Election deadline nears

If you haven’t made up your mind about whom to vote for, you’re running out of time. Tomorrow, May 8, is Election Day, and you have many decision to make. Don’t go into the voting booth unprepared. Access a sample ballot online at the Orange County website:
http://www.co.orange.nc.us/elect/precincts.asp.

You’ll need to know your precinct (and its abbreviation, i.e., the Weaver Dairy precinct is WD) in order to select which ballot you’ll be given when you go into vote. To find out your voter registration status and precinct, go to: https://www.ncsbe.gov/VoterLookup.aspx?Feature=voterinfo.

You can vote in the primary even if you aren’t registered as a Democrat or Republican. If you registered as Unaffiliated, you can choose when you show up to vote whether you want a ballot listing Democrats to choose among or a ballot of Republicans. You don’t even have to be 18 to vote in the primary, as long as you will have had your 18th birthday on or before the November Election.

Make sure you know where the candidates stand on issues important to you. The information on each candidate’s website tells you what he or she thinks you want to know, and that can be an indication of a candidate’s priorities.

Don’t forget to turn the ballot over. The marriage amendment is on the back.

— Nancy Oates

by on May 7, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Elections
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Posted by Nancy Oates on May 7, 2012

https://chapelhillwatch.com/2012/05/07/election-deadline-nears/

To your health

As the town’s money guy, Ken Pennoyer clicked his way through his PowerPoint slides last night, giving an overview of the proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2013 (which begins July 1, 2012). One of the bright spots centered on the town’s reduction in health care costs for its employees. The high cost of health care and health insurance is sure to be flogged repeatedly in these coming months leading up to the presidential election in November. Yet the town’s cost for employee health insurance has decreased, in part because municipal workers are becoming more health conscious.

And maybe because, if town manager Roger Stancil is to be believed, the town has reduced the number of desktop printers in its offices. Time was that every desk had its own printer, but replacing ink cartridges put unnecessary strain on the budget and stress on the environment, given that all those empty cartridges ended up in the landfill. (Did no one in the Work Smart Save Money program think to collect up the empties and recycle them at Staples for a $3-a-pop rebate?) So the town is eliminating individual ink-jet printers for a centrally located, office-wide printer.

The consolidation will force people to get up and walk around, Stancil said, and they might even talk to someone while they’re at it. Walking and talking lead to improved mood (providing everyone in the office has mastered the art of workplace civility), which can have a positive impact on physical health.

The town has taken other actions to reduce health care costs: hiring a nurse who can treat minor illnesses that might otherwise send an employee to a doctor’s office, and organizing health education programs and healthy activities such as walking groups. But for those who can’t yet bring themselves to spend their lunch breaks walking and talking with co-workers, a roundtrip to the office printer may be the first steps to a healthier lifestyle.
– Nancy Oates

by on May 1, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Budget, Lifestyle
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Posted by Nancy Oates on May 1, 2012

https://chapelhillwatch.com/2012/05/01/to-your-health/

Elections bought and paid for

Tonight’s Town Council meeting includes several interesting nuggets, not the least of which is a proposal to extend the taxpayer-financed elections program, known as Voter Owned Elections, set to expire on July 1, 2012.

VOE, which the General Assembly signed into law in 2007, authorizes the town to give taxpayer-generated revenue to candidates running for Town Council and mayor to fund their campaigns, providing they stay within a set spending limit. If candidates not accepting VOE money raise funds above a threshold level, the town would give the VOE candidates additional money in the form of Rescue Funds. In 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court declared Rescue Funds illegal, and Chapel Hill VOE candidates did not receive any Rescue Funds.

Chapel Hill made VOE available in the 2009 and 2011 elections. In 2009, one mayoral candidate of the four opted for VOE, as did one council candidate out of eight total. In 2011, none of the mayoral candidates used VOE, and two of the nine council candidates did.

The idea behind VOE is that people without a lot of money or without the time or talent to raise money would not be at a disadvantage in the campaign. That sounds laudable in theory but was shot down in practice when special-interest PACs were allowed to contribute unlimited funds to a VOE candidate’s campaign, making a mockery of the VOE’s intent.

So, on the same night that council is approving, by way of items on the Consent Agenda, scaled back allocations to some established public service projects, council is considering allocating taxpayer funding for elections. Given that PAC funding can cover the cost of direct mail and other forms of advertising, expenses to the candidate are minimal. Really, what does it cost to open a Twitter account? In Chapel Hill, that leaves only the expense of taking Sierra Club members to lunch (has anyone ever won in Chapel Hill without the Sierra Club’s endorsement?) or dropping off bagels at its monthly meetings.

Taxpayers have higher priorities on how the town should spend our money than buying campaign signs for local politicians.
– Nancy Oates

by on April 30, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Budget, Politics
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Posted by Nancy Oates on April 30, 2012

https://chapelhillwatch.com/2012/04/30/elections-bought-and-paid-for/

Hailing the chief

A local TV station broadcast the arrival of Air Force One on Tuesday and live-streamed the coverage to the giant video screens at Carmichael Arena, where a near deliriously happy SRO crowd in Carmichael and an overflow crowd in Woollen Gym watched President Obama step onto the tarmac and shake hands with various political leaders, including our own Mayor Mark Kleinschmidt.

Having the opportunity to chat up the president would be well worth the endless PowerPoint presentations Kleinschmidt had to endure to get to the point in his career where he receives an invitation to greet the president. And a seat on the aircraft carrier to watch this past season’s Tar Heel men’s basketball team play their season opener. What more is there for him to achieve in local politics?

Well, bringing to fruition a new comprehensive plan would be one thing. The CH2020 visioning process will soon wrap up, and its report is expected to yield more than just a building code manual.

According to CH2020 leaders who spoke to the Friends of Downtown yesterday, the report will delineate some areas where redevelopment should take priority, some places that should be left as is, and a change in the way we conceive of zoning. CH2020 leaders hope to move toward form-based zoning. Rather than leaving the council to fight over each zoning change, the new comprehensive plan would spell out what buildings in a zone should look like (height, massing, setbacks, etc.) If a project fits the form of that vision, the town planning staff can give or deny approval, and the use can change as long as the buildings don’t.

CH2020 leaders also are open to adjusting the rural buffers, which were put in place to encourage infill development and prevent Chapel Hill from becoming a mini Los Angeles.

Another version of the CH2020 plan coming out in mid-May will be more reader-friendly. Once a final draft is written, the council can vote to receive it (basically, saying, “Thank you very much, goodbye,”) or adopt it (giving it the power of a development ordinance).

Welcoming a new comprehensive plan may not be as thrilling to Kleinschmidt as meeting the president, but the crowds who’ve donated countless hours of their lives to the process will cheer every bit as loudly as those in Carmichael Arena when President Obama took the stage.
– Nancy Oates

by on April 27, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in CH2020
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Posted by Nancy Oates on April 27, 2012

https://chapelhillwatch.com/2012/04/27/hailing-the-chief/

Timing

Gene Pease put it in a nutshell last night. In response to the concept plan review for Carolina Flats presented by Florida developer Russ Greer of Progressive Capital Group, Pease said, “Your timing is lousy.”

After Greer and Scott Radway presented the “back of the envelope” plan, as Mayor Mark Kleinschmidt called it, and a bevy of neighbors laid out their objections, Pease was the first council member to comment. Hundreds of town and Extra-Territorial Jurisdiction residents have spent countless hours over the past several months hammering out a vision for growth in town. Said CH2020 project is due to wind up in June, and leaders will present a report that lays out what kind of growth they’d like to see where, and why they believe that to be the best course. Greer’s project of a hotel and high-density student housing for a key intersection seemed to be rushing the decision-making process.

The Estes Drive/MLK Jr. Boulevard is a very congested intersection already, without the additional traffic that a high-density development would bring. The way the project was sketched out, it could not be entered from the north or west, and vehicles had no safe way to go south or east from the exits. The extra runoff from the added impervious surfaces could cause flooding in nearby neighborhoods. And the vision for Carolina North was to avoid a ring of dense development around its perimeter.

Some residents were disingenuous in their opposition to the project. They talked about how unsafe it was for children living in the neighborhood to the west of Phillips Middle School and Estes Hills Elementary to walk to school because there was no sidewalk on the north side of the street and that they had to drive their kids to school because of it. (They are in the walk zone and don’t have bus service.) Lee Storrow said he’d look more favorably on Carolina Flats if it could ensure a sidewalk to the school, regardless of the fact that Greer did not own two parcels of land between his and the two schools.

But children who live in that neighborhood, and even in neighborhoods north of Piney Mountain Road, regularly walk to school. More than a decade ago, homeowners on Huntington Drive laid a sidewalk-wide gravel path that runs along the edge of their property and connects Huntington to Phillips Middle School. Kids continuing on to Estes Hills Elementary can either walk along the path around Phillips to Estes Hills or walk along the sidewalk that runs from the Phillips parking lot to Estes Hills. Another homeowner on Huntington created a similar gravel path that connects Piney Mountain Road to Huntington, so many students in neighborhoods along Piney Mountain Road (which has a sidewalk all along the south side) eschew the bus and walk to school. No one needs a car.

Penny Rich asked for a development classification to make clear that a project intended to be student housing, and Laurin Easthom wished for housing that would support the graduate students, researchers and faculty of Carolina North, rather than the undergraduates who would commute to main campus.

On one point, everyone could agree: The corner lot would be developed in some form at some point. And single-family houses, in keeping with its current R-1 zoning, probably would not be the best use of the land.
– Nancy Oates

by on April 24, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Carolina North, CH2020, Housing, Roads
Tagged , ,
Posted by Nancy Oates on April 24, 2012

https://chapelhillwatch.com/2012/04/24/timing/

Sharp eye on Flats

I support smart growth in appropriate venues, a minority position among many of my peers. I’d like to be able to lobby for high-density projects, but when a developer seems to portray a project as something it isn’t and smacks down moderately priced housing for a half-mile stretch, that makes the task all the harder.

At tonight’s council meeting, developers will present a plan for Carolina Flats @ Estes (the “@ Estes” will be dropped before the concept review presentation ends, I’d bet) on 16 acres on the northeast corner of MLK Jr. Boulevard and Estes Drive, a site that seems reasonable for an apartment complex, and even for the accompanying hotel the developers have planned, given the eventual development of Carolina North. (Once construction begins on Carolina North, the site would be ripe for a 24-hour Walgreens.)

Two-thirds of the project site that includes nine three-story apartment buildings abuts the Shadowood apartment complex, zoned R-5, and one-third lies next to a single-family neighborhood, zoned R-1. The other end is adjacent to an unimproved acreage whose owner seems in no hurry to develop. The four-story hotel faces MLK Boulevard. Tally for the apartments: 588 bedrooms spread among 189 apartments with 532 parking spaces, nine-tenths of a space per bedroom, the plan says.

The concept plan text forgets all about the 125 to 145 rooms of the hotel and its parking for guests and staff. Realistically, Carolina Flats will need room for a good 700 vehicles.

While the developer would like us to believe that his plan is a smaller version of Shadowood, only with a hotel, there is one big difference. Shadowood’s 336 apartments are one- and two-bedroom units, whereas 117 of Carolina Flats’ 189 units are four-bedroom apartments. Students attracted to a one- or two-bedroom apartment likely seek a quiet community more conducive to studying than partying. And Shadowood apartments are relatively affordable, renting for about $600 a month.

Four-bedroom apartments are more cost-effective for the developer to build. One kitchen per four bedrooms is cheaper than one kitchen per one or two bedrooms, for instance. Four-bedroom apartments likely will be rented by the bedroom, which developers generally set to match the price of a dorm room, about $600 a month per bedroom. That will push up the market price of Shadowood apartments, so the town will lose that moderately priced housing.

Ron Strom, brother of absconded council member Bill Strom, plans to redevelop Timber Hollow apartments, across Piney Mountain Road from Shadowood, into high-end rentals and increase the density. So Timber Hollow’s 198 moderately priced one- and two-bedroom units will fall like dominoes, too.

Develop the MLK/Estes corner, but with a complex of one- and two-bedroom units. We need off-campus housing for students, but we don’t need a Granville Towers North.
– Nancy Oates

by on April 23, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Carolina North, Housing
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Posted by Nancy Oates on April 23, 2012

https://chapelhillwatch.com/2012/04/23/sharp-eye-on-flats/

Windfall

I’ve read about people who come into money and then the trouble starts. Town Council showed a hint of that at Monday night’s meeting when they began talking about how to spend the money from the sale of “two-thirds” bonds. These bonds don’t need voters’ approval, but council does have to approve the sale. The bonds would give the town an extra $1.7 million to put toward capital investment projects that have been neglected during the economic downturn.

Ken Pennoyer, the town’s director of business management, gave a short tutorial on re-funding (that is, refinancing) general obligation bonds and how the town is able to sell the two-thirds bonds. Council members – the six who showed up, anyway; Donna Bell, Penny Rich and Jim Ward were maybe home doing their tax returns – would have to approve both the refinancing of the general obligation bonds and the sale of the two-thirds bonds. The finance guys (Pennoyer was backed by a bond lawyer) wanted approval ASAP before the economy rebounded and the low interest rates went away. By doing both transactions together, the town would save about $40,000 in financing fees, above and beyond the money saved by switching to a lower interest rate.

All was going well until Pennoyer ran through a list of projects that the $1.7 million could cover. Some of the items were from the bottom of the priority list.

Town Council and town staff, after listening to residents’ input, spend time prioritizing the projects on the capital investments/improvements list. And Pennoyer rearranging the list seemingly at will didn’t sit right with some council members.

Matt Czajkowski asked whether approving the sale of the two-thirds bonds meant approving Pennoyer’s priority list. Completing a low-priority item just because financing was available didn’t seem fair to him. Town manager Roger Stancil said that everything on the capital improvements project list was high priority. The town has deferred maintenance on some projects for so long that they were in danger of falling apart.

That prompted Lauren Easthom to ask where repairs to the gymnastics building and the former museum building fit in. Couldn’t the windfall be used toward those projects? Stancil said the gymnastics building was in such sorry shape that it would need to be torn down, and the former museum building, at 523 E. Franklin St., might need as much as $2 million to make it safe for the public to use. (Evidently Penny Rich should thank her lucky stars that she was able to cater a party there and pocket the profit before someone was seriously hurt.)

Some council members were uncomfortable approving Pennoyer’s list of projects, but the thought of saving $40,000 in banking fees won out. (That money could come in handy once the town receives the bill for signs to warn people that they can’t talk on the phone while running a red light.) With the assurance that voting for the two-thirds bonds didn’t mean sanctioning Pennoyer’s list, council approved both transactions and has until April 30 to come up with a list of what the money will cover.
– Nancy Oates

by on April 19, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Museum, Spending
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Posted by Nancy Oates on April 19, 2012

https://chapelhillwatch.com/2012/04/19/windfall/

Back from break

Town Council resumes meetings tonight, presumably refreshed and rarin’ to go after its 3-week spring break. Tonight’s agenda includes a number of interesting items, and perhaps a little gift.

Community Home Trust starts the festivities with a petition for the town to commit to designating 13 of its parking spaces at 140 West Franklin for use by the owners of the 18 affordable housing units in the high-rise. Ram Development is providing only 5 spaces for the affordable units and referred CHT to the town for the remaining 13 so that each unit could have its own parking space. CHT contends, rightly so, that the units will be harder to sell if they don’t include a parking space. At one point, the town proposed designating spaces in the Wallace deck, nearly two blocks away, as parking for affordable housing, but council members perhaps felt too sheepish to go on record supporting that idea. But the parking issue needs to be addressed before CHT can realistically market the units to prospective buyers.

Recognizing that it needs to come up with extra money to fund the toothless cell-phone ban ordinance, among other questionable decisions by council, the town’s business management director is recommending that the town take advantage of the climate of low interest rates to refinance nearly $4 million in general obligation bonds. By doing so, the town could save nearly $323,000 over the life of the bonds, realizing nearly $60,000 in savings in the 2012-13 fiscal year alone.

At the same time, the town is asking for council’s permission to issue $1.7 million in “two-thirds” bonds, which is like a home equity line of credit. The money would go toward Parks & Rec facilities and streets. A common practice among many municipalities, two-thirds bonds allow a town to issue a general obligation bond for two-thirds of the amount that it has paid back in principal the previous year. Chapel Hill’s reduction in principal for fiscal year 2012 is $2.55 million; two-thirds of that is $1.7 million. The town can issue the bonds without having to get voter approval first.

Tucked away discreetly in the Consent Agenda is a request from Chapel Watch Village corporate townhomes (“Designed for Living,” its website proclaims) to schedule a public hearing to allow the 120-unit complex to be annexed. The development sits on nearly 34 acres next to the Northwood neighborhood, off Eubanks Road. Two-bedroom units rent from $1,450 to $2,090 a month, and three-bedroom rentals cost between $1,880 and $2,540 a month, according to its website. Adding that property to the town’s tax base could be a boon, depending on whether you believe density pays for itself. The public hearing has been requested for April 30.
– Nancy Oates

by on April 16, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in 140 West, Budget, Parking, Taxes
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Posted by Nancy Oates on April 16, 2012

https://chapelhillwatch.com/2012/04/16/back-from-break/

Keeping up with campus

Five of nine council members made sure we now have a law banning some people from talking on cell phones while driving (although those five council members are exempt). The law will cost taxpayers an undetermined amount of money in an extraordinarily tight budget year. It will be impossible to enforce, according to police, and won’t make our streets any safer. Donna Bell and Ed Harrison assured constituents they can continue to drive and talk on the phone, and if they should cause a fatal accident while doing so, it will only cost them $25. Penny Rich proposed and fanned this drainchild. Does this foreshadow the sort of foolishness she’ll wreak if she is elected county commissioner?

Council has been so distracted by sideshows like this that when UNC representatives delivered their report on transportation and development at the March 26 Town Council meeting, some on the dais were taken aback by the construction plans for campus. Eight projects totaling $20.6 million have been completed. The steam tunnel rehabilitation should wrap up by September. In response to a question from council, Bruce Runberg, UNC’s associate vice chancellor for facilities planning and construction, said the traffic disruption due to the steam tunnel repairs had been going on two years, but I swear he must have meant 10. Just ask folks who live along Ransom, Vance and McCauley streets or Patterson Place.

But when it came to the announcement about adding four stories to Craige Parking Deck to accommodate another 970 spaces, Ed Harrison paused the presentation. “Did we know about that?” he asked.

Runberg replied, “It’s been on the books a long time.”

University architect Anna Wu gave the explanation: The parking spaces required for the new science buildings had to be moved off site instead of in a deck under the buildings. The finely calibrated instruments in the science buildings would be thrown off by the vibrations from traffic if the buildings were to sit atop a parking deck. So the parking spaces belonging to those buildings will be piled onto Craige Deck.

The final phase of the Landfill Gas Pipeline project is to begin this month and continue through the summer. Wu assured Matt Czajkowski that the University would compensate the county for the methane UNC is extracting as fuel.

Finally, the seven buildings on the 47.4 acres that UNC purchased from Blue Cross Blue Shield will be used for administrative offices initially, though the long-term plan is for clinical space. UNC also would like to site a park-and-ride lot there. Lee Storrow urged including a couple of lunch spots so that employees would not increase traffic on Fordham Boulevard over the lunch hour. Wu assured him that UNC sees itself as an economic engine for other businesses.
– Nancy Oates

by on April 5, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in UNC
Posted by Nancy Oates on April 5, 2012

https://chapelhillwatch.com/2012/04/05/keeping-up-with-campus/

Decision by Ouija

I don’t think I ever went to a slumber party as a kid that someone didn’t bring out a Ouija board to divine answers to life’s mysteries of who liked whom and would I ever be kissed. I don’t recall at what age I finally figured out that the little plastic table wasn’t picking out the letters by itself. But I didn’t stop playing Ouija board after my disillusionment. I just made sure my fingers became an equal force.

I thought again about what moved the plastic table after I watched a dozen or so people at last Monday’s Town Council meeting speak about feeling that their voices were being silenced in the CH2020 process. A few days later, at a Friends of Downtown meeting, I heard a conversation about how input from town business leaders and others who work full time was being diluted because they could spare time to go to only a few of the 30-some meetings, and the voices of those who had been to most, if not all, of the meetings would prevail.

CH2020 had as a goal the involvement of 10,000 residents. But did the organizers truly believe they’d be able to come up with one unified voice? Anyone who’s ever been on a committee – or served on Town Council, for that matter – knows that a diverse body rarely will deliver unanimous decisions. But you can get the strength of a wide range of ideas playing off one another and maybe some new solutions presenting themselves.

The town would be served best by a document that presents diversity – the wisdom and folly of doing things one way, along with the reasons a significant cohort would prefer to do things a different way. Planning board member Del Snow claims that the Northern Area Task Force got derailed by paid consultants, yet the report periodically is cited as the will of the people when it behooves one group or another to do so. What’s the point of having another report masquerade as a unified voice when it isn’t? If council truly wants to use the CH2020 report as a guide for how to rule on development, the report should contain the various major viewpoints.

Back in my Ouija board days, after I attained enlightenment, I started getting the answers I wanted to hear. But that didn’t mean they were correct.
– Nancy Oates

by on April 2, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in CH2020, Lifestyle
Posted by Nancy Oates on April 2, 2012

https://chapelhillwatch.com/2012/04/02/decision-by-ouija/

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