A business our Industrial Authority wanted to get us into still risks bankrupting Irwin County: a private prison. Maybe we should do better due diligence around here and invest in better business ventures.
AP reported 23 April 2012, South Ga. detention center nearly sold at auction,
A privately owned detention center that houses hundreds of illegal immigrants in south Georgia is struggling with finances, and narrowly avoided being auctioned this year.
How bad is it?
Continue readingSo we heard about Chattanooga all during the school “unification” referendum. I turns out Chattanooga really does have something that attracts business (no, not a unified school system; if you want to go back into that, I’ve got the references available). What really attracts businesses to Chattanooga is fast Internet broadband access.
Christopher Mitchell wrote for Planetizen 30 April 2012, Should Your City Build Its Own Broadband Network?
While on a site selection visit in Chattanooga, a CEO asked about broadband access. When told that the slowest tier on Chattanooga’s community fiber network was 30 megabits per second, he turned to his IT adviser for a translation. Upon hearing “that’s more than we can get in our headquarters presently,” the company cancelled its other planned visits and located its new site in Chattanooga.
That’s right, Chattanooga really does have one thing going for it: high speed Internet access.
Why does that matter?
Continue reading 
Lots of people, from Occupy Buffalo to at least one New York state representative, are tired of tax abatements doled out by ECIDA (the Erie County Industrial Development Agency, aka The Economic Development Corporation for Erie County). ECIDA thinks it knows better. Sound familiar?
Occupy Buffalo complained to ECIDA about tax abatements for luxury residential lofts that had already been completed, saying “this board is not a democratic process”. They noted the people’s representative on the ECIDA board had said it was a clear waste of taxpayer resources but was ignored, and couldn’t stop county resources being “fleeced by this board”. They added, “This experiment has gone on for long enough, and it’s time for immediate change” of “this crony corrupt process”. Occupy Buffalo demanded suspension of tax abatements by ECIDA until a public town hall meeting could be held.
Here’s the video:
Tired of tax abatements: Occupy Buffalo and NY state reps @ ECIDA 2012-02-13
Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia, .
Video by for Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE).
Occupy Buffalo wrote 16 February 2012, Occupy Buffalo and the Erie County Industrial Development Agency,
Continue readingIn case you thought local elected and appointed governments in Lowndes County, Georgia were alone in not always being coordinated or strategic, here’s another example.
Not only does Erie County, New York have an industrial authority (ECIDA, the Erie County Industrial Development Agency, aka The Economic Development Corporation for Erie County) but many of the towns also do and there isn’t always coordination. Even in densely developed Erie County, there is a clash between rural and urban development.
Sandra Tan wrote for the Buffalo News 22 April 2012, Bad breaks given by IDAs? As a state lawmaker drafts a bill that would handicap town IDAs, those groups defend the deals they make,
“And there is no way rural communities such as Concord and the Village of Springville would ever get taken seriously by the ECIDA, said Concord Supervisor Gary Eppolito, who heads the least active town IDA in the county.
He recalled an instance where a local business asked the ECIDA for help expanding its agricultural business and was shown properties in the City of Lackawanna.”
-gretchen
It’s a cloudy sunrise for open government in Georgia with HB 387 now law. Will anyone enforce it? Will local governments comply? Will the legislature extend this law into a sunshiny day in Georgia?
Aaron Gould Sheinin and Bill Rankin wrote for the AJC yesterday, Governor signs Open Records rewrite into law,
House Bill 397, which took effect upon Deal’s signature, is the first major rewrite of Georgia’s sunshine laws in more than a decade. New provisions in the open records and meetings laws increase fines for offenders. The maximum penalty of $500 is now $1,000, and offenders who commit repeat violations within a year face fines of up to $2,500.
Previously, the sunshine laws allowed only criminal complaints to be filed against suspected violators, meaning a prosecutor would have to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt. The rewrite now allows the filing of civil complaints, which have a lower burden of proof.
That could be interesting if anyone actually files a complaint.
The rewrite also would provide new exemptions for some gatherings of governing bodies, such as allowing a quorum of members to attend the same civic function, receive training or visit government agencies — provided no official business is discussed or transpires.
So the various elected boards meeting together at the end of last month was probably OK, since they weren’t making decisions, merely educating each other. But the Lowndes County Commission repeatedly hiding from the public while discussing solid waste disposal, among other issues, does not seem to fit that exception.
It also reduces the cost of most documents disclosed under the Open Records Act from 25 cents to 10 cents per page.
That means the price of the Industrial Authority’s old minutes just went down, Continue reading
Ocilla, about an hour north of here, took the private prison gamble, and now is scrambling to import enough prisoners to fill it.
Jim Galloway wrote for the AJC 11 April 2012, Importing illegal immigrants — into private Georgia prisons quoting Hannah Rappleye and Lisa Riordan Seville in The Nation 10 April 2012, How One Georgia Town Gambled Its Future on Immigration Detention,
Deportations have reached record levels under President Barack Obama, and demand for detention facilities has increased. Starting in 2002, ICE had funding for 19,444 beds per year, according to an ICE report. Today, ICE spends about $2 billion per year on almost twice the number of beds.
ICE’s reliance on facilities like the Irwin County Detention Center has put small rural towns at the center of one of today’s most contentious policy arguments—how to enforce immigration law. A yearlong investigation by The Nation shows how much politics has come to rule detention policy. Even as Georgia and Alabama passed harsh new immigration laws last year designed to keep out undocumented immigrants, documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act reveal that politicians from both states were lobbying hard to bring immigrant detainees in. ICE succumbed to the pressure, sending hundreds of detainees to the financially unstable facility in Georgia that promised to detain immigrants cheaply. That promise came at the expense of the health, welfare and rights to due process of some 350 immigrants detained daily in Ocilla.
Marvelous. Pass a low to eject illegal immigrants, except it really locks up a bunch of them, but not enough to keep Ocilla’s private prison full, so import a bunch of them back in as prisoners.
Aren’t you glad we didn’t accept a private prison in Lowndes County, Georgia?
Ocilla and Irwin County didn’t just make that bad bet once, they doubled down on it:
Continue readingLikely new industry, private prison really cancelled, strategic planning, and trees in the median!
Here are videos of the entire March regular meeting of the Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial Authority (VLCIA). Here’s the agenda.
It’s good that they approve minutes after emailing them to each other. Maybe someday we the taxpayers will get to see those minutes.
Did you know they had two executive sessions on 23 February 2012, at 10AM and 2:25 PM in addition to their retreat and regular meeting of that same day? If they’re having all these executive sessions, presumably all the material about personnel and real estate that needs to be kept confidential is in there, and the minutes of the regular meetings shouldn’t contain anything the public should not see.
For example, Continue reading
Industrial Authority board meets about something or other Tuesday; hard to tell what. Maybe this will reveal some sort of strategy:
- Target Market Study Update
VLCIA’s website is restored enough to say:
The Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial Authority will hold a Regular Board Meeting on Tuesday, April 17, 2012 at 5:30pm in the Industrial Authority Conference room.
They’ve also posted a notice on their facebook page.
The agenda doesn’t say much. I guess that one time they put a lot of information in it was a one-shot. And if you want to see any old agendas, you’ll need to wait until they finish fixing their website. Or look in the LAKE blog….
Now, let’s see, where are those minutes?
Here’s the agenda.
-jsq
Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial AuthorityContinue reading
Agenda
Tuesday, April 17, 2012 5:30 p.m.
Industrial Authority Conference Room
2110 N. Patterson Street
Here are videos of the
Local Option Sales Tax (LOST) talks yesterday morning
between Lowndes County and the local cities (Valdosta, Hahira, Remerton, Dasher, and Lake Park.
Not really negotiations, these were more an exchange of views.
The county’s position is the same as Chairman Ashley Paulk told me after
the county’s
four minute work session earlier that morning:
the county could claim 72% of LOST based on cost of services delivered
to the whole county,
but the county’s offer is to stick with the 58% share from 2002.
The cities all would like a bigger share.
The venue was the county’s meeting room next to Commission Chambers. There was no sound feed available in there, so sound is variable.
First
County Manager Joe Pritchard explained
the state-mandated procedures
and
Lowndes County’s position,
both of which were spelled out in a
three page paper.
Basically, the county wants to stick to the percentages negotiated in 2002,
although by the county’s reckoning it could ask for a much higher percentage.
None of the cities had a written position paper.
Valdosta Mayor John Gayle noted Valdosta had grown more than the
county as a whole.
County Chairman Ashley Paulk responded that the city couldn’t grow
without the county growing.
The Mayor said nontheless most growth was in Valdosta.
The Chairman asked whether that was growth in households?
The Mayor said he didn’t know the answer to that right now.
The Chairman remarked that according to his reading of the census,
it was mostly not in households.
Lowndes County Clerk Paige Dukes handed out this document, Lowndes County’s Report for Initial LOST Negotiations: April 9, 2012, at that first LOST meeting yesterday. When I spoke to her later, I mentioned that I thought it was the very model of how to write such a document: clear, complete, pithy, and easily understandable. She did not have a readily-accessible electronic copy, so I’ve posted these scanned images on the LAKE website.
The document includes a summary of the negotiation procedure (60 days to negotiate, after which it goes to mediation, then Superior Court “baseball arbitration”), plus how and how much LOST can reduce property taxes.
The rest of the document is the county’s position, which includes that the county provides services such as sheriff, courts, public health, and animal control that benefit the entire county, and the county could claim 72% of LOST. However, the county is only asking for the same 58% as negotiated in 2002.
A few things I did not know include that the dedicated millage for Parks and Rec (VLPRA 1.5mil) and the Industrial Authority (VLCIA 1 mil) come out of county property taxes, not out of any city property taxes. Also VLCIA’s millage started since 2002, before which VLCIA was funded out of hotel-motel taxes, including Valdosta hotel-motel taxes.
I also remarked to Paige Dukes that I wished the cities had prepared 
similar position statements. She said they may be depending on LOST negotiating documents by the Georgia Municipal Association (GMA), and that there were similar documents by the Association of County Commissioners of Georgia (ACCG), both which you can find linked in on the LAKE website.
The ACCG guidelines include this interesting passage:
Continue reading