Where is the Lowndes County Commission getting the money for paving parts of nine roads? Who are they appointing to the Airport Authority and the South Georgia Community Service Board?
Here’s the agenda:
Continue readingLOWNDES COUNTY BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS
PROPOSED AGENDA
WORK SESSION, MONDAY, MAY 13, 2013, 8:30 a.m.
REGULAR SESSION, TUESDAY, MAY 14, 2013, 5:30 p.m.
327 N. Ashley Street – 2nd Floor
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
William Geyer expressed two widespread opinions,
keep the solid waste disposal sites open, and reprioritize SPLOST,
when he spoke at Tuesday’s
Lowndes County Commission Regular Session.
County Manager Joe Pritchard, the driving force behind the waste disposal decision,
still wasn’t listening.
There’s people out there that can’t afford what y’all are offering. And with a budget as large as we got, I know there’s some way to keep them open. Not only that, Florida has them, and they don’t even man them. I talk to a lot of people out there, they don’t come here, but I wish you really would reconsider, because it is a plus for this county, the elderly, a lot of people here who are struggling, who can’t afford it. I’m not saying I can’t; I can afford it, but there’s a lot of people here who can’t afford it.
At that first SPLOST meeting, it was around 1984 or 5 they did my road, Union Road. What happened to the rest of the roads that are dirt? We’ve somehow lost our priorities. We want a new library, we want a new this or that. What about these people who live on these dirt roads that were promised they’d be paved. County Manager, how many miles of dirt roads do we have in this county?
County Manager Joe Pritchard obviously wasn’t listening,
“Pardon me?” he said, after the Chairman prodded him.
He didn’t know, either; he motioned
Continue reading
Simon Rogers wrote for the Guardian 22 November 2011, US road accident casualties: every one mapped across America
369,629 people died on America’s roads between 2001 and 2009. Following its analysis of UK casualties last week, transport data mapping experts ITO World have taken the official data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration – and produced this powerful map using OpenStreetMap. You can zoom around the map using the controls on the left or search for your town using the box on the right – and the key is on the top left. Each dot represents a lifeThe national view is very interesting, but let’s look at Lowndes County:
I don’t know what that adds up to, but it looks to me like a lot of dead people, and in just nine years, from 2001 to 2009. Far more dead people than killed by terrorism.
OK, but where are these fatalities happening? All over the county. Let’s zoom in on Hambrick Road: Continue reading
| How Much | To Whom | From | For What |
|---|---|---|---|
| $7,200.00 | Lovell Engineering Associates | Valdosta | Design of Culvert |
| $48,010.00 | Doyle Hancock & Sons Construc. | Doerun | Clearing and Grubbing |
| $1,357,887.92 | The Scruggs Company | Valdosta | Paving |
| $1,413,097.92 | All contractors | Total |
This financial information comes from an open records request filed by Carolyn Selby more than a year ago and finally fulfilled 17 March 2011. Copies of all the pages received are in the flickr set.
How many other roads could have been paved for $1.4 million?
If this road had been paved like a local rural road,
instead of like a state highway (literally according to
state highway standards) it would not have cost nearly
as much and probably another shorter road could have been paved, too.
And if other roads were paved like local roads instead of state
highways, how many more of them could be paved?
They still wait while this one got paved to the tune of $1.4 million.
-jsq
Michael E. Kanell and Ty Tagami, writing in the AJC about
More than 16,000 flood-related claims filed in Atlanta area,
quote Robert Klein, professor of risk and insurance at Georgia State University:
Moreover, the maps that set out those high-risk areas are “woefully inadequate,” he said.And maybe somebody should do something about that continued development and sprawl.Maps should be recalibrated to account for continued development and sprawl, he said: destruction of trees, paving of roads and parking lots, addition of new homes to older areas and landscaping all change the way water drains — or doesn’t drain.
We love the Valdosta Daily Times (VDT), WCTV, and WALB, but if they published anything about that, we missed it. They have space constraints, and we don’t. Local governments do a lot of good things (and other things) that don’t get reported in the traditional press. This is where LAKE comes in. Continue reading