We survived an earthquake and a hurricane all in one week. We must, as they say in the South, be blessed. So I started thinking of all the things in my life for which I am grateful. Here’s just a smattering of what I came up with: I may never be able to open my […]

I suppose I shouldn’t be so hard on people in leadership positions. They’re probably too busy to think of the consequences of decisions they make. Like when Butch Davis, leader of the football program at UNC while it racked up nine or so charges of violating NCAA rules, offered his son a scholarship to play […]

A well-designed website can give a veneer of legitimacy to any venture. Just ask the visitors to a sham website that looked convincingly like a site to buy DPAC tickets. Buyers who purchased tickets through the sham site paid more than double the price they would have paid on the official DPAC site. A website […]

One in the morning, and Mayor Mark Kleinschmidt appeared stunned by a one-vote majority of his Town Council colleagues that sounded the death knell to Aydan Court. All nine members of council showed up last night for what turned out to be six hours’ worth of information covering two development matters, the proposed moratorium on […]

Tonight’s Town Council meeting will be the closest event Chapel Hill has to the World Series of Poker. The Aydan Court special use permit application returns for another round; expect players to see, raise, call and maybe even bluff. Zinn Design Build owns a 6-acre parcel off N.C. 54 in Durham County, just behind UNC’s […]

Most of the time, municipal processes work just fine. But once in a while, something comes up that gives “government workers” a bad name. The street resurfacing recommendation that is part of tonight’s consent agenda is one of them. Because of the increase in tipping fees at the landfill that the county did not determine […]

Through a happy confluence of timing, some lucky TV viewers were able to watch Scotty McCreery win American Idol and still tune into the continuation of the public hearing for Aydan Court. And just as some season finales stretch a one-hour show into two (or, if you’re Oprah, an entire week and cause the NBA […]

Imagine waking up one day to a train coming through your yard. That’s the specter that haunts property owners along the edge of Morgan Creek. The light rail system has been in the works for years, long enough that some of us won’t believe it until we see it. But the various options for its […]

Sometimes what you don’t say says it all. Council members – minus Mayor Mark Kleinschmidt, Matt Czajkowski and Gene Pease, who were absent – got schooled in the art during a discussion of the Ephesus Church-Fordham Boulevard Small Area Plan at last night’s Town Council meeting. Jim Babb, managing director of real estate for Bluerock […]

Any article that promises tips on how to trim a household budget gets my attention. Self-employed and married to someone who retired early, I’m highly motivated to keep our expenses low. But invariably I come away from those financial advice columns disappointed – whatever they suggest, I’ve already done. At this point, there’s very little […]