Category Archives: Planning

Solar projects get community support

What if the Industrial Authority supported industry that had a business model, brought jobs, and had the support of the community? It can happen, and already has!

Citizen Carol wrote for Texas Vox 6 January 2012, Austin Energy drought proofs its energy with new Webberville Solar Project,

Public Citizen says kudos to the City of Austin and Austin Energy for their vision and efforts in completing this project. Given that the State Climatologist is warning us that Texas can expect up to 5 more years of the current drought cycle, this project came just in time to help provide our community with drought–proof electricity during the peak use times — that will come in handy next summer.

Remember we already discovered this right here in Valdosta and Lowndes County? The Wiregrass Solar commissioning was a popular event, with many critics of the Industrial Authority lavishly praising it for the solar plant. Nobody complained about living near a solar installation. How about some more clean industry?

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Where could we put utility solar in south Georgia?

Where could we find 380 acres for a 30 Megawatt solar plant in south Georgia? Here’s a clue from Texas.

Citizen Carol wrote for Texas Vox 6 January 2012, Austin Energy drought proofs its energy with new Webberville Solar Project

A number of years ago, the City of Austin purchased this land planning to install a new coal-fired power plant. When those plans fell through, a landfill was proposed for the site that now boasts 280 acres of solar panels with a view of downtown Austin along its horizon.
How about on the proposed coal plant site in Ben Hill County?

Of course, it doesn’t have to be that big, or all in one place. How about on top of a landfill? How about on the cotton fields next to Valdosta’s Sallas Mahone Elementary School? Energy to air condition the school instead of drifting pesticides, and profit to the landowner! How about at the airport? At the mall parking lot? On top of the new county palace? On the warehouses in Hahira?

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Industrial Authority still pushing “benefits” of scrapped private prison

The Industrial Authority appears to have learned nothing from the reams of information about the CCA private prison found for them by members of the public. They’re still pushing the “benefits” while saying nothing about the numerous cons (pun intended), the biggest of which is that the state and federal prison population is already decreasing, meaning we don’t need any more prisons, and if we built one here, it would be likely to close. So it’s not just a bad idea, it’s bad business. But here they go again….

Eames Yates wrote for WCTV Friday, Plans For New Prison Scrapped,

Schruijer went on to say “It would have been a huge economic impact. There were about 400 jobs associated with the project with approximately $150 million dollars in capital investment.”

Those four hundred jobs that the prison would have created, on average, would have payed between $40,000 and $50,000 dollars eah.

To people who mostly don’t live here now and mostly wouldn’t want to live here then, while driving away better businesses; she didn’t mention any of that, or the other problems with the whole private prison bad business.

That picture of Ms. Schruijer is hosted on the LAKE website, by the way. The VLCIA website is still broken, a week after I first pointed it out. Is this how the Industrial Authority plans to do PR, still promoting yet another failed Brad Lofton boondoggle while not making anything positive available on their own website?

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GA HB 818 would reduce renewable energy tax credits

Snuck into a renewable energy bill is a proposed decrease to Georgia renewable energy tax credits. It already passed the House and needs to be fixed in the Senate.

In HB 818 Section 2.3:

(G) For calendar year 2014, $5 2.5 million.”
The Georgia House passed this bill unanimously, apparently paying attention only to the addition of geothermal and not noticing this item at the end. It is in the Senate Finance Committee.

Sen. Tim Golden is a member. Less than a year ago he assisted in passing these very same renewable energy GEFA tax credits and the next day in Valdosta at the ribbon cutting for the Wiregrass Solar project he said:

…solar power at one time was a theory, and now it’s in practice.
He and other Georgia State Senators need to know somebody in the statehouse is trying to stop that solar practice.

Capitol Office

121-G State Capitol
Atlanta, GA 30334
Phone: (404) 656-7580
Fax: (404) 651-6767 		    tim.golden@senate.ga.gov

District Information

110 Beacon Hill
Valdosta, GA 31602
Fax: (229) 241-7732
Why decrease? The current GEFA renewable energy tax credits are already almost entirely subscribed through 2014. Why not increase them?

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PS: Owed to Claudia Collier.

PPS: Current law: Continue reading →

Separate CWIP payments to Georgia Power —WACE call for action

We don’t have to wait for the Georgia legislature to ban Construction Work in Progress (CWIP) for Georgia Power’s new nukes at Plant Vogtle. WACE has put out a clever call for action about CWIP, Go Solar, Not Nuclear!

Here’s an excerpt:

  • Use two checks each time you pay your bill. One check covers the amount you are forced to pay for “Nuclear Construction Cost Recovery” (write “for solar construction” in the memo line). The other check covers the remaining amount of your actual electricity costs.
  • Include a note in the letter with your checks voicing your opposition to nuclear power and ask Georgia Power to invest your funds in solar energy instead. This note could read:
    • I oppose nuclear power because of its dangers to our health and our environment. (See the nuclear accidents at Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island)
    • I oppose the construction surcharge for nuclear power plants because they are too expensive and waste billions of our tax dollars. (Plant Vogtle was originally estimated to cost $660 million. Eventually, only 2 of its proposed 4 reactors were built, costing more than $8 billion, and resulting in huge rate hikes for Georgia residents.)
    • I ask that GA Power invest my money and any collected surcharges in solar instead.
The PDF of the call includes these addresses:
Tim Echols, Chairman
Georgia Public Service Commission
244 Washington Street SW
Atlanta, GA 30334
1-800-282-5813 		W. Paul Bowers, CEO
Georgia Power Company
241 Ralph McGill Boulevard NE
Atlanta, GA 30308
1-888-660-5890
And don’t forget Georgia Power’s parent company The Southern Company’s CEO, Thomas Fanning, said a year ago he’s “bullish” on solar. Let’s see some solar action from The Southern Company and Georgia Power!

Here are some more contacts.

You don’t even have to be a Georgia Power customer to write to these people. Most of them are elected or appointed officials who are supposed to represent you, the taxpayers.

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CCA private prison project shelved —VDT

According to this morning’s paper VDT, the contract between private prison company CCA and the Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial Authority has expired. The land owner could sell the land to CCA anyway, but that would be without a state or federal customer for the prison and without $5 or $6 million in economic incentives VLCIA was going to arrange, including without water and sewer.

According to the letter Brad Lofton signed and VLCIA sent to CCA 12 November 2009, the total of incentives was more like $9 million dollars of tax abatements for CCA or tax-funded work, all of which the rest of us taxpayers would have to pay for one way or another. All that plus the prison itself would have been paid for with our tax dollars. Tax dollars that now can go to rehabilitation or education instead.

So the people of the community win! Congratulations to Drive Away CCA and all others who helped oppose this private prison project, and congratulations to the Industrial Authority for finally saying what is going on.

Perhaps now the Industrial Authority can get on with bringing in industry that will actually contribute to the community. How about industry that people would be proud to move next to? Industry that would employ local people? Industry that would attract knowledge-based workers and businesses? Maybe that’s what VLCIA’s Strategic Plan Process is about. If so, let’s all help the Industrial Authority achieve it.

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Why CWIP is a bad idea

Iowa is rejecting CWIP, and Georgia can, too. Here’s why.

Herman K. Trabish wrote for Green Tech Media 22 February 2012, The Nuclear Industry’s Answer to Its Marketplace Woes: Construction Work in Progress (CWIP) financing shifts the risks of nuclear energy to utility ratepayers,

A sign of the nuclear industry’s difficult situation in the aftermath of Fukushima is a proposal before the Iowa legislature
“Construction Work in Progress was intended to circumvent the core consumer protection of the regulatory decision-making process,”
that would allow utility MidAmerican Energy Holdings, a subsidiary of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, to build a new nuclear facility in the state using Construction Work in Progress (CWIP) financing (also called advanced cost recovery).

“Investment in nuclear power is the antithesis of the kind of investments you would want to make under the current uncertain conditions,” explained nuclear industry authority Mark Cooper, a senior fellow for economic analysis at Vermont Law School’s Institute for Energy and the Environment. “They cannot raise the capital to build these plants in normal markets under the normal regulatory structures.”

CWIP would allow the utility to raise the money necessary to build a nuclear power plant by billing ratepayers in advance of and during construction.

“Construction Work in Progress was intended to circumvent the core consumer protection of the regulatory decision-making process,” Cooper explained. “It exposes ratepayers to all the risk.” The nuclear industry’s answer to its post-Fukushima challenges, he said, “is to simply rip out the heart of consumer protection and turn the logic of capital markets on their head.”

And the Iowa Utilities Board staff agreed with Cooper and recommended against CWIP.
His message to policymakers is simple, Cooper said. “This is an investment you would not make with your own money. Therefore, you should not make it with the ratepayers’ money.”
Meanwhile, in Georgia: Continue reading →

VLCIA executive session on real estate transactions last Thursday noon

According to the VLCIA website, they had a special called meeting last Thursday, including apparently an executive session to discuss real estate transactions. One big real estate transaction with a deadline of today (13 March 2012) is the CCA private prison.

This is on the front page of the VLCIA website:

Notice:The Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial Authority will hold a Special Called Meeting on Thursday, March 8, 2012 at noon, for the purpose of reviewing bids and awarding a contract for the Miller Business Park Landscape/Irrigation Project and discuss real estate transactions.
Here’s the agenda. I congratulate the Industrial Authority for posting agendas!

Note the executive session. The agenda doesn’t say what the executive session is for (isn’t it supposed to, according to Georgia sunshine laws?). We can guess it’s for real estate transactions, as in the notice on the VLCIA front page.

Hm, what real estate transactions could that be? A contract for a landscaping and irrigation project isn’t a real estate transaction. Let me think… oh, the CCA private prison is a real estate transaction! Could that be what they were discussing?

The rest of VLCIA’s website is pretty thoroughly broken right now, as in

Warning: Parameter 3 to showItem() expected to be a reference, value given in /home/industri/public_html/includes/Cache/Lite/Function.php on line 100
None of the other links seem to work.

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Special Called Meeting of the
Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial Authority
Thursday, March 8, 2012, 12 noon
Valdosta Lowndes County Industrial Authority
Conference Room
Valdosta, Georgia
  • Call to Order Special Called Meeting

  • Invocation

  • Welcome Guests

  • Westside Business Park

    • Reviewing bids and awarding a contract for the Miller Business Park Landscape and Irrigation Project
  • Adjourn Special Called Meeting into Executive Session
  • Adjourn Executive Session/Call to Order Special Called Meeting
  • Adjourn Special Called Meeting

Tornado report —Ashley Tye @ LCC 2012-03-12

No injuries or loss of life from the March 3rd tornado, but no disaster declaration and thus no government financial assistance, said Ashley Tye in a long report to the Lowndes County Commission this morning. Such reports are not normally repeated at the Tuesday evening regular sessions, so if you weren’t there, here is the only place you will see it.

Ashley Tye remarked:

The good news is that there were no reported injuries or no loss of life.
There was a lot of property damage. He said the National Weather Service determined it was an F2 tornado, and once it got to Walker’s Crossing it had winds of about 100 miles an hour. He said 34 homes were affected, of which 19 were destroyed, meaning uninhabitable.

He’s checking types of assistance that might be available.

Unfortunately, financial assistance is unavailable; it requires a federal declaration. And while the level of damage is obviously devastating to us in Lowndes County, it didn’t reach the level that would meet the threshold that would cause the governor to request a federal declaration.
He said there had been a tremendous outpouring of volunteer support. And insurance might pay off, although some people may not have enough insurance.

He added that the county’s code red emergency system worked well, and probably had something to do with there being no loss of life. I know I got at least six county code red messages that day before my message box filled up (I was in a building with no signal).

Commissioner Richard Raines asked if FEMA had to have a declaration for GEMA to respond. Ashley Tye answered: Continue reading →

Marching at the Industrial Authority 2012-03-06

After starting up at the prison site and heading out, we honking at the Valdosta City Council, we marched at the Industrial Authority office. Drive Away CCA!

Here’s Part 1 of 3:


Marching at the Industrial Authority 2012 Part 1 of 3:
No private prison in Lowndes County,
Motorcade against Corrections Corporation of America, Drive Away CCA,
CCA, VLCIA, Corrections Corporation of America, Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial Authority,
Valdosta City Council, Lowndes County Commission, incarceration, prison, private prison,
Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia, 6 March 2012.
Videos by Gretchen Quarterman for LAKE, the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange.

They weren’t in, since they only meet once a month.

Here’s Part 2 of 3: Continue reading →