Tag Archives: budget

Lowndes County Manager Joe Pritchard reviews the budget process

Here is the complete playlist for yesterday’s (8 September 2011) Lowndes County Lunch and Learn, in which County Manager Joe Pritchard reviewed the county’s budget process. County Clerk Paige Dukes said she would also send the slides for posting.


County Manager Joe Pritchard presents the budget process
Lowndes County Lunch and Learn 8 September 2011
Videos by Gretchen Quarterman for LAKE, the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange

Here are last month’s Lunch and Learn playlist and slides.

-gretchen

Millage and Budget

What will Lowndes County do with that millage it’s going to adopt Tuesday? That would be in the budget.

Maybe they think they sufficiently discussed that at the budget hearing where no citizen questions were entertained. About the budget they refused to post online until after they approved it.

So, did they post it by that Friday, 1 July 2011, as County Manager Joe Pritchard promised? Continue reading →

LCC: work session cancelled, regular meeting Tuesday 26 July 2011

County to adopt tax millage Tuesday; cancels work session about that. See next post for more. Now: the agenda for Tuesday.

According to lowndescounty.com, the Monday morning work session is cancelled,

“Due to the lack of items on the agenda that require additional information”
but the Lowndes County Commission meets Tuesday evening as scheduled. The agenda does not contain the formerly tabled Nottinghill rezoning proposal for Cat Creek Road. Since rezonings are usually considered once a month (every other meeting), presumably the Commission will take that one back up in August.

The rest of the agenda is the shortest I’ve ever seen, so unless lots of citizens sign up to be heard, don’t blink or you’ll miss Tuesday’s meeting.

LOWNDES COUNTY BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS
PROPOSED AGENDA
WORK SESSION CANCELLED
REGULAR SESSION, TUESDAY, JULY 26, 2011, 5:30 p.m.
327 N. Ashley Street – 2nd Floor
Continue reading →

Lowndes County has transparency issues —John S. Quarterman @ LCC 28 June 2011

No unfinished drafts will be published while Ashley Paulk is chairman, or so he told us.

I asked him how he recommended citizens provide input to the budget process? He said at every meeting.

So I said I wondered why the county attorney seemed to be overbudget. No response.

Then I got to my main point, which was that the county seems to have a number of transparency issues, such as the missing ordinances he’d just heard about, or Vince Schneider’s Foxborough McDonald’s issues, or the animal shelter issues, or the T-SPLOST list that the Commission approved on the basis of a one page list of one-liner with no details that turns out to include things like $10 million to widen New Bethel Road to Lanier County.

I said I would like to compare the county’s submissions for T-SPLOST funding to the county’s Thoroughfare Plan and the Comprehensive Plan; if I could find those plans online. The Chairman said my five minutes were up. I said “Alrighty” and moseyed back to my seat. As you can see for yourself, it was actually 4 and a half minutes.

-jsq

Here’s the video: Continue reading →

Budget meeting and Lowndes County Commission meeting tonight

Remember there’s a second budget hearing today, 28 June 2011 at 5PM. The county didn’t publish the proposed budbget, but LAKE did. Maybe you’d like to come ask some questions, like these by Jessica Bryan Hughes.

Then there’s the regular session of the County Commission; agenda appended. They plan to vote tonight to approve the budget they never published.

-jsq

LOWNDES COUNTY BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS
PROPOSED AGENDA
WORK SESSION, MONDAY, JUNE 27, 2011, 8:30 a.m.
REGULAR SESSION, TUESDAY, JUNE 28, 2011, 5:30 p.m.
327 N. Ashley Street – 2nd Floor
Continue reading →

Why make it hard to obtain the budget? —Jessica Bryan Hughes

Why, indeed? -jsq
This is ridiculous.

-Jessica Bryan Hughes

This comment came in yesterday on Proposed Lowndes County Budget published by LAKE.

Proposed Lowndes County Budget published by LAKE —Gretchen Quarterman

Apparently there was a budget hearing last week that no one attended. I don’t see it on the county calendar.

We know it happened though because the paper reported on it.

The second budget hearing is scheduled for June 28 at 5:00pm and is on the Lowndes County web site calendar.

At the work session this morning, I asked Ms. Stephanie Black if she could e-mail me a copy of the budget and she said yes. Ms. Paige Dukes said that Ms. Black should not e-mail me the document, but I could look at a paper copy. A paper copy could be provided to me for $0.25 per page. I asked if there was an electronic copy and Ms. Dukes said that this document was not available in an electronic form.

Given that the document is neatly typed and clearly is generated from a spread sheet, I think that it is not true that this document is unavailable in an electronic format.

I asked if I could photograph it instead and Ms. Dukes said Continue reading →

Lowndes County budget hearing today 5PM

That’s 5PM, before the usual 5:30 PM Lowndes County Commission regular session time, at 327 North Ashley Street. The county has published a public notice about this second hearing. It’s not clear they did that for the first budget hearing, which was last week. And the budget doesn’t include the T-SPLOST boondoggles Lowndes County is requesting.

VDT opined 23 June 2011, What We Think: Surviving, not thriving:

Lowndes County Commissioners held a budget hearing Tuesday to discuss the 2011-2012 fiscal year with citizens, only to have no citizens appear. The budget will be finalized at a public hearing Tuesday, June 28, prior to the regular commission meeting.

With all of the attention paid lately to officials and their expenses, you would think that the opportunity to learn how the county spends citizens’ tax dollars would have been an opportunity not to be missed. But missed it was.

After giving people in Valdosta a hard time for not showing up at their city’s budget hearing, I have to say: mea culpa. I wasn’t there.

However, I would ask: how were we supposed to know about it? Someone from LAKE has been at every regularly-scheduled Lowndes County Commission meeting in the recent past, videoing the whole meetings, and I must have missed the announcement of this recent budget hearing, which is also not on the county’s website calendar.

The VDT continues:

Maybe it’s because there’s nothing new about the county’s budget. It’s the same as it has been for several years — flat.

No increases in revenue are projected. No new positions, merit raises, cost of living increases, or significant purchases, again. Caps on assessments, the continuing lull in construction, and slow sales mean no new revenue is coming in. What is projected is enough to make ends meet, but there are no frills, no luxury items, not this year.

Oh, there are luxury items, they’re just not in the budget, because the county is asking we the taxpayers to pay through the proposed new T-SPLOST tax for That’s $24 million in new taxes they’re requesting for unnecessary road projects that will promote sprawl into far north Lowndes County and into Lanier County. Sprawl that will end up costing Lowndes County more than it can bring in in taxes from the sprawling developments.

And Lowndes County has tacked onto the end a request for $7.5 million for a bus system. Which would you rather have? A bus system that would promote the entire county’s economy, or five lanes on New Bethel to add to Lanier County sprawl?

Fortunately, T-SPLOST does publicize its hearings, the next of which will be 6 July 2011 in Nashville, Georgia.

The VDT concludes;

But for Lowndes to thrive, to make such a possibility come alive, it needs citizens willing to participate in the process. We need creative thinking and we need leaders willing to listen to the possibilities of new ideas.
Hear hear!

Stay tuned for what happens when a citizen tries to get involved in the Lowndes County budget process.

-jsq

Valdosta budget hearing: no citizens spoke

Valdosta city officials advertised a budget hearing and no citizens spoke.

David Rodock wrote today in the VDT, Valdosta’s 2012 budget reviewed by citizens and public officials

City officials and staff gathered Wednesday night to discuss and review the fiscal year 2012 budget. Public participation was advertised, but no citizens presented any concern at the meeting. This is the first budget hearing, with the final adoption of the budget taking place at the upcoming regular City Council meeting on June 23 at 5:30 p.m.
No citizens. I don’t live in Valdosta, so I didn’t go. Apparently no Valdosta residents who have any economic concerns went, either.

That’s too bad, because among the items discussed was this:

  • Energy and fuel prices are a threat, since the private sector controls the costs. Public Works, the Valdosta Fire Department and the Valdosta Police Department use significant amounts of fuel.
And I bet the city spends significant funds air conditioning its buildings. Costs that could be offset by investment in solar panels for those same buildings. Solar panels that would limit ongoing electrical expenditures, and would also be a visible sign to residents and potential investors that Valdosta means renewable and sustainable energy business.
According to Hanson, for every dollar spent by residents, $1.17 is spent by non-residents.
And many of those non-residents would see those solar panels, which would spread the green reputation of Valdosta back to whereever they came from.

If Valdosta wants to be forward-looking, Continue reading →

Prisons bad for education budget

Building a prison is not just a bad business gamble now that crime rates are down and state budgets are tight. It’s bad for other things, too. As the reporter who originally broke the story about the empty new prison in Grayson County, VA noted 2 January 2011, Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project, a national group that promotes criminal justice reform, summed it up:
“Corrections over the past 25 years has become an increasingly big component of state budgets, to the point that it’s competing for funding with education and other core services,” Mauer said. “And you can’t have it both ways anymore.”

If we want knowledge-based jobs here, a private prison is not how to get them. Let’s not build a private prison in Lowndes County, Georgia. Spend those tax dollars on education instead.

-jsq