Macon County Commissioners 08-12-2014

The Macon County Commissioners met Tuesday night and had a lot of material on the agenda. The two public hearings on proposed telecommunications tower (cellphone towers) took about an hour and public comment lasted about an hour as a number of people spoke for and against fracking. Overall, the meeting lasted a little over three and a half hours (not counting the closed session). After the closed session, Vice Chairman Ronnie Beale recessed the meeting until August 26th.

I divided the video into three parts:

Part 1 Public Hearings


Part 2 Public Comment


Part 3


The public agenda and the agenda that was distributed to members of the local media are posted below.

MACON COUNTY BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS
AUGUST 12, 2014
AGENDA

• Call to order and welcome by Vice-Chairman Beale
  
• Announcements
  
• Moment of Silence
  
• Pledge of Allegiance
  
• Public Hearing(s) -
  • 6 p.m. - Telecommunication Tower Application from Cellco Partnership
  • 6:30 p.m. - Telecommunication Tower Application from Tower Engineering Professionals
  
  NOTE: Consideration of either or both applications would immediately follow the public hearings.
  
• Public Comment Period
  
• Adjustments to and approval of the agenda
  
• Reports/Presentations
  • 2014 Small Health Department of the Year Award - County Manager
  • NCACC Liability & Property Pool's 2013 Safety Award - Charlie Eaton, NCACC Property & Casualty Program Specialist
  • Recognition of Habitat for Humanity - Commissioner Beale
  • Historic Preservation Week in Macon County - Barbara McRae
  • Region A Update - Ryan Sherby
• Old Business
  • Fox Ridge Project Review Fee - Doug Johnson, Macon County Soil and Water Conservation
  • Revised Lease for Waterwheel Manufacturing, Inc. - County Attorney
• New Business
  • Purchase of Electronic Health Record - Jim Bruckner, Macon County Public Health Director
  • Consideration of lease agreement with Harmony House Foods, Inc. - EDC Director Tommy Jenkins/County Attorney
  • Consideration of Interlocal Agreement for Recreation with the Town of Highlands - County Manager
  • Endorsement of "Sit for 60, Move for 3" Program - HR Director
  • Consideration of lease agreements for the Community Care Clinics in Franklin and Highlands - County Attorney
  • Consideration of agreement to provide recreation opportunities with the Scaly Mountain Historical Society, Inc. - County Attorney
• Consent Agenda - Attachment #11
  All items below are considered routine and will be enacted by one motion. No separate discussion will be held except on request of a member of the Board of Commissioners.
  • Minutes of the July 8 and July 24, 2014 meetings
  • Budget Amendments #16-20
  • Tax releases
  • Settlement report for Fiscal Year 2013-14 taxes
  • Monthly ad valorem tax collection report
  • Resolution honoring the 100th anniversary of Holly Springs Baptist Church
• Appointments
  • Ratification of e-mail poll regarding appointments to the Highlands Tourism Development Commission
  • Commissioner appointment to the Smoky Mountain LME/MCO County Commissioner Advisory Council
• Closed session (if necessary)
  
• Adjourn/Recess

Press Packet for 08-12-2014 Commissioners Meeting by Thunder Pig

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USA Today Poll Reveals Younger People Don't Trust Nuclear Power

Lord, save us from the Luddite children!!!

Here are the results of a poll on USA Today I just saw regarding support for building nuclear power plants in the United States:

35% 18-31 years old

47% 32-43 years old

52% 44-62 years old

63% 63 years and older

This is just another example of the disgrace of our public education system being overrun by lefties who think it is more important to teach cultural marxism than it is to teach science and math.

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Political Pistachio Radio For Nov 9th

Here is an excellent show by Douglas Gibbs, where he focuses on the issues of (from his show notes) Islam's Jihad with Money! Sharia-Compliant Finance on Wall Street!, Gay Marriage does not violate the Equal Protection Clause set out in the 14th Amendment, and tonight I tell you why - plus much more Conservative Commentary:

Show Page
Blog

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Science Blogburst

Here are a few science-related things I thought worthy to pass along:


An 8 second exposure I took of the Space Station on June 8, 2008

According to Heavens Above, I will have a chance to view the International Space Station in the morning, that is if the sky is clear.

Still seven years away from its rendezvous with Pluto, the New Horizons spacecraft was awoken from hibernation for the second annual checkout of all systems. The spacecraft and its team back on Earth will also undergo three months of operations as the New Horizons will make observations of Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. But the first order of business was uploading an upgraded version of the software that runs the spacecraft’s Command and Data Handling system.

Pluto Spacecraft Gets Brain Transplant

After the August 21st sunspot debacle where SIDC reported a spot and initially NOAA didn’t, mostly due to the report from the Catania Observatory in Italy, we have another similar situation. On September 11th, a plage area developed.

This is what passes for a sunspot these days

The Surface Stereo Imager on NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander caught this dust devil in action west of the lander at 11:49 a.m. local Mars time on Sol 104, or the 104th Martian day of the mission, Sept. 9, 2008.

Dust devils have not been detected in any Phoenix images from earlier in the mission, but at least six were observed in a dozen images taken on Sol 104.

Dust devils are whirlwinds that often occur when the Sun heats the surface of Mars, or some areas on Earth. The warmed surface heats the layer of atmosphere closest to it, and the warm air rises in a whirling motion, stirring dust up from the surface like a miniature tornado.

Dust Devils on Mars



CERN's LHC -A Video Tour of One of the Most Important Events of the 21st Century

High temperature, oxygen-free gasification turns carbon sources such as coal or biomass mostly into gaseous H2 and CO (syngas). These two gases can be converted via either chemical or biological means into a wide range of fuels--including gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, ethanol, methanol, etc etc. These carbon-to-fuel processes can be made very clean, with virtually no toxic byproducts remaining after the conversion process. Brian Westenhaus reports on progress coming directly from the long work of the Gas Technology Institute (GTI) in Illinois.

Gasification: Turning Any Carbon Into Any Fuel

The August anomaly is -0.10 (in terms of a degree Celsius).

HISTORICAL COMPARISON OF THE SINGLE DATA POINT
*It is 0.0547 degrees colder than July 2008
*It is 0.296 degrees colder than August 2007
*It is the coldest August anomaly since 2000
*Warmer anomalies can be found as far back as September 1979 (0.27). The data starts December 1978.

RANK
*19th warmest (12 coldest) August anomaly out of 30 data points since 1979
*223rd warmest (135th coldest) anomaly out of the total 357 monthly observations.

September 2008 Update on Global Temperature - UAH

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The Pickens Plan

From T. Boone Pickens:

America is in a hole and it's getting deeper every day. We import 70% of our oil at a cost of $700 billion a year - four times the annual cost of the Iraq war.

I've been an oil man all my life, but this is one emergency we can't drill our way out of. But if we create a new renewable energy network, we can break our addiction to foreign oil.

On January 20, 2009, a new President gets sworn in. If we're organized, we can convince Congress to make major changes towards cleaner, cheaper and domestic energy resources.

To get this done, I need your help. Check out the plan. If you think it's worth fighting for, please join our effort.

Source: Pickens Plan

Commentary

This is something I can get behind. Check it out, and help spread the word.

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Crunching The Numbers On Algal Gasoline

According to the US Energy Information Administration, US gasoline consumption is currently averaging (4-week rolling) 9.027 million barrels of gasoline per day, or about 379 million gallons (42 gallons per barrel). Thus, to completely replace US gasoline consumption, Sapphire Energy would need to “scrub”, at 100% efficiency, just over 83000 cubic kilometers of air per day. Certainly there is plenty of air available - this volume represents less than 0.02% of the volume of air in the first 1 km of atmosphere. Nevertheless, it is an enormous amount to process each day.

Of course, Sapphire Energy’s near-term goals are much more modest. As CEO Jason Pyle told Biomass Magazine, “the company is currently deploying a three-year pilot process with the goal of opening a 153 MMgy (10,000 barrel per day) production facility by 2011 at a site yet to be determined.” Using my fuzzy math above, that equates to a minimum of 92 cubic kilometers of air a day. Still seems like a lot.

So where will all of the CO2 come from?

Source: Watts Up With That? (Be sure and read the whole post over there).

Commentary

This is the one thing enviro-weenies seem to forget when they try to force alternative energy on us...it is usually not scalable the way oil is scalable. They make good supplemental sources of energy, but cannot replace oil completely.

I am very interested to see more research in this direction for producing fuels from biological sources that are not also food sources. Al Fin has a post on a similar effort that boasts 100,000 gallons of oil an acre production, which leaves me to ponder the possibility of lefties and enviro-weenies (often the same creature) will begin to oppose that process should it promise to free us from bondage to the Middle East, and perhaps create true wealth here. If it is successful...count on it as surely as the protests against wind mills and clean coal plants...which they championed a few years ago.

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Our Next National Purpose: The Lexington Project

Senator John McCain has a plan: 




Our nation's future security and prosperity depends on the next President making the hard choices that will break our nation's strategic dependence on foreign sources of energy and will ensure our economic prosperity by meeting tomorrow's demands for a clean portfolio. John McCain has made the necessary choices - producing more power, pushing technology to help free our transportation sector from its use of foreign oil, cleaning up our air and addressing climate change, and ensuring that Americans have dependable energy sources. John McCain will lead the effort to develop advanced transportation technologies and alternative fuels to promote energy independence and cut off the flow of oil wealth to repressive dictatorships like Iran.

Source: The Lexington Project

Commentary

While I do not agree with every aspect of his plan, I believe it is a step in the right direction. Just by announcing our intent to drill more oil here at home would send oil prices lower.

I have problems with McCain's extremely ignorant view on what he calls "speculators". The very word belies a Marxist connotation. If he is against someone betting on prices going up (called going long), then he should be against someone betting on prices going down (going short), and one would think he is against people trading stocks, futures, or other financial instruments just to make money. Someone should educate the Senator on what makes Capitalism work. The markets are the best indicator of how the economy is doing, and makes judgment calls on the worth of companies and entire segments of the economy of far more efficiently than any economist, or group of economists ever could.

I support The Lexington Project just on the merits of using our own resources, which would be better than giving our money to despots in the Middle East. That money would be better spent paying Americans to do the work here. And oil jobs pay well. Very well. I have a friend who works on an oil rig off the coast of Louisiana six months out of the year, and takes the other six months off to do whatever he wants.
 
Something like this could supercharge our economy beyond our wildest creams...and the worst lefty nightmare.

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Who Needs Oil or Ethanol When You Can Grow Algae?

...PetroSun BioFuels Refining has entered into a joint venture to construct and operate a biodiesel refinery near Coolidge, Arizona. The feedstock for the refinery will be algal oil produced by PetroSun BioFuels at company owned and operated algae farms to be located in Arizona....The refinery will have an annual production capacity of thirty million gallons and will produce 100% renewable biodiesel. PetroSun BioFuels will process the residual algae biomass into ethanol....Petrosun claims that Independent studies have demonstrated that algae is capable of producing in excess of 30 times more oil per acre than corn and soybean crops.

Source: Al Fin

The Free Market will find a way to solve our problems, if only the givernment will get out of the way...

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West Carolina Report and Ten Myths About Nuclear Power

Not that they have anything to do with one another, I just didn't want to do a post for each topic.

West Carolina Report

First, I have updated the first four pages of West Carolina Report with news headlines that link to the news of the day. Of course, the widgets on those pages are always up-to-date, thanks to the miracle of RSS Feeds. I will have my state and local widgets ready soon. I also have upgraded the hosting because I exceeded my bandwidth allocation for last month. I've got 600GB now...and I'm not likely to exceed that anytime soon (unless one of the big boys link to me again!) and it also affords me more hard disk space that will allow me to make the next phase of improvements I have been planning.

Ten Myths About Nuclear Power

1. Uranium is running out
2. Nuclear is not a low-carbon option
3. Nuclear power is expensive
4. Reactors produce too much waste
5. Decommissioning is too expensive
6. Building reactors takes too long
7. Leukemia rates are higher near reactors
8. Reactors lead to weapons proliferation
9. Wind and wave power are more sustainable
10. Reactors are a terrorist target

Source: Amy Ridenour's National Center Blog

Be sure to click over to read Amy's post, and follow her links and arm yourself to combat the Lies From The Left on nuclear power. I'm still disappointed that Duke Power didn't go through with the nuke plant in Macon County. That would have been cool, and a great boost to the local economy, not to mention giving the local greenie weenies a heart attack!

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