Next week I will begin training to be a U.S. Census enumerator. Yes, I will be one of those folks who go from dwelling to dwelling to gather information to complete the decannual count. The Census expects to hire 870,000 temporary workers such as myself to go around and knock on doors – as many […]

Two neighborhoods in Chapel Hill are proceeding with Neighborhood Conservation District applications. The town has six NCDs already and has spent tens of thousands of dollars on consultants to help with the process. So who’s in charge of making sure that land owners in and residents of NCDs comply with the ordinance? Nobody. That was […]

Council members Laurin Easthom and Penny Rich were chatting at the snack table in council chambers Monday night when, at 7 p.m. sharp, Mayor Mark Kleinschmidt shooed them to their seats. “We want to end on time tonight,” he said, making a veiled reference to a petition Easthom put on the agenda. With two council […]

More than 35 years after women marched around with “Government: Get your hands off my body” signs, I may have to print up a new batch. In the early 1970s, the signs were to stand up for a newly pregnant woman’s right to choose what to do with her body. We won that fight. On […]

Got a little card in the mail from the Orange County tax office yesterday. The card was one of those fold-here-tear-here-do-it-in-this-order constructions that are so evocative of governments everywhere. The card was to tell me that my request to have the assessed value of my property lowered had been denied. I applied for the reduction […]

It’s hard enough to make council members happy with a new development project, even more so as the clock moves toward midnight on a night that council members already had listened for more than three hours to impassioned citizens making their cases for or against urban archery, followed by an hour and a half of […]