{"id":634,"date":"2009-02-24T07:59:00","date_gmt":"2009-02-24T12:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/2009\/02\/expansion-of-lowndes-county-commission.html"},"modified":"2009-02-24T07:59:00","modified_gmt":"2009-02-24T12:59:00","slug":"expansion-of-lowndes-county-commission","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/2009\/02\/expansion-of-lowndes-county-commission.html","title":{"rendered":"Expansion of Lowndes County Commission?"},"content":{"rendered":"Since a proposal for nine commissioners was voted down in the 1980s\nand the Justice Department required a minority-majority district,\nleading to the current three commissioners plus non-voting chair,\nthere have been various attempts to expand the number of Lowndes County\nCommissioners.\nThomas County has eight commissioners, as do several other nearby counties\nwith less population than Lowndes County.\nFor that matter, the city of Valdosta has I think seven city council\nmembers, for less than half the population of Lowndes County.\n<p>\nThe previous commission was divided among itself on this issue,\nand the local state representatives\nwould not bring it up in the legislature without consensus among the commission.\nThe new commission has been trying to move forward on this.\nThe last version I heard involved keeping the same commission districts as now,\nplus adding two overlapping commissioners for new east and west districts.\n<p>\nInterestingly, there was nothing said about all this at Monday&#8217;s work session,\nyet we discover\n<a href=\"http:\/\/valdostadailytimes.com\/local\/local_story_054230858.html\">\nin the newspaper<\/a>:\n<blockquote>\nPaige Dukes, Lowndes County information officer, said the commission\nvisited with reapportionment in Atlanta twice during the past few\nweeks. As a result of those meetings, the reapportionment office forwarded\nseveral maps to the commission for its review, Dukes said.\n<p>\nLowndes County Commission Chairman Ashley Paulk said, \u201cThe commission\ncontinues to work feverishly on the expansion issue. We are at an 80\npercent consensus regarding a plan that will meet local needs and satisfy\nrequirements determined by the Department of Justice. I am working one\non one with each commissioner in an effort to get a plan to citizens as\nsoon as possible.\u201d\n<p>\nPaulk was a guest of Scott James on his morning radio on program TALK\n92.1 Monday, and in the course of that interview, Paulk said that if\nall the commissioners agreed on the plan, the expansion could actually\nbe voted on by the board at tonight&#8217;s meeting.\n<\/blockquote>\nIt&#8217;s not clear from that just what they might vote on,\nbut from context maybe it would be to forward a plan to citizens to vote on.\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"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 [&hellip;]","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1736,12],"tags":[1835,1849,3,2,2114,2113,45],"class_list":["post-634","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lowndes-county-commission-georgia","category-politics","tag-ashley-paulk","tag-county-commission","tag-georgia","tag-lowndes-county","tag-radio","tag-scott-james","tag-valdosta"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4Gj0O-ae","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/634","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=634"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/634\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}