All posts in category Ethics

Save all of us from ourselves

The town has confidence in us to use our handguns responsibly in public parks, and perhaps to use our cell phones responsibly on public roads (unless we are single or in a marriage not recognized by the state or are childless or orphaned), but not to make decisions in the best interest of health regarding […]

New year resolutions?

Council meetings resume one week from tonight. Here’s a glimpse of what may grace the agenda in 2012: Homeless shelter’s Good Neighbor Plan: A Better Site representatives are participating in the meetings, but IFC won’t allow the proceedings to be recorded. A Better Site wants teeth to the plan, consequences if the tenets are violated; […]

2011 highlights

A sign in the window of the tax office at Town Hall, where about a dozen of us were waiting to pay our taxes yesterday around lunchtime, lists various products the town sells to market itself: flags, tote bags, books and ball caps. As I totaled up my various tax bills – vehicle, business, real […]

Rubygate

What does it take to get kicked off a volunteer committee? Ruby Sinreich found out recently when she was called on the carpet for some inappropriate tweets she sent during a CH2020 meeting. Sinreich was the co-chair of the outreach committee, and feeling frustrated during a CH2020 meeting, she tweeted publicly a derogatory comment that […]

Shame of the NCAA

I agree with Tom Sorensen’s piece in the Oct. 27 News & Observer that college athletes should be paid. Paying student-athletes seems like the right thing to do. After all, how is a student-athlete’s work at his or her sport any different from that of a work-study student, except the work-study student gets paid? But […]

Trick or tweet

At Monday night’s Town Council meeting, when once again I heard the tremor in a grown man’s voice as he spoke at the podium in front of a ring of council members, a phalanx of staff, a smattering of people in the audience and a couple of TV cameras, it brought home to me how […]

Redemption

On Wednesday, I learned from school system spokeswoman Stephanie Knott that the donation to Rashkis Elementary School that resulted from the retirement party Penny Rich catered amounted to $25, a check the school received from Rich on Aug. 26. That cast a worse pall over what started out as a well-intentioned party to honor a […]

This round’s on Rashkis

Carwashes, sorting clothes at the PTA Thrift Shop, linking your VIC card at Harris Teeter – these are the school fundraising methods of the plebeian. Rashkis Elementary School teachers have a much more innovative way of raising money: selling alcoholic drinks at a party where students who are minors work as servers. Penny Rich told […]

Why Pennygate matters

When I worked as a cashier in a grocery store, I was not allowed to check out my mother. Store policy. Thirty years later when my son worked as a cashier at a different grocery chain in a different state, the policy at his store was that cashiers couldn’t check out any of their relatives. […]

Pennygate

Ethics? Ethics, and transparency, for that matter, are for the little people, Penny Rich seems to believe. At the May 23 Town Council meeting, in which she petitioned council to lift the alcohol ban from 523 E. Franklin St., Rich argued that the former museum belonged to “all the people.” And by that she evidently […]