Cemetery.
You can search for people by name, and it will show you birth date, death date, lot number, and pan to the correct location on a map. Quite a difference from when aunt Jane and I used to have to try to guess when the caretaker would be in to look up who was buried where, or just stomp around until we found the marker.

What’s Sunset Hill, you may wonder? About Sunset Hill Cemetery: Continue reading →