December 2003
Orange County has been looking for a new landfill for many years. Our current space, just north of Chapel Hill city limits on Eubanks Road, is filling up. You won't be at all surprised to learn that none of our neighbors in this vast, friendly county have agreed to take a new landfill near their homes or their favorite recreational areas. There have been expansions near the current landfill, which to me seems to violate the County's 25-year-old agreement not to dump any more on the landfill neighbors (mostly black) on Rogers Road.
According to the News & Observer, we're now teaming up with other Triangle communities to seek some sucker, er I mean, some other helpful county to take our garbage and some money.
Will anyone go for this? Even so, it makes my skin crawl to think of selling our garbage to other communities who surely would rather get the money for their important government services, through nice property taxes or clean industry. Maybe they'd like a UNC satellite campus! We've got one to spare...
OK people, you asked for coverage of the entire County. I warned you... we're not qualified. But we'll give it a shot. (It hasn't stopped me yet.)
So you tell us: what's going on north of I-85? Is Hillsborough still quaint? How many Wal*Marts are there now?
The Town of Chapel Hill's Horace Williams Citizens' Commitee will meet tomorrow (12/18/03, 5:30 pm, C.H. library) to respond to UNC's latest draft plans for Carolina North. This group was created to advise the Town Council on issues related to UNC's development of a satellite campus on Airport Road. I invite anyone who has been paying attention (as many of you have) to share your opinions with the committee and the Town Council.
(By the way, the Town Planning department has put up a great website with tons of resources on Horace Williams/Carolina North, check it out.)
I'll be out of town and have to miss this meeting, here's what I wrote to them:
A fond farewell to Wallace Kuralt, propietor of the Intimate Bookshop, who went down fighting. His literary empire grew to eight stores, but eventually he had to close every location due to being unable to compete with the huge chains and online retailers who get sweetheart deals with book wholesalers. He took up the fight on behalf of all independent booksellers.
I didn't know him personally, but he had a profound impact on me. When I was in elementary school, my mother had a store downtown (where Pepper's is now). Along with the Varsity Theatre, the Intimate was my main afterschool program. I went there daily, took one of the many small chairs scatterred throughout the children's section, and read everything I could get my hands on. My favorite nook (a 2-foot wide space between two shelves) was dubbed "Ruby's corner" by the staff.
I just want to thank Mr. Kuralt for providing this opportunity for me and countless other Chapel Hillians to read to our hearts delight.
Some folks who live near the University have started an online petition. I don't know how effective these things are, but I guess it can't hurt, right? Here's what it says:
To: UNC-CH trustees, Chancellor Moeser, the UNC Board of Governors, the developers of Carolina North
We, the residents of the Towns of Chapel Hill and Carrboro, in recognition that the Towns benefit from the University and the University benefits from the Towns, ask for careful consideration of this petition.
The best faculty recruitment tool the University has are neither salary compensation, nor health benefits, but the Towns of Chapel Hill/Carrboro themselves, their natural resources and public facilities including the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools.
In this spirit, to maintain the desirability of Chapel Hill/Carrboro as a place to live and enable the University to recruit the best faculty far into the future, we demand that any Carolina North plan for the Horace Williams Tract have a designated public school site before Trustee approval.
I'm going out of town for the next week so I offer this topic for discussion, which was submitted by Paul Jones:
In today's Chapel Hill Herald, Dan Coleman hands out "Awards" to various people and organizations. This is a time honored journalistic tradition of which one of the high point is the Texas Monthly's "Bumsteer Awards" and Esquire's "Dubious Awards."
What awards would the readers/posters of orangepolitics.org give and to whom? No reason that Dan, Texas Monthly or Esquire should be the only ones giving out awards. How about a thread on year end awards that we wish we could give?
Meanwhile, I am working on introductions for each of the archive topics (see them over to the right, from "About..." to "UNC"). If you'd like to write all or part of one, submit it via the "Contact Us" link. Please keep it brief. Your submissions might not be acknowledged, but if we use it you'll get credit.
This is a national story, but I thought some folks around here might be interested in what was happening to former Durham Police Chief Teresa Chambers. It seems that Chambers is about to be fired from her job as the chief of the National Park Police because she went on the record with a Washington Post reporter describing very specifically how her agency was underfunded, and what that meant on the ground.
http://www.slate.com/id/2093330/
I commend her on her courage and forthrightness, but I hope I'm not the only one who's struck by the irony. In Durham, Chambers was not known as someone who was forthright with the press. Indeed, she did everything she could to manage the department's image, which in her mind meant choking off the local press's access to police officers and police documents. Her feud with the Herald-Sun was particularly nasty and personal.
Then she goes to Washington and suddenly she's a whistleblower and a friend of the press? Better late than never, I suppose.
While I'm fiddling with the where-are-they-now machine on this, the last day of 2003, a day when the grownups seem to have disappeared leaving us nothing substantive to chew on, I thought I should call your attention to the situation of former UNC-Chapel Hill Executive Vice Chancellor Elson Floyd, now the president of the University of Missouri system.
http://www.collegesports.com/sports/m-baskbl/stories/121103aah.html
It's too complicated to summarize, but it involves a basketball player/girlfriend beater named Ricky Clemons, NCAA violations, secretly taped conversations, a crashed ATV, and that scion of the Evil Empire, Quin Snyder. In my experience, Floyd was an honorable, honest, and candid vice chancellor when he was at UNC, and I'm surprised he's landed in this mess.
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