Tag Archives: construction

Valdosta’s Penn Station to be torn down –Alfred Willis @ VCC 2014-10-23

Received as a response to Outside corporation trumps Valdosta citizens about historical Nichols house? –Jim Parker @ VCC 2014-10-23. -jsq

The City Council’s deliberations on the 23rd had nothing to do with any construction project, but rather focused on the sale of a parcel — as Councilman Carroll’s message of the 25th accurately conveys. The Council’s vote was historic because it signified openly the supremacy of certain private property interests (specifically, those entailed in selling as a form of enjoyment) over civic cultural interests, at least within the municipality of Valdosta. In doing so it gave Valdosta’s citizens a peek behind a curtain that had remained drawn over historic preservation here since 1980. The construction of buildings, the demolition of buildings, the remodeling or moving of buildings, the maintenance and preservation of buildings, their sale and their purchase, their adaptive reuse — all of those processes are historical processes that turn on the resolution of conflicts among interests. Thus they all reveal structures of power and the machinations of powerful individuals and groups. How could they not?

The construction of the Nichols house in the early 1950s showed with a degree of clarity that probably no other Valdosta building of that time did, the identity, values, attitudes, and mode of operation of Valdosta’s leadership. Its demolition will Continue reading →

Work Session Minutes @ LCC 2011-01-10

Ordinance or policy? That question comes up for at least two items, Special assessment and Speed control devices, in the minutes of the 10 January 2011 Work Session of the Lowndes County Commission. -jsq

LOWNDES COUNTY BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS
MINUTES
WORK SESSION
Monday, January 10, 2011
Continue reading →

$30,000 saved by library furloughs, $millions for building construction —Idelle Dear @ LCC 2013-01-08

Idelle Dear noted we’re up to 12 library furlough days, and reported a flaw in that picture to the 8 January 2013 Lowndes County Commission Regular Session.

I looked across the street and there are millions of dollars being spent on the construction of the hospital, construction of the VSU Health Sciences building. And yet what is happening, because this is a mandatory furlough for all employees, is that people who are employed by the South Georgia Regional Library, most of whom are minimum wage, work part time, rely on the income: they are going to lose out….

We’d heard about these state-mandated furlough closings at a library board meeting. Idelle Dear spelled out some of the consequences, and made some telling comparisons.

Something is wrong with this picture, and I realize there are different kinds of money, but something is wrong with this picture if we can spend millions and millions of dollars on construction of these buildings and yet shut down the library and the employees who are in low income are going to be affected.

She said she wasn’t sure most people even knew about all this. And she heard somebody had said most people have Internet at home, but

Continue reading →

No T-SPLOST means 30% match for LMIG, and what else? @ LCC 2012-12-10

To pave or not to pave? That is the question that was danced around by County Engineer Mike Fletcher and County Manager Joe Pritchard, with interest, at yesterday morning’s Lowndes County Commission Work Session, on agenda item 8.d. Georgia Department of Transportation Local Maintenance & Improvement Grant.

County Engineer Mike Fletcher said Lowndes County was receiving from GDOT a Local Maintenance and Improvement Grant (LMIG) of $746,984.75 for FY “two thirteen”. Because T-SPLOST didn’t pass, the county has to come up with a 30% match, which is $224,095.43. He said there was a work sheet and project list in the board packet (which the rest of us don’t get to see).

County Manager Joe Pritchard said with change from LARP (Local Assistance Road Projects, primarily for resurfacing) to LMIG the county could now use these funds for any purpose, and had planned to use LMIG for Continue reading →

Vogtle circular firing squad delaying opening

Southern Company and the other owners of Plant Vogtle are blaming the contractors (who are suing them) for further delays in construction. How much money will they waste before they never open?

Kristi E. Swartz wrote for the AJC yesterday, Disputed costs at Vogtle rise,

Georgia Power and a group of municipal and cooperative electric companies are building twin 1,100-megawatt reactors, the first in the United States to win permits in 30 years. The total expected cost of the project is $14 billion, but potential cost overruns at Vogtle, located in Waynesboro in east Georgia, continue to grow, according to the recent Southern Co. regulatory filing.

Delays in getting federal licensing approvals for the new reactor design and then for the entire project have been cited as the chief culprit.

Because of the dispute with contractors over the additional costs, “the owners are evaluating whether maintaining the currently scheduled commercial operation dates of 2016 and 2017 remains in the best interest of their customers,” the filing said. The total amount of the cost overruns could be well over $900 million; Georgia Power owns 45.7 percent of the project, so its share is $425 million, the latest filing said. Originally the overrun was projected at $400 million when the issue was first made public in April.

Up another $25 million since April? How long until it gets into billions of cost overruns? Which will be paid by whom?

Continue reading →

Concrete flaws at Vogtle delay construction, require modified nuke permit

Concrete sinking into the dirt less than two months after licensing? One license amendment already requested and dozens more to come? Does this give you confidence in Southern Company's ability to build a safe nuclear plant without huge cost overruns charged to you the Georgia Power customer or you the taxpayer?

In mid-March the nuclear industry bragged about

Progress continues at the construction site of Plant Vogtle units 3 and 4 — the country's newest reactors and the first to be licensed since 1978.

We discover that at the end of March Southern Company had to ask NRC for a licensing change due to construction problems. Vogtle Nuclear Construction Faces “Additional Delay” Based on Miscalculations in Foundation Concrete — News Release from NC WARN and Alliance for Nuclear Accountability—April 9th, 2012, Continue reading →

Lowndes County: commuter rail hub

Look at all those other railroads converging on Valdosta in that GFRR project proposal map. Valdosta is a historical rail hub for passenger traffic to Atlanta, Savannah, Jacksonville, Orlando, Thomasville, Tallahasssee, and beyond. All the tracks are still in place and still in use for freight. With some rolling stock and a few deals with the railroads, Valdosta and Lowndes County could become again a passenger rail hub with a mass transit system for local commuting to jobs and for long distance travel.

Add a bus system and local commuting becomes very practical. People could take the train to town and catch a bus to work. Many people could walk or take a bicycle to their work from the train station. This could work the other way around, too. People could live in Valdosta and work in Ray City or Lakeland or Hahira or Lake Park or Clyattville and not have to drive to get there. That would save a lot of wasted time and wasted fuel.

This kind of mass transit would attract the knowledge-based workers we supposedly want around here. Including jobs our high school and college graduates could take, so they wouldn’t have to move elsewhere.

And upgrading the railroads, building stations, building and refurbishing houses and apartments near the stations, etc., would employ a lot of construction workers; probably as many as road projects and sprawling subdivision projects, but without the sprawl.

-jsq

PSC lining up to vote for solar

Previously PSC Chair Lauren McDonald said he wanted Georgia Power to “come up with options in the next 30 days for expanding the tiny amount of electricity generated from solar power”. Yesterday, PSC Commissioner Chuck Eaton said “Solar is great for diversity, independence, research, and business,” and added that until recently he had discounted solar, but now he had seen it. And it turns out that Friday PSC Commissioner Tim Echols wrote an op-ed saying
It wasn’t until I entered the training room of Mage Solar in Dublin and saw 40 subcontractors in their solar academy that I got it. The growing solar industry is not just about funky collectors on a roof or left-leaning environmentalists who hate fossil fuel. It is about skilled jobs in manufacturing and construction, about economic development in Georgia, about consumers saving money on their power bill so they can spend it somewhere else, and about empowering people to essentially create their own power plant. This could eventually be big.
That’s three out of five commissioners. I’d call that a majority shaping up to do something in the PSC Energy Committee meeting of 16 July 2011. I couldn’t say what, exactly, since there nothing on the energy committee’s agenda about this. But something solar seems to be in the works.

-jsq