Weekly Update 03/07/2014

From Bob Schwartz, City Manager 


Floodplain Ordinance - Here is a copy of the transmittal letter submitting our revised floodplain ordinance to the state Department of Natural Resources AND a copy of the approval email. We’re done!
Oxford College Community Classroom - Hoyt Oliver was the first speaker for this round of lectures. On Tuesday, March 4 he told us about the Zen of wood working. We had about 25 attendees including Mayor Roseberry and Councilmember Windham. The next lecture will be on the science of insomnia by Dr. Ken Carter, Professor of psychology. This will be Tuesday, March 18 at 4 PM.
Emory Asbury Water Line Project – We had our second progress meeting on March 5th. 28.2% of the funds have been spent; 35.7% of the pipe has been placed; and 25.2% of the contract time has expired. So, we are a little ahead of schedule in spite of the bad weather in February. The contractor has completed the water main on Asbury. The pipe has been installed but the final grading has not been done. The new line has been sanitized and has passed all tests. Homes on Asbury will be connected to the new main over the next month. The contractor has started work on Emory. Work began this week on the Covington end and is proceeding north toward Palmer Stone School. Next week we will send a letter to all the residents along the project giving them an update.

MEAG Minutes – MEAG is the Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia and is our wholesale electric cooperative supplier. Here are a few excerpts from the MEAG board meeting on February 20, 2014.

• January was very cold. Off system purchases of electricity were $1.5 million over budget. The revenue from off system sales in January, on the other hand, exceeded the projected budget for all of 2014. Energy consumption was 9% above budget for January and 17% higher than last year at this time.

• MEAG and ECG worked well together during the severe ice storm. ECG coordinated the 15 crews that were dispatched from cities that were not affected to cities that had outages. A rough estimate was that at the peak there were 6,000 MEAG customers out.

• Plant Wansley, one of the coal plants, operated at 48% of capacity in January, the highest it has been since late 2008.

• The coal supply at Plant Scherer is getting a little short. Normally they have three trains of coal delivered per day but recently, because of the weather, the deliveries have averaged two per day. They expect to resolve the delivery problems soon.

• During January the total MEAG energy supply was 50% nuclear, 32% coal, 10% SEPA (hydro), 5% purchased, and 3% gas.

Police Statistics – Here’s where we are fiscal year to date – that’s July 1 – February 28.