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 […]

The list of what downtown needs to thrive ran off the page by the time Chapel Hill residents and downtown business owners had had their say. About 150 participants between the morning and afternoon discussions last Thursday threw in their ideas at public planning sessions sponsored by the Town of Chapel Hill and the Downtown […]

The Community Survey that recently was presented to the Town Council had a lot of information in it about satisfaction with town services. One area where the council should study real hard is what residents want in bike safety. As many respondents were dissatisfied with the ease of biking and walking in town (35 percent) […]

We are basically happy campers, those of us who live in town, or more accurately, 696 of us who responded to a survey conducted by ETC Institute of Olathe (not Google), Kan., and sent to 2,000 households. An additional 91 of us who were not selected to receive the 8-page form in the mail completed […]

Talk around the water cooler at the Crosland construction company is that work on the Chapel Hill North and Chapel Watch Village projects in north Chapel Hill will be back on track in 90 to 120 days. Those who’ve been around for more than 10 years were probably looking at those projects, which represent 243 […]

Periodically, my husband and I pledge to live healthier lives by swearing off our main vice, salty snacks. Harris Teeter may be having a buy-one-get-one-free special on potato chips, and we’ll virtuously walk past the chip aisle with only a longing, backward glance. And that will work fine, until we throw together a meal that […]