Now maybe the county commissioners will listen to their constituents. Nearly 45 percent of registered voters cast ballots in yesterday’s election, an “off” year devoted mainly to local races and local issues. According to the election results reported on the Orange County website, precincts in the rural sections of the county were among those with […]

Just as pulling a wisdom tooth makes room for the remaining teeth to realign, the many vacant seats on the dais at last Monday’s Town Council meeting allowed similar shifting. First up on the agenda that night was a proposed change in the wording of the Land Use Management Ordinance pertaining to the amount of […]

Franklin West LLC threw down the gauntlet. We won’t know until Nov. 22 whether the town will pick it up. At the public hearing this past Monday, a representative of Franklin West, the group of investors who bought The Courtyard after it was foreclosed on, went over the scaled-back plans for a special use permit […]

After Time Warner Cable conked out during the broadcast of the Town Council meeting last night, some viewers might have been lost to the baseball post-season game on another channel. Pity that town planner J.B. Culpeper didn’t tune in as well. She might have learned something about being a team player. During the public hearing […]

We live in a town that spent more on fixing up a skate park than on repairing our history museum to keep it open. Remember that, the next time a council member cites the image of Chapel Hill as a reason for voting one way or another on a matter. I’m harping on the museum […]

Perhaps it’s my Midwest, Protestant upbringing that prevents me from enjoying a party unless everyone is invited. Every year, I go on the Parade of Homes, touring only the priciest entries. I love seeing what people with more money than they know what to do with do with it. The economy has had its effect […]

You’d think that Mayor Mark Kleinschmidt, a lawyer, would know better than to try to bluff in a situation where he could so easily be proved wrong. Yet Monday night’s Town Council meeting had shades of prosecutor Christopher Darden asking O.J. Simpson to try on a pair of shriveled leather gloves, which led to defense […]

Dan Ariely, in his book Predictably Irrational, tells of a study he conducted in which he asked people to choose between two prices for a service. The vast majority chose the lower price. Then he presented the same scenario, keeping the first two prices the same but adding a third, higher, price. The vast majority […]

Don’t you hate it when your own words are thrown back at you in an argument? Council member Jim Ward must have been thinking that during the Town Council meeting of Sept. 27 when Citizens for Responsible Growth lined up a passel of experts to speak out against rezoning part of the Jordan Lake watershed […]