The item with 9 conditions, VA-2012-14,
is at a rather vague location,
“the southeast corner of West Brookwood Drive, North Oak Street,
North Toombs Street, and West Jane Street”
which presumably means
200 W Jane St, as shown in the map here.
That’s directly across W. Toombs Street from 1302 N Patterson Street,
which is part of VSU.
Here’s the agenda.
-jsq
AGENDAContinue reading
REGULAR MEETING OF THE VALDOSTA CITY COUNCIL
5:30 PM Thursday, October 11, 2012
COUNCIL CHAMBERS, CITY HALL
Pushers of the charter school amendment must be desperate! Blurring the line between public officials and private citizens, state Attorney General Sam Olens wrote:
Local school boards do not have the legal authority to expend funds or other resources to advocate or oppose the ratification of a constitutional amendment by the voters. They may not do this directly or indirectly through associations to which they may belong….
As Jim Galloway wrote yesterday for the AJC in Sam Olens orders local school boards to stay out of charter school fight,
That means organizations like the Georgia School Boards Association, and perhaps, the Georgia School Superintendents Association, would be barred from speaking out against the proposed constitutional amendment.
And would that include organizations like PAGE, which produced the slides that a local middle school teacher used last week? What about that teacher, or Dr. Troy Davis, speaking a few weeks earlier, both on their own time?
Olens’ letter would apply to what the VDT said was in the VBOE and LCBOE joint resolution, at least the part about “The resolution explicitly states that the boards are asking voters to not support the Constitutional Amendment relative to state charter schools.”
But what does Olens mean, duly elected local school boards don’t have authority to express opinions about educational matters that would directly affect the people who elected them?
Why has Sam Olens suddenly gotten religion about this now, after he was silent last year when both VBOE and LCBOE adopted resolutions against the school “unification” referendum? Where was he when both boards of education hosted numerous forums opposing consolidation?
Will he next be telling the Valdosta City Council it can’t pass a resolution opposing a referendum? What exactly is the difference between that elected body and an elected school board as far as expressing such an opinion? And all of those resolutions were non-binding opinions.
Will Sam Olens next be telling the VDT it can’t editorialize against the charter school amendment?
How desperate are the pushers of the charter school amendment?
Continue readingIt would be easier for people to vote for SPLOST VII if they knew what they were getting. So far, that’s difficult to tell from what’s been published. Many questions remain to be answered.
We’ve already seen the WCTV story that quotes a total of $35 million for SPLOST VII. And Jason Schaefer wrote for the VDT 5 August 2012, SPLOST project list released: Renewed sales tax would build library, auditorium
The county projects penny sales tax collections through SPLOST VII to total at least $150 million during a six-year period, a sum that could fund a library complex, an auditorium, the installation of a mandated public safety radio system, an array of municipal water and sewage improvements, new equipment for police officers and firefighters, and road maintenance projects.
There is not adequate funding for these projects if the SPLOST referendum does not pass, according to city and county planners.
$150 million is not $35 million. $150 million divided by six is $25 million, not $35 million.
The mystery deepens.
Continue readingReceived today. -jsq
Continue reading
September 26, 2012
George Boston Rhynes
5004 Oak Street
Valdosta, Georgia 31605TO: U.S. Department of Housing
and Urban Development
Valdosta City Government
Valdosta Housing Authority
Valdosta Industrial AuthorityThe following is our honest responses to HUD and in response to the City of Valdosta’s 8th Year of responding to HUD CPMP Consolidated Annual Performance and Evaluation Report. This includes Narrative Responses to CAPER questions in relations to and with the Consolidated Planning Regulations and questions from the general public as highlighted on page 5, paragraph 1.
CITIZENS VIEW POINT AND RESPONSES: {GEORGE BOSTON RHYNES AND JOHN ROBNISON}
after reviewing all previous CAPTER’S and the city’s responses to them, I commend the City of Valdosta for responding to HUD in an extremely professional manner on paper. One can see and feel the professional prowess involved in providing these answers the City of Valdosta has placed on paper over the city’s (long) historic past. However, when one looks deeper into the problems facing our beloved community, one will find the following to be as Paul Harvey would say the rest of——-the story!
GENERAL QUESTIONS: The City of Valdosta’s response on the issues remains the same as reported in many other CAPERS such as:
- City attained the goal of:
- # of homes was brought up to code.
- Worked in conjunction with——
- to train, resident information sessions were held that yielded nearly 30 attendees etc.
- Staff continues to…., Overall, the city is pleased with the second Consolidated Plan Submission.
- (3.a) The city hosted several Section 3 Information Sessions and will continue to provide more information to…. Work with local community and faith-based organizations to identify and address.
- I could go on and on with these highly professional lines of what some see as solutions to the real problems in the City of Valdosta, Georgia. However there is another side and forgive me for not going through the complete CAPER in the above manner. I am sure your time is valuable; therefore I will cut through the chase and provide the following in response to the City of Valdosta RESPONSES. Not only to this CAPER but others we have read and taken into consideration:
A recent meeting held in the Valdosta City Annex about Community Housing etc. perhaps exemplifies
Update 2012-09-27 8:50AM: Added video, stills, and notes about the County Palace and Internet access.
The seventh Special Local Option Sales Tax, SPLOST,
will be on the November ballot.
Not to be confused with the just-defeated
bogus regional transportation T-SPLOST,
or last year’s successful
educational ESPLOST,
or the
currently renegotiating property-tax-relief LOST,
SPLOST VII will follow up on SPLOST VI
in supporting local infrastructure projects.
Greg Gullberg reported for WCTV today,
Campaign Kicks Off For Valdosta Tax
(no video appears to be available):
The text story link has vanished, but
video has appeared.
Continue readingThere is a campaign in Lowndes County to rally for the tax called SPLOST, or the Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax. It could bring in as much as $35 million, but that is only if voters say it’s worth the extra pennies.
Received yesterday on WCTV on biomass site VLCIA v. Sterling Planet. -jsq
Wiregrass Activists for Clean Energy (WACE) have made it clear from
the start that biomass plants have a number of issues: 1) biomass plants bear significant health risks; 2) biomass plants waste enormous amounts of water; 3) biomass plants are risky investments in an increasingly competitive energy sector; and 4) biomass plants contribute to global warming.
In the light of rising global temperatures, worsening drought conditions, and dropping prices for solar panels, an increasing number of people are understanding these simple truths.
The Industrial Authority has to be congratulated for the courage to admit that energy from biomass plants is indeed more expensive than energy from solar plants, and we have not even figured in the costs associated with the consequences of air pollution coming from biomass plants.
(For more information on biomass plants, here a testimony I recently gave: http://www.bredl.org/pdf3/120828_WACE-Comments-Docket_NO-E-100_SUB113.pdf)
Although this point has already been made earlier, note again that solar plants are much better alternatives, economically and environmentally: they do not pollute our air, they do not need any water, and a huge spill of solar energy is simply called a sunny day … of which we have plenty here in the south.
-Michael G. Noll
-jsq
Looks like history may repeat itself like last decade,
now that LOST negotiations between the cities and the county have failed.
Except this time apparently the law has changed so they can’t sue each
other directly.
Instead next it goes to
Superior Court “baseball arbitration”.
However, I bet that still involves lawyers at taxpayer expense,
not to mention the Court’s time.
Greg Gullberg reported for WCTV yesterday, Tax Negotiations Hit Another Dead End In Lowndes County, and asked Gretchen down at the County Extension, who said,
It’s sort of sad because it is a waste, if you will, of taxpayer dollars. That the elected officials can’t get together and come to some agreement to say that they all understand how the money has to be divided up Yeah, it’s sad that more money has to go to lawyers insted of being spent on services.
I continue to think the local governments could spend their time together better trying to increase the size of the pie instead of squabbling over slices of it.
-jsq
The City of Valdosta almost wins for transparency about some upcoming road resurfacing work, except the details are in some Windows-only non-web format.
20 August 2012, In the City This Week, Aug. 20-25, 2012,Aug. 20: LMIG Work Continues Today.The street resurfacing made possible through a Local Maintenance and Improvement Grant (LMIG) will continue Aug. 20 with the removal and replacement of curb and gutter on a dozen designated streets in the city. Road resurfacing of these streets is scheduled to begin on Aug. 27. Click here for more information.
That leads to Project News and Updates which has a link LMIG Resurfacing Schedule and Desiginated Areas which gets:
You have chosen to openLMIGWould you like to save this file?
which is a: BIN file (63.9 KB)
from: http://www.valdostacity.com
And that’s actually a ZIP file containing a bunch of XML files. We should trust Valdosta’s website enough to be secure that we should download random ZIP files? Fail!
Gretchen decoded that ZIP bomb and sent it in plain text, which I include here. My question is: why didn’t Valdosta simply put it on the web that way to start with?
-jsq
Continue readingJulian Assange of Wikileaks spoke from the Ecuadorean Embassy in London today (video, text):
The next time somebody tells you that it is pointless to defend the rights we hold dear, remind them of your vigil in the dark outside the Embassy of Ecuador, and how, in the morning, the sun came up on a different world, and a courageous Latin American nation took a stand for justice.
The British government made a stunning mistake in throwing away the worldwide goodwill just gained through the London Olympic Games, by actually beginning to storm a sovereign embassy in violation of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations that was observed throughout the Cold War. How could they be so foolish? This man, this reporter and publisher, they think is somehow more dangerous to them than the armed might of the Soviet Union was? This is as if JFK arrested MLK after John Glenn’s first orbital flight (a step which JFK fortunately did not take).
There is something you can do, even when the world is turned upside down:
Continue readingSince the floods of 2009 Valdosta had been waiting on FEMA
to say whether it would grant some funding for improving the wastewater treatment plant that flooded then. Finally, FEMA gave a decision, no, which allowed the Valdosta City Council to choose another path. But not in time for improvements before the same plant had another wastewater overflow.
WCTV posted PR from the City of Valdosta of 17 August 2012, Major Sewage Overflow from Withlacoochee Water Pollution Control Plant,
Continue readingAt approximately 1 a.m. on Aug. 16, 2012, the pumps in the Influent Pump Station of the Withlacoochee Water Pollution Control Plant (WPCP) stopped working.
An emergency bypass pump system was placed into service at 12:45 a.m., on Aug. 17; and as a result, the sewer spills are no longer occurring. Contractors are currently on site investigating the cause of the failure, which has not yet been determined, while also making necessary repairs to the damaged equipment.
Sewer overflows were recorded at the following locations within the sewer collection system:
