Category Archives: Valdosta City Council

Videos, AAUW Candidates’ Forum @ AAUW 2013-10-15

Water was a popular topic, as you can see in these videos of the Candidates’s Forum by AAUW. Same location (VSU Continuing Education Building) as the one Chamber held, but this time the audience got to ask questions. Yes, Virginia, they do all live in their districts, and some of them have widely divergent views about what cities or school boards should do.

Local AAUW President Diane Holliman gave a welcome, and then Dr. Luke Fowler moderated. Here’s the list of qualified candidates. Here’s Matthew Woody’s writeup in the VDT.

Valdosta City Council District 2

John Hogan and Calvin Graham Sr. were present; Sandra J. Tooley was not.

John Hogan pointed out that a road issue could really be a drainage issue, so it’s necessary to look at context.

Calvin Graham Sr. said he was retired military, lived in the district, and had been spending a lot of time volunteering. He indicated the Continue reading →

OK LOST status quo –Valdosta City Council @ VCC 2013-10-17

Yes we’ll take the 2002 percentages offered by Lowndes County, voted the the Valdosta City Council this morning at a Special Called Meeting.

The vote result is from Council Tim Carroll, who says they will revisit the percentages after the Georgia legislature does whatever it’s going to do about LOST in January. Here’s the notice of the meeting on Valdosta’s website:

Notice of a Special Called City Council Meeting
Posted Date: 10/16/2013

The Valdosta City Council has scheduled a Special Called City Council Meeting for Thursday, October 17, 2013 at 8:00 a.m. at City Hall, 216 East Central Avenue, Council Chambers. The purpose of this Special Called Council Meeting is to discuss the Local Option Sales Tax (LOST).

For more information, please contact Teresa S. Bolden, City Clerk, at 259-3503 or tbolden@valdostacity.com.

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Spectra met Lowndes and Valdosta @ Pipeline 2013-10-16

Spectra Energy subsidiary Sabal Trail Transmission held a landowner one-on-one at Wiregrass Tech last night. Matthew Woody of the VDT was there, as was one Valdosta City Council member, one Lowndes County Commissioner, and at least two county staff, plus some landowners (“might as well get something out of this”, several said at the food bar), one of whom was a match for Andrea Grover.

Matthew Woody, VDT:

Continue reading →

County lost LOST; now has 120 days to negotiate with cities

So all our tax money the county spent on the alleged county attorney arguing before the state Supreme Court was wasted. The remaining law seems to say by 120 days from Monday the cities and the county need to come to an agreement.

Kay Harris wrote for the VDT yesterday, Lowndes LOST in limbo: Supreme Court tosses key amendment,

In a ruling issued Monday, Oct. 7, the Supreme Court of Georgia declared a 2010 amendment to the Local Option Sales Tax Act unconstitutional, reasoning that the amendment would delegate a legislative function of allocating tax proceeds to the judicial branch of government, a violation of the Separation of Powers clause of the Georgia Constitution.

For Lowndes County, the ruling effectively renders the lawsuit moot that was filed by the five cities against the county in September 2012.

The Supreme Court’s ruling came in the case of Turner County vs. the City of Ashburn over a dispute in splitting the proceeds from the one cent sales tax, the same issue in the Lowndes lawsuit. By declaring the portion unconstitutional that would allow a judge to decide how to allocate the tax dollars between the entities, the issue is now in limbo for several counties in Georgia.

You may recall that former Chairman Ashley Paulk wasn’t interested in discussing proposals from the cities, and said from before the LOST negotiations began that he expected it to go to arbitration.

This was the same Chairman Ashley Paulk who put SPLOST VII on the ballot a year early and lost it. I wonder how much input County Manager Joe Pritchard had into these two losing decisions?

At least SPLOST VI hasn’t expired yet and there’s time for the voters to go again on SPLOST VII in November.

What happens now with LOST? Continue reading →

WWTP surveying, Norwood withdrawn, Colbert on agenda, radar, benefits, and parking @ VCC 2013-10-10

Valdosta wants to survey to prepare for moving and upgrading the Withlacoochee Wastewater Treatment Plant. The City Council is awarding retirement benefits, and the employee of the month is three people this month. One rezoning has been withdrawn and another is up for action Thursday. Plus somebody didn’t like the Valdosta Historic Preservation Commission actually requiring preservation and is appealing to the City Council. It would be interesting to see what’s in that WWTP surveying and engineering contract and which parking is being appealed, but Valdosta City Council doesn’t publish its agenda packets online, unlike for example Augusta, which has the second highest high tech job growth in the country.

Here’s the agenda. They also have a Work Session Tuesday 8 October 2013 at 5:30 PM, inconveniently the same time as the Lowndes County Commission Regular Session.

AGENDA

REGULAR MEETING OF THE VALDOSTA CITY COUNCIL

5:30 P.M., Thursday, October 10, 2013
COUNCIL CHAMBERS, CITY HALL
Continue reading →

Meet the Candidates –Chamber

Go hear what they have to say, to help you decide who you’re going to vote for. here’s the list of candidates who qualified.

Here’s the Chamber’s event description:

Event Name: Meet the Candidates
Event Type(s): Chamber Calendar
Community Calendar
Description: The Valdosta-Lowndes County Chamber will host a Meet the Candidates event on Tues. Oct. 1 from 5-7 p.m. at the VSU Continuing Education Building located on 903 N. Patterson Street. The event is an opportunity for the public to meet and hear from candidates running in the Nov. 5 general election. Attendees can speak one-on-one with candidates and candidates will be given three minutes to discuss his or her main initiatives.
Event Date: 10-01-13
Event Time: 05:00 PM – 07:00 PM Eastern
Location: VSU Continuing Education Building (Auditorium)
903 N. Patterson St.
Valdosta, GA 31601

click here for Google Maps
click here for Mapquest
Contact Person: Patty Martin
(phone: 229.247.8100)
Outlook/vCalendar: click on the date(s) to add to your calendar:
10-01-13

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Orr, Barrington, Whitewater, New Statenville + VLD * 2 + Dasher + Hahira variance @ GLPC 2013-09-30

A county developer has moved roads, plus 3 out of 5 local cities at the Greater Lowndes Planning Commission tonight, plus “Attendance policy for appointed Boards”: are we going to expect them to show up now? A Hahira variance, a Valdosta conditional use permit and a rezoning, a Dasher zoning text amendment, and rezonings on four Lowndes County roads, including New Statenville Highway, Whitewater Road @ Williams Road, Barrington Drive @ Bemiss Road, and Orr Road.

That Orr Road one uses the same name, Nottinghill, as one that on Cat Creek Road that previously got tabled and never came back. GLPC didn’t list any street numbers of parcel numbers, but there’s only one property on Orr Road that’s 14.99 acres, owned by William Henry Wright, backing up to his property on Stafford Wright Road. Have the Nottinghill developers made a deal with him for Orr Road since the neighbors didn’t want them on Cat Creek Road?

Here’s the agenda. Continue reading →

Japan or south Georgia?

How is our local landfill like Fukushima? No, not radiation: nobody seems to be responsible.

Colin P. A. Jones wrote for The Japan Times 16 September 2013, Fukushima and the right to responsible government,

Rather, the means of holding a member responsible for bad judgments are internalized as part of the rules and discipline governing the hierarchy to which they belong, with mechanisms for outsiders to assert responsibility — to assert rights — being minimized and neutralized whenever possible.

Sure, it’s not exactly the same. Our local governments live in fear they’ll get sued (or so they claim), and even sheriffs and judges occasionally get convicted around here. But it’s quite difficult to get local elected officials to take their responsibility to the people as seriously as “we’ve invested too much in that to stop now” where “we” means the local government or more frequently a developer.

And privatizing the landfills and now trash collection is not that dissimilar to the Japanese government keeping TEPCO afloat so they have an unaccountable scapegoat for Fukushima. Locally, nobody seems to even know, much less care, that the landfill is Continue reading →

Cancelled: Valdosta City Council this week @ VCC 2013-09-19

According to In the City this Week, Sept. 16-21

The Valdosta City Council meeting = scheduled for Thursday, Sept. 19 has been canceled. The next City Council meeting is scheduled for Oct. 10. The Mayor and Council look forward to seeing you there. Click here for information about Mayor and Council meetings.

I guess you’ll have to get your entertainment elsewhere downtown this week. From that same newsletter: Continue reading →

Flood control measures encourage settling too close and provoke severe flooding events

Flood control to keep water out of houses seems like a good idea, but it turns out that it causes the flood control measures to keep needing to be raised higher, and it encourages people to build too close to flooding areas, plus “rare and catastrophic events take place”. Like the 2009 “700 year flood” and the four or more floods this year that have overflowed the Withlacoochee Wastewater Treatment Plant. In our case, there are also the issues of widespread clearcutting and buildings and streets with impervious cover. The local runoff containment requirements in the various local government zoning codes may be like levees: “flood control structures might even increase flood risk as protection from frequent flooding reduces perceptions of risk”.

This encourages human settlements in floodplain areas, which are then vulnerable to high-consequence and low-probability events.
Much simpler just not to give out building permits for flood zones. Or we could put medical buildings right next to a creek, assuming because it’s never flooded it never will….

Socio-hydrology: conceptualising human-flood interactions, G. Di Baldassarre, A. Viglione, G. Carr, L. Kuil, J. L. Salinas, and G. Bloschl, Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 17, 3295–3303, 2013 doi:10.5194/hess-17-3295-2013, © Author(s) 2013. CC Attribution 3.0 License.

Abstract. Over history, humankind has tended to settle near streams Continue reading →