On the right, Natasha Fast is explaining it to somebody.
First Friday, Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia, 3 September 2010, Pictures and videos by Gretchen Quarterman.
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Who does know?
We are mapping all of the existing, proposed, closed and defeated dirty energy and waste facilities in the United States. We are building a network of community groups to fight the facilities and the corporations behind them.The detail map shown includes the Wiregrass Power LLC proposed plant (the orange oval I just south of Valdosta), two plants in Hamilton County, Florida Continue reading
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
Jeffrey H. Dorfman,
Professor, Dept. of Agricultural & Applied Economics,
The University of Georgia:
Local governments must ensure balanced growth, as sprawling residential growth is a certain ticket to fiscal ruin*See The Economics of Growth, Sprawl and Land Use Decisions.
* Or at least big tax increases.
Note and jobs, not just people: jobs so the people can work and afford the houses they live in.
- Green spaces increase property values of surrounding land
- Green and open spaces can provide environmental amenities for free
- If green spaces contribute to quality of life, you attract people and jobs to community
But this doesn’t mean exurban subdivisions with big yards: Continue reading
In 2004 the state of Georgia adopted a water planning
system, and in 2008 adopted a water plan,
with regional councils appointed in 2009 by the governor,
lieutenant governor, and Speaker of the House.
While I wonder why this organizational setup inserted a regional
layer of government that is unaccountable to the people in the region,
it’s good somebody
is doing some water planning.
In the event “gaps” between available water and future (or current) demands are identified, the Council will determine which water and land use management practices should be employed to ensure there is sufficient water and assimilative capacity to meet future needs. EPD will use computer models to test the ability of the recommended practices to close any identified “gaps.”If you remember Atlanta running out of water a few years ago Continue reading
Here’s an interesting
video interview
with Dr. William Sammons,
the doctor who spoke in Traverse City just before that biomass plant was nixed.
Is it more important to reach the target … or to say we have new information and we need to revise the targets and what qualifies?He’s talking about potential billions of dollars of health costs from particulates, about “waste” wood (what they say they will burn) vs. whole trees (what they end up burning), and most importantly about sustainability.
Biomass plants don’t have to report their CO2 emissions, so if all the proposed biomass plants get built we’re talking about as much as 800 million tons of CO2 from biomass plants by 2020, 12 to 14% of total CO2 emissions for the U.S. (not just power emissions: total national emissions). Trees don’t grow fast enough to suck all that back out of the air in ten years. Continue reading
George Monbiot writes in the Guardian about how
We have allowed developers to rob us of our village green:
Build loose suburbs carved up by busy roads and without green spaces and you help to create a population of fat, lonely people plagued by criminals. Build dense, leafy settlements with mixed uses, protected from traffic, and you help to create safe, fit and friendly communities.
Here’s one picture of what a fit, safe and functional community might look like. There’s nothing radical or new about it: similar developments have been built for centuries (and most are now monopolised by the rich). Houses or apartment blocks are built densely around a square of shared green space. It is big enough for playing ball games, but without fixed goalposts, allowing children and adults to define the space for themselves. It could contain trees; perhaps rocks or logs to climb on. There might be a corner of uncut meadow, or flowerbeds or fruit bushes. The space will work best when it is designed and managed by the people who live there.(An asbo is an Anti-Social Behaviour Order, like a citation for disturbing the peace.)Most important, the houses face inwards, and no cars are allowed inside the square: the roads serve only the backs of the buildings. The square is overlooked by everyone, which means that children can run in and out of their houses unsupervised, create their own tribes and learn their own rules, without fear of traffic accidents or molesters. They have a place in which to run wild without collecting asbos.
Suppose instead of walling off a detention pond and letting it grow weeds and snakes we made most of it high enough not to flood and let it grow trees, flowers, grass for children to play on, and maybe even vegetables.
That wouldn’t cost much more to develop.
The detention pond pictured is in the
Hamilton Pointe development,
where several residents told me they had no place to play football
or basketball.
If the detention pond was turned into a village green, they would have a place
for sports.
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The Valdosta Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) comes in the bottom 10 nationwide. That’s for overall average wages.
It doesn’t look quite as bad for specific classes of jobs (creative, service, and working class), but that’s mostly because there are almost no MSAs in the lowest pay tier. However, for service jobs, Valdosta is not as good as Tallahassee, and makes it into the bottom 10: Continue reading
The UGA Center for Agribusiness and Economic Development has
quantified the economic effects of eating local food in Georgia,
in this report:
The Local Food Impact: What if Georgians Ate Georgia Produce?
Prepared by: Sharon P. Kane, Kent Wolfe, Marcia Jones, and John McKissick Center Report: CR-10-03 May 2010
If Georgians produced all of the fruits and vegetables that they consumed, it could provide a way to close this utilization gap (the difference between state-wide production and consumption) of over $780 million per year. Even if this level can’t be achieved, simply closing the gap in one commodityÂlettuce, for exampleÂcould mean an additional $83.6 million of direct revenue to local producers.
What is the lettuce gap? The Cordele Dispatch explains it: Continue reading
This is part 2 about the July 8th
town Hall meeting about the biomass plant proposed for Valdosta.
First let’s hear George Rhynes explain that it’s never too late to reregulate our minds:
Here I’ve selected videos of local County Commission candidates: Continue reading