The big news is that
Lowndes County Planner Jason Davenport is leaving his position at the county for another opportunity.
GLPC welcomed its new member, Calvin Graham, Sr., who only said “Thank you,” to replace Celine Gladwin, who declined to be reappointed. See previous post for some background.
The one case, CU-2018-05 LifeSouth3. Community Blood Centers – 301 Woodrow Wilson, was presented by City Planner Matt Martin, and after three times addressing one question, Continue reading
Since Celine Gladwin declined to be reappointed, GLPC has a new member, Calvin Graham, Sr., who ran for Valdosta City Council District 2 in 2013, when he said he was an Army veteran who subsequently worked for the Department of Defense. Sandra Tooley won, and is still on the Valdosta City Council.
That leaves the Planning Commission with no female members and no architect.
There’s only one case on the agenda for this evening: Continue reading
On the day she died, Nobel Prize-winning economist Elinor
Ostrom published
her last article, in Project Syndicate, 12 June 2012,
Green from the Grassroots,
This grassroots diversity in “green policymaking” makes economic sense. “Sustainable cities” attract the creative, educated people who want to live in a pollution-free, modern urban environment that suits their lifestyles. This is where future growth lies. Like upgrading a mobile phone, when people see the benefits, they will discard old models in a flash.
Of course, true sustainability goes further than pollution control. City planners must look beyond municipal limits and analyze flows of resources — energy, food, water, and people — into and out of their cities.
Worldwide, we are seeing a heterogeneous collection of cities interacting in a way that could have far-reaching influence on how Earth's entire life-support system evolves. These cities are learning from one another, building on good ideas and jettisoning poorer ones. Los Angeles took decades to implement pollution controls, but other cities, like Beijing, converted rapidly when they saw the benefits. In the coming decades, we may see a global system of interconnected sustainable cities emerging. If successful, everyone will want to join the club.
And counties, and regions, and watersheds, of course.
As Mayor Julian Castro of San Antonio said, there is a
"nexus between sustainability and job creation."
We don't have to wait for San Antonio or Los Angeles or Beijing or
Atlanta to lead the way:
we can get on with it right here where we are.
-jsq
What about supplier diversity outreach efforts at Southern Company (SO), asked David (didn’t get his last name; sorry). SO CEO Thomas A. Fanning responded that those efforts were critically important, and part of how they got paid. CEO Fanning added:
When you think about building a nuclear plant, you’re procuring great big huge scale equipment. The minority suppliers really don’t lend themselves to say a gigantic steam turbine or a reactor vessel. But where we can use diverse suppliers in our supply chain efforts, we absolutely do undertake to make sure that they have an opportunity to compete for the business, and we can coach them along to make sure that they are ultimately successful.
Perhaps this monoculture of suppliers for huge equipment is yet another flaw in building mainframes in a networked-tablet world. They could get a lot more diversity by deploying solar power plants throughout sunny south Georgia, especially if they included financing housetop and business roof solar.
Earlier CEO Fanning had gone on at some length about diversity on SO’s all-white board, saying that SO didn’t measure diversity by such metrics as race or ethnicity or gender. Some people wonder if they measure it by different majors at Auburn or Georgia Tech. Not to be ungenerous, I do applaud SO for their diversity outreach efforts.
Here’s the video:
Supplier diversity outreach –David ?
Shareholder Meeting, Southern Company (SO),
Callaway Gardens, Pine Mountain, Georgia, 23 May 2012.
Video by John S. Quarterman for Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE).
-jsq
She also said: Continue readingHi, I’m a parent, and I have three kids in school right now; one just graduated.
First of all, CUEE sent me flyers… to insult my schools…. That was very hurtful for my children to read those flyers telling them how bad my schools are. My schools are not bad, and I’m very upset about that.
[applause]
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.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.
-jsq