Valdosta Cutting Back

On the same day a VDT editorial said “NO!” to any negative talk about the local economy, the VDT published this:
Published March 05, 2009 12:40 am –

Valdosta deals with economic downturn
Hiring freeze, possible furloughs part of the plan
By Matt Flumerfelt
The Valdosta Daily Times

VALDOSTA — The city of Valdosta recently announced it is taking measures to compensate for declining revenues. Among the steps considered at the city’s recent annual planning retreat to adjust to the revenue shortfall is a hiring freeze on new positions and possibly furloughing some city employees.

“The city of Valdosta is experiencing the same effects from the economic downturn that all other governments and businesses are experiencing,” said Valdosta City Manager Larry Hanson. “The unemployment rate in Valdosta and Lowndes County has nearly doubled over the last 18 months. That means revenues such as sales tax have decreased.”

There’s more, all well worth reading.

That the city was retrenching was no secret to anyone who attended the mayor’s state of the city address, but apparently the degree has increased since then.

VDT Goes Ted Stevens

stevens21.jpg Tired of hearing people say newspapers are dying, the Valdosta Daily Times channels former Alaska Senator Ted “Series of Tubes” Stevens’ favorite response:
My answer to all of the above is an emphatic “NO!”
The other talk the VDT is saying no to is about foreclosures and job loss. It’s curious about the foreclosures, since it was a little more than a year ago that the VDT published “Lowndes area not immune from home foreclosures” by Billy Bruce, in which he used counts of foreclosure ads from the VDT as data. That was a big change from the previous VDT tune of this area being immune to the financial problems plagueing the rest of the country.

Ah, but Billy Bruce doesn’t work there anymore! And the VDT is back to its old tune. The verse this time is that Lowndes county is not as bad as metro Atlanta counties in foreclosures. Yes, that’s true, and we’re all glad of that. Yet foreclosure rates are up here, too. And above 7% unemployment is not as bad as Atlanta, either, but isn’t normal.

This is a curious excuse: Continue reading →

Chip Your Chicken?

Shannon Hayes writes in an op-ed in the New York Times:
AT first glance, the plan by the federal Department of Agriculture to battle disease among farm animals is a technological marvel: we farmers tag every head of livestock in the country with ID chips and the department electronically tracks the animals’ whereabouts. If disease breaks out, the department can identify within 48 hours which animals are ill, where they are, and what other animals have been exposed.

At a time when diseases like mad cow and bird flu have made consumers worried about food safety, being able to quickly track down the cause of an outbreak seems like a good idea. Unfortunately, the plan, which is called the National Animal Identification System and is the subject of a House subcommittee hearing today, would end up rewarding the factory farms whose practices encourage disease while crippling small farms and the local food movement.

NAIS has been around awhile, but now Congress is proposing to make it mandatory. Hayes goes on to detail how much it would cost small farmers to chip every cow and chicken, calf and pullet.

Besides, NAIS is about controling disease by quarantine, which is locking the barn after the horses are out. Hayes gets to the root of the matter: Continue reading →

Paving Quarterman Road

Quarterman Road, 9 March 2009Several months ago a contract for grubbing and clearing Quarterman Road was let. I posted about some of the results of that.

Yesterday, 10AM, March 12 11, 2009, was the bid selection meeting for the contract for paving Quarterman Road. It was a public meeting. Carolyn Selby reports the following bids were read:

Scruggs$1,394,660.47
Reames$1,502,909.80
Hancock$1,495,737.76
The low bid was selected, so Scruggs will be paving Quarterman Road.

The county engineer had estimated $1,336,000.00 for the project.

The county commission will vote on March 24, 2009 at the regular meeting.

Neighborhood Watches Good in Bad Economy

Speed Limit 35 Neighborhood Watch CNN has an interesting interactive graphic about house safety:
When the economy goes down, crime often rises, says Al Lenhardt, CEO and president of the National Crime Prevention Council.
Lenhardt sums it up:
They reduce crime and they reduce the fear of crime …. It’s the golden rule — watching out for others.
Although it’s not well known, Lowndes County, Georgia does have a neighborhood watch program (see picture of a sign), as do some of the cities in it, including I think Valdosta and Hahira.

Expansion of Lowndes County Commission?

Since a proposal for nine commissioners was voted down in the 1980s and the Justice Department required a minority-majority district, leading to the current three commissioners plus non-voting chair, there have been various attempts to expand the number of Lowndes County Commissioners. Thomas County has eight commissioners, as do several other nearby counties with less population than Lowndes County. For that matter, the city of Valdosta has I think seven city council members, for less than half the population of Lowndes County.

The previous commission was divided among itself on this issue, and the local state representatives would not bring it up in the legislature without consensus among the commission. The new commission has been trying to move forward on this. The last version I heard involved keeping the same commission districts as now, plus adding two overlapping commissioners for new east and west districts.

Interestingly, there was nothing said about all this at Monday’s work session, yet we discover in the newspaper:

Paige Dukes, Lowndes County information officer, said the commission visited with reapportionment in Atlanta twice during the past few weeks. As a result of those meetings, the reapportionment office forwarded several maps to the commission for its review, Dukes said.

Lowndes County Commission Chairman Ashley Paulk said, “The commission continues to work feverishly on the expansion issue. We are at an 80 percent consensus regarding a plan that will meet local needs and satisfy requirements determined by the Department of Justice. I am working one on one with each commissioner in an effort to get a plan to citizens as soon as possible.”

Paulk was a guest of Scott James on his morning radio on program TALK 92.1 Monday, and in the course of that interview, Paulk said that if all the commissioners agreed on the plan, the expansion could actually be voted on by the board at tonight’s meeting.

It’s not clear from that just what they might vote on, but from context maybe it would be to forward a plan to citizens to vote on.

Whole cities and metro regions became giant Ponzi schemes

Richard Florida writes in The Atlantic about How the Crash Will Reshape America:

To an uncommon degree, the economic boom in these cities was propelled by housing appreciation: as prices rose, more people moved in, seeking inexpensive lifestyles and the opportunity to get in on the real-estate market where it was rising, but still affordable. Local homeowners pumped more and more capital out of their houses as well, taking out home-equity loans and injecting money into the local economy in the form of home improvements and demand for retail goods and low-level services. Cities grew, tax coffers filled, spending continued, more people arrived. Yet the boom itself neither followed nor resulted in the development of sustainable, scalable, highly productive industries or services. It was fueled and funded by housing, and housing was its primary product. Whole cities and metro regions became giant Ponzi schemes.
 

Phoenix, for instance, grew from 983,403 people in 1990 to 1,552,259 in 2007. One of its suburbs, Mesa, now has nearly half a million residents, more than Pittsburgh, Cleveland, or Miami. As housing starts and housing prices rose, so did tax revenues, and a major capital-spending boom occurred throughout the Greater Phoenix area. Arizona State University built a new downtown Phoenix campus, and the city expanded its convention center and constructed a 20-mile light-rail system connecting Phoenix, Mesa, and Tempe.

And then the bubble burst. From October 2007 through October 2008, the Phoenix area registered the largest decline in housing values in the country: 32.7 percent. (Las Vegas was just a whisker behind, at 31.7 percent. Housing in the New York region, by contrast, fell by just 7.5 percent over the same period.) Overstretched and overbuilt, the region is now experiencing a fiscal double whammy, as its many retirees—some 21 percent of its residents are older than 55—have seen their retirement savings decimated. Mortgages Limited, the state’s largest private commercial lender, filed for bankruptcy last summer. The city is running a $200 million budget deficit, which is only expected to grow. Last fall, the city government petitioned for federal funds to help it deal with the financial crisis. “We had a big bubble here, and it burst,” Anthony Sanders, a professor of economics and finance at ASU, told USA Today in December. “We’ve taken Kevin Costner’s Field of Dreams and now it’s Field of Screams. If you build it, nobody comes.”

Valdosta Aeterna

vldseal.jpg A new year brings Mayor Fretti’s State of the City address for Valdosta. It was quite interesting as an exercise in transparency: he walked through what seemed like every city department, one by one, in addition to talking about overarching cost-saving measures and emphasizing that Valdosta has no debt, not even bond debt. This was all good.

I noticed that, unlike last year, there were no military personnel pointed out or even present. I guess the mayor noted that saber-rattling is not in fashion this year. He did mention some details of recent economic improvements at Moody AFB; everyone knows the importance of Moody to the local economy.

I did think it was a little over the top when the mayor included in his welcome of new and old county officials that “all roads lead to Valdosta, the county seat.” Valdosta Aeterna! Well, Valdosta, unlike Rome, may not be eternal, but bickering between the city and the county apparently is.

Also, as I mentioned to the mayor afterwards, I had hoped he would say a few words about the proposed bus system. He indicated that he had simply forgotten to do so. That’s understandable, considering all he did talk about. Next year.

If you live in Valdosta, I understand you can view the mayor’s speech on local cable for some time to come. I recommend it. The full text is on the Valdosta city web site (yay!), even though it’s in a hidden link (which I’ve dug out and linked in here) and in Microsoft Word (boo!) instead of as plain HTML.

In the regular agenda, the elephant not in the room became even more obvious by its absence. At the citizens wishing to be heard section, nobody came forward. For that matter, there were almost no citizens present other than elected officials, city employees, contractors, and press. This is a problem. The city of Valdosta is going to some lengths to be transparent and to accept citizen input. Where are the citizens?

Also, this being Valdosta, the one item on the agenda that got the most discussion time was the tennis court improvements at McKey Park. Sports rule in TitleTown!

Perhaps the new county commission chair will think about giving a State of the County talk.