Burned by Burns?

Such generosity we Orange County taxpayers show. Why, just look at the salary Nancy Oatesand benefits package we are paying County School Superintendent Del Burns — an annual rate of nearly $300,000. Add up his base pay, health coverage, a monthly car allowance of $250 and another $50 a month toward his cell phone, and we are paying Burns $24,621 a month. That generous, some might say exorbitant, pay is for working only three-quarters time. His contract grants him five paid vacation days every month.

Burns is not the highest-paid county schools superintendent in North Carolina. But those who receive comparable pay oversee school systems with three to eight times the number of students in Orange County. And his peers likely work full time.

What makes Burns worth a compensation package that equals the salary of the president of the United States? According to county school board chair Steve Halkiotis: “He has brought a level of professionalism in our operations and systems that was much needed. … He has rejuvenated the staff.”

Sounds like a basic part of the job description to me.

Certainly teachers, who make in the $30,000 to $60,000 range, need some shoring up after the dissing they got by the General Assembly and governor during this past election year. Will seeing the riches showered on their boss have a trickle-down effect on their morale?

Orange County has extra money in its pockets this year, due to a combination of higher sales tax revenue from the recovering economy and higher property taxes that come from valuations made before the real estate market crashed. But that doesn’t mean we should spend like drunken sailors.

The Orange County schools have some serious problems of failing buildings and failing students. We need to give careful consideration to how to spend to maximize the benefit to the community. Paying someone to stay in a job he doesn’t want does not seem the right path.

Burns’ contract is for five months only. Apparently he was so ready to leave the job before the end of the school year that his devotion had to be bought. An employee who is only there for the money likely is not fully engaged. The county would have been better off appointing an interim superintendent who really wants the job.
– Nancy Oates

by on December 22, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in County business, Schools, Taxes
Posted by Nancy Oates on December 22, 2014

https://chapelhillwatch.com/2014/12/22/burned-by-burns/

Urban renewal

Don heard that a store in Burlington sold Cheerwine with real sugar, not Nancy Oateshigh-fructose corn syrup, and always one to encourage a healthy lifestyle, I went with him to search. I’d never been to Burlington beyond the outlet stores that used to flourish off the interstate until Tanger Mall lured them away. As we drove past the empty shopping centers toward downtown where the big-box stores and apartment complexes squeezed out the modest neighborhoods of this former mill town, I thought, “This could be Chapel Hill in 30 years.”

Burlington’s town council surely didn’t intentionally approve away any charm the town might have had. Elected officials likely did what our Town Council members are doing: approve projects that bring in more property tax revenue than currently exists for the site, without thought to how the development works with the community now and in the future.

Years ago, the people who lived in Burlington worked in Burlington. Though the mills closed, outlet stores remained, and residents found work in retail. But once Tanger siphoned off the outlet stores and Alamance Center drew the national chains, Burlington retail clerks had to commute out of town to work. Sales tax revenue dropped along with property tax revenue, and Burlington had to take what commercial development it could get.

A healthy town needs to gear development for the people who work there. Chapel Hill is lucky that the town’s main employers — the state-run university and the state-run hospital — are unlikely to go out of business. Still, I have yet to hear a Chapel Hill council member ask who will live in the spate of luxury apartment buildings it has approved recently.

Some will draw students now renting in Durham. Cram enough students in a two- or three-bedroom apartment renting for about $2,000 a month, and it becomes affordable. But who are these mythical “professional” singles and couples we hear about clamoring to rent in Chapel Hill?

Crunch the numbers: To pay $1,800 to $2,400 a month in rent, the tenant must make $65,000 to $85,000 a year. That salary range might fit a tenure-track professor who plans to put down roots and likely wants to own a home, or a full professor in Arts & Sciences who already owns a home and sees renting as a waste of money, or a senior nurse or administrator who may have a family and won’t give up a house in Mebane to stuff the spouse and children in an apartment just to ease the commute.

The developer of The Edge mentioned recruiting a grocery store, an odd choice given that there is a mega-grocery store less than a quarter-mile away, yet that same developer won’t consider a grocery store at 123 West Franklin (not after the SUP was granted, anyway).

Developers don’t seem to be thinking about what would serve the community. All the more important that council members have a vision and shape development they can be proud of long after they’ve retired out of town.
– Nancy Oates

by on December 15, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Council Members, Downtown Chapel Hill, Economic development, Housing, Land Use, Lifestyle, Taxes
Tagged , ,
Posted by Nancy Oates on December 15, 2014

https://chapelhillwatch.com/2014/12/15/urban-renewal/

Council must govern

Form-based code — it’s everywhere in Chapel Hill these days. First, Town Nancy OatesCouncil approved it for 190 acres in the Ephesus-Fordham area. Currently, Northwood Ravin is trying to get the same liberties offered by form-based code, though it hasn’t used the highly charged term, in its proposed mixed-use development The Edge, at the corner of Eubanks Road and N.C. 86. And in between, town manager Roger Stancil slipped form-based code benefits past council’s notice by allowing Northwood Ravin to convert 40,000 square feet of commercial space at 123 West Franklin into residential apartments.

Not only is Stancil turning revenue-positive space into revenue-negative — commercial property generally yields more in property tax revenue to the town that it costs to provide services, whereas residential property costs more in services than it pays in taxes — but he gave his approval without giving Town Council a chance to weigh in.

Northwood Ravin reportedly asked for the office/retail to be reclassified as multifamily residential space because of less than expected pre-leasing interest. Tepid interest in renting office/retail space signals low demand. So why not entice prospective tenants by lowering the rent?

Isn’t that the “market force” theory we’ve been hearing from Dwight Bassett, the town’s economic development officer, and Aaron Nelson, head of the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Chamber of Commerce, anytime a council member presses for affordable housing amidst the deluge of applications for luxury apartments? Build more apartments and the oversupply will temper demand, which in turn will push down rents, Bassett and Nelson say. But when a perceived oversupply of office/commercial space arises, Stancil’s response is to shift the burden to taxpayers to protect the developer’s profit.

The economic environment hasn’t changed since council approved 123 West. But the municipal regulatory environment has. In approving form-based code, council “gave away the store,” as Jim Ward said, by giving up inducements for developers to contribute to affordable housing and good stewardship of environmental resources.

At the Nov. 24 council meeting, Stancil’s staff presented a plan to incentivize developers to build green and improve energy efficiency. Matt Czajkowski pointed out that not only were the rebates the town would pay developers coming from the revenue the town had planned to use to repay the bond, but developers would have provided all of those environment-friendly things free in exchange for greater density had the town written those requirements into the form-based code in the first place.

And now East West Partners perhaps wants a piece of that deal for its building in Ephesus-Fordham. East West has twice delayed the next step in the process, maybe to qualify for the town’s energy-efficiency rebate.

Town Council has the authority to rein in Stancil’s cowboy antics. And council members have the smarts and the professional expertise to recognize when they’re getting snookered and taxpayers are being taken advantage of. We elected them to do the hard work of protecting the interests of the community. It’s time for them to do so.
– Nancy Oates

by on December 8, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Council Members, Downtown Chapel Hill, Economic development, Land Use, Taxes, Town staff
Tagged , ,
Posted by Nancy Oates on December 8, 2014

https://chapelhillwatch.com/2014/12/08/council-must-govern/

Assembled governments

County elected officials spent a million dollars of taxpayers’ money on refurbishing aNancy Oates meeting space. You’d think they could have picked out comfortable chairs.

Town and county staff and elected officials gathered around the meeting table, as well as those of us in the audience, squirmed and shifted uncomfortably in our seats, not because of what was being discussed around the table — precious little was — but because the hard plastic chairs weren’t meant for meetings that go on for more than three hours, as the Assembly of Governments meeting did on Nov. 19.

In fact, by 10 p.m., the three-hour mark for the meeting that began at 7, many in the audience and some at the table had called it quits. And who could blame them? Rarely did the players go off script — yes, selected officials took turns reading from a script to introduce topics — and much of what they said could have been written in an annual report and posted on a website.

The one exception came when Carrboro Alderman Sammy Slade and Chapel Hill Mayor Mark Kleinschmidt disagreed on a sunset clause for expanded uses of land in the rural buffer. Right now, owners of farmland in the buffer can sell their land to a developer for low-density housing. Small farming is not lucrative, and as Commissioner Earl McKee noted, “The most profitable crop farmers in the buffer can grow is houses.” So to help small farmers make more money from their operation, the county has proposed allowing farmers to open businesses such as wineries and breweries and hold large events on their land.

Whether that would achieve the goal of preserving the rural buffer or just extend sprawl and traffic, no one knows for sure. Carrboro’s solution was to say that the new uses could last only six years, at which point the governments of Carrboro, Chapel Hill and the county would have to agree on whether to extend it. Kleinschmidt argued that landowners would view that six-year end date as the point at which their land might become less valuable, so a sunset clause would be an incentive to sell to developers.

The two had a discussion that didn’t follow the “raise your hand and the moderator will call on you” format, prompting Commissioner Barry Jacobs to interrupt with his version of “Boys! Boys!”

But that kind of back-and-forth is exactly what the issue calls for. Yes, Chapel Hill’s Town Council will discuss it separately, but it would help to have input from Carrboro. And the county might want to weigh in, too.

Isn’t that what an Assembly of Governments meeting is for?
– Nancy Oates

by on December 1, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Council Members, County business, Land Use
Tagged ,
Posted by Nancy Oates on December 1, 2014

https://chapelhillwatch.com/2014/12/01/assembled-governments/

Ask a planner

This being the time of year to give thanks, I must acknowledge how grateful I am to my Nancy Oateschildren, both of whom inherited their father’s lawyer gene, for the training they put me through during their teenage years. If I had not had those years of intensive practice asking laser-like questions to get to the truth and countering their parry of equally narrow answers to hide what they didn’t want me to know, I never would have had the stamina to go so many rounds with town planning staff to find out what was going on in Central West.

Last week, surveyors, soil testers and tree cutters swarmed a 6-acre parcel of land on the north side of Estes Drive between Somerset Drive and Phillips Middle School. I recalled that when the Central West Small Area Plan was hammered out that that parcel was in the Airport Hazard Overlay District and nothing could be built there until UNC closed Horace Williams Airport. For a variety of reasons, UNC plans to keep the airport open for the foreseeable future.

I reached out to property owner Whit Rummel, and while I waited for him to respond, I called Phil Mason, the town’s development manager in charge of permits. Property owners near the Rummel parcel were concerned that crews were working without a permit to prepare the site for what a worker on-site said would be a 131-unit, multistory senior living facility.

Mason said no permit was needed as long as no large trees were cut down. He said he would look into whether the land was in the Airport Hazard Zone and what could be built there if it were. It seemed to me the time to research those questions would have been when the developer first contacted the Planning Department.

The next day, I called Mary Jane Nirdlinger, executive director of planning and sustainability, who directed me to Gene Poveromo. Though he returned my call in short order and ultimately gave me the information I sought, it took nearly 45 minutes of what felt like a cross examination of him. I wondered what I would have had to go through if I’d asked him something controversial.

By the end of the day, I’d heard back from Rummel, and piecing together the information from him and Planning Department, here’s what I learned:

A senior housing company is assessing the site for an independent living facility and is doing a survey and soil testing as part of its due diligence. To build anything larger than 24,000 square feet, the parcel would have to be rezoned, and to build more than seven units, the project would have to go through the Special Use Permit process.

The parcel is in the Airport Hazard Overlay District, so the developer would have to convince Town Council to release it from the overlay restrictions. The FAA has its own restrictions. Rummel sent the FAA a hypothetical concept plan, and the FAA saw no hazard, providing the building height did not exceed 50 feet. However, Rummel did portray the airport as soon to close, which it isn’t, and with having only two flights a day, which, as someone who lives under the flight path, I believe to be low.

Material submitted to the Planning Department is public record. Why should it take coaching from a trial lawyer to get answers from staff?
– Nancy Oates

by on November 24, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Land Use, Town staff
Tagged ,
Posted by Nancy Oates on November 24, 2014

https://chapelhillwatch.com/2014/11/24/ask-a-planner/

Which workforce?

In an email to Town Council last month, Lee Perry, a principal of East West Nancy OatesPartners, referred to Village Plaza Apartments as “workforce housing.” Perry, whose company is building the 266-unit apartment building in the vacant lot that used to be the site of a movie theater, explained that his rents, starting at $1,150 a month for a one-bedroom apartment, would be affordable to someone earning $46,000, which he said is 100 percent of the Area Median Income for a single person.

The federal Housing and Urban Development office calculates the Area Median Income, a point where half the people living in the area make more than that and half the people make less. Perry evidently assumes those incomes are distributed along a bell curve. But household incomes in Chapel Hill clump rather than flow.

University students (undergraduates and those in graduate and professional schools) make up our largest demographic. Our second-largest category is senior citizens, many on fixed incomes. These groups are offset by a fairly well-off group of high earners.

Presumably Perry has researched the income demographics and has found a pocket of childless earners who want to live in apartments and think rent of $1,150 a month is a good deal. But commercial property owners next door are the canaries in the coal mine, and one evidently came to a different conclusion about the potential customer base moving to Village Plaza Apartments.

Regency Centers, which owns the shopping center block of stores anchored by Whole Foods, is keeping its leasing options flexible. That’s just good business practice. Regency can’t discuss terms of individual leases, but independent business owners in the complex have said their leases will end anywhere from the end of 2015 through the end of 2017. (Whole Foods has a longer lease.) Some businesses have been offered extensions in 90-day increments, and others now lease on a month-to-month basis. One business, seeing the writing on the wall, packed up at the end of its lease and became an online-only shop.

Just as landlords need flexibility, business owners need certainty. Some of the shops in the complex are looking for new space and are having difficulty finding affordable commercial rents in Chapel Hill.

The fact that some of these businesses provide services that many people in the workforce need — an eco-friendly dry-cleaners, a shoe repair shop, a tailor, a thrift store — indicates to me that Regency feels change in the wind. Chain stores can afford higher rents. Regency’s leasing agent, Paul Munana, said his company has no preconceived vision of the type of businesses that will lease the space, such as the upscaling of University Mall, but it’s in a landlord’s best interest to adapt to consumer demands.

“If I make commitments now,” he said, “I’m determining the future.”

Apparently the future won’t necessarily include independent shops and service providers who cater to the workforce.
– Nancy Oates

by on November 17, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Business, Economic development, Housing
Tagged ,
Posted by Nancy Oates on November 17, 2014

https://chapelhillwatch.com/2014/11/17/which-workforce/

Insurers hold cards

Don and I received an extortion letter last month. It came from our insuranceNancy Oates company. If we did not sign a letter authorizing the company to increase our homeowners’ insurance premium by as much as 250 percent, the company would not renew our coverage. And if our insurance lapsed, our lender could call in our mortgage.

If you haven’t received a ‘consent to rate’ letter already, you will get one soon. Usually, insurance renewal coincides with the anniversary of your original mortgage.

The N.C. Department of Insurance sets the rates that insurance companies can charge. Major insurance companies believe the rates are too low in North Carolina for them to make sufficient profit. The N.C. Rate Bureau, which represents insurance companies, negotiated with the NCDOI but couldn’t get the kind of increase it wanted. Insurance companies want to raise homeowners’ insurance premiums by 17.7 percent in Orange County. Increases in other counties range from 10 to 35 percent. Go to the NCDOI’s homepage, ncdoi.com, and click on “Proposed Rates by Geographic Territory” to check the requested increase for your county.

Because the two sides couldn’t agree on reasonable rates, a hearing is going on, for the first time since 1992. It should finish up this week, after which the N.C. commissioner of insurance, who serves as judge, will make a ruling on rates.

But just in case the insurance companies don’t get the increases they want, they are sending out extortion letters to lock in consumer permission to raise premiums by as much as 250 percent at any time during the course of the policy. It is legal for the companies to do this because consumers have the option of looking for an insurance company that won’t require signing the consent-to-rate form.

Good luck with that.

All of the major national insurance companies we called required us to sign the form.

I did a little research to find out how much insurance companies are hurting. As it turns out, they aren’t. State Farm had a 16 percent increase in net worth in 2013, the highest in its company’s 91-year history, due in part to a decline in claim costs. It rewarded its CEO with a 19 percent raise to nearly $11.5 million in compensation. The CEO makes another million or so a year by serving on other corporate boards.

Allstate’s profit tripled in 2012 and it gave its CEO a nearly 10 percent bump up, to $18.7 million in 2013. Its shareholder return was 38 percent. Nationwide doubled its CEO bonus in 2012, but I could find nothing on his pay in 2013. (And, yes, all three CEOs are white males.)

Regardless of the outcome of the hearing, expect that in Orange County your homeowners’ policy premium will increase by 17.7 percent. Keep an eye out for a letter from your insurance company. Tossing it in the recyclable bin unopened could start a cascade of unintended consequences.
– Nancy Oates

by on November 10, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Business, Ethics
Tagged
Posted by Nancy Oates on November 10, 2014

https://chapelhillwatch.com/2014/11/10/insurers-hold-cards/

Ghost bikes

The electronic sign in the median of N.C. 54 urging cars to share the road with Nancy Oatesbikes might cause some drivers to keep alert to cyclists. The white Ghost Bike propped against the bridge railing next to Run-In Jim’s on MLK Jr. Boulevard will help them understand why.

In early October, Pamela Lane was killed by an SUV turning right out of the gas station on the corner of MLK and Hillsborough Street; the driver apparently didn’t see Lane riding on the sidewalk in the opposite direction. Last year, two cyclists, Ivin Scurlock and Alexandria Simou, were killed in a hit-and-run along U.S. 15-501 near Southern Village, evidently riding in the direction of traffic. And last week, cyclist Kent Winberry was killed in Durham when a pickup truck turned left in his path.

Chapel Hill has unveiled a plan to improve the odds of cyclists and pedestrians against motor vehicles. The bike-ped safety plan has some common-sense changes that may prod drivers to pay attention: for instance, changing the flashing pedestrian crossing signs across MLK and East Franklin Street to flash only when pedestrians push a button; drivers attenuate to the signs that flash constantly at present and blow past pedestrians.

But the main thrust of the safety plan is to push cyclists to ride in the street and obey the same laws as motor vehicles or face a $213 fine. One person opined that cars won’t notice cyclists until there is a critical mass of us sharing the road. Unfortunately, that will mean more cyclist deaths, because standing your ground on a bike against even a small car never ends in the cyclist’s favor.

Pre-bike-crackdown, when I rode from my home up Piney Mountain Road to MLK, I crossed Piney Mountain at the crosswalk near the entrance to my neighborhood and rode on the sidewalk against traffic. But to be legal, I must pedal uphill in the lane of traffic (Piney Mountain has no shoulder) with cars going easily 50 mph as they careen around a long downhill and around a blind curve.

Terror factor aside, I did a simple cost-benefit analysis and found it was less risky to my physical and fiscal health to ride on the sidewalk. I calculated that I could get ticketed twice a week for several months and still pay less than the medical bills for a couple broken bones should I get sideswiped by a car while riding in the road.

Maybe with all those fines, the town could afford to lay black-top bike paths along heavily traveled roads like Piney Mountain and Estes Drive that have no shoulder. Or tap the public art fund. We don’t need more Ghost Bikes as public art.
– Nancy Oates

by on November 3, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Roads, Transportation
Tagged ,
Posted by Nancy Oates on November 3, 2014

https://chapelhillwatch.com/2014/11/03/ghost-bikes/

Two worlds

I make a lot of people angry, sometimes with what I write or what I do, or as my Nancy Oatesdaughter told me once, “It’s just who you are.” But I don’t live in a world where the people who get angry at me would shoot me.

But some who live in our community aren’t so lucky, like an 18-year-old boy in Hillsborough who lives in a low-income apartment complex. One Saturday afternoon earlier this month, he walked down the steps of his building, and whoever was mad at him shot him and left, no screeching tires, nothing like what you see in the movies. Just did what he’d come to do and moved on.

The gulf between that 18-year-old’s world and mine is ocean-wide. It’s not so much the lack of money that separates his world from mine; it’s the lack of hope, the lack of a belief that if your life isn’t the way you want it to be, you can change it, without gunfire.

This teenager was not out after decent folk had gone to bed, in a part of town decent folk would steer clear of. He was home, on an Indian summer day in October, in an apartment complex where little kids raced around on their bikes and moms sat on the steps watching out for them. When the moms frantically called 911 after the shooting, a police car arrived with lights swirling but no siren. An officer saw the carnage, spoke into his shoulder mike, and shortly after that, an ambulance arrived. Because the victim didn’t die, the media didn’t deem it newsworthy. If gunfire erupted in my neighborhood on a Saturday afternoon, I bet it would have made the news, even if no one had been hit.

There is nothing I could have done that day to prevent the teenager from getting shot. What I can do, and what everyone reading this can do, is vote for elected officials who do not set policies and budgets that gut education, take away health care from people already on tight budgets, and make it harder for the working class and those without private transportation to vote.

The woman I will vote for to represent me in the U.S. Senate works to raise the minimum wage and to eliminate gender pay inequities; she pushes for women to have access to no-cost contraception; she makes it easier for veterans to get student loans. She believes government exists to serve its people, even people who don’t have a lot of money and often feel powerless to change life for the better.

I’m voting for Sen. Kay Hagan to continue to work in the U.S. Senate to balance the playing field, to move us toward the day we won’t have two so very different worlds. Early voting begins Thursday, Oct. 23. Election Day is Tuesday, Nov. 4.
– Nancy Oates

by on October 20, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Elections
Posted by Nancy Oates on October 20, 2014

https://chapelhillwatch.com/2014/10/20/two-worlds-2/

Bike wreck

My husband almost became a statistic last week in a bike accident eerily similar Nancy Oatesto the one that killed cyclist Pamela Lane the week before.

He and I had come out of the Community Center end of the greenway and were riding on the sidewalk along Estes during the after-work rush-hour. We chose to ride on the side against traffic to go toward Franklin Street because it has fewer risky places for cars to turn into and out of. The side of Estes going with traffic has two bank driveways, the post office entrance and exit, a driveway to a small office complex, the more heavily trafficked egress to The Center and the pork chop entrance and exit to Walgreens. I’ve seen too many car-on-car crashes at The Center and didn’t want to be part of a car-on-bike accident. Cars don’t even watch out for other cars there. A cyclist would be only so much roadkill.

So we opted for the side where we had to contend only with a radiology center, a Pizza Hut, the Chamber of Commerce and Caribou Coffee. Don was in the lead when a brownish-gold SUV shot up the incline out of the Chamber of Commerce parking lot. The driver paused briefly, apparently looking only left to check for cars, then made a right turn onto Estes and sped away. (And I don’t blame Aaron Nelson here, though I did wonder what kind of vehicle he drives.)

As soon as the SUV appeared in his line of sight, Don slammed on his brakes so hard he flipped over the handle bars. Had he landed in traffic or in front of the SUV, news headlines would have talked about a second cyclist getting killed within days of the first. Instead, Don made a five-point landing on the pavement, leading with his chin. His worst injuries were a finger bone snapped clean in two at one joint and popped out of another, and a cracked elbow. He hobbled to the Fast-Med on the corner, where he received excellent care.

But I couldn’t sleep that night, thinking how close he’d come to a much worse outcome. And how that driver could have been me. Who hasn’t been in a hurry, seen a break in traffic and gone for it without looking right to see what non-vehicular traffic might be in our path?

We tout ourselves as a bike-friendly town, and when I ride in bike lanes or in the street on the many thoroughfares that don’t have sidewalks, bike lanes or shoulders, almost all of the cars and trucks have given me room. But the occasional one that doesn’t scares the bejesus out of me.

We are so fragile on a bike or on foot, and far too many drivers pay too little attention to what’s going on outside their vehicle. A bike friendly community starts with drivers who are alert, educated and aware.
– Nancy Oates

by on October 13, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Lifestyle, Roads
Tagged
Posted by Nancy Oates on October 13, 2014

https://chapelhillwatch.com/2014/10/13/bike-wreck/

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