Chapel Hill public hearing on YouTube

For those who missed it, Dave Hartzell had a fine piece in the Nov. 26 CH News. It's titled 'Don't accept the downtown development terms' and can be found at: http://www.chapelhillnews.com/157/story/3843.html

Will, thnx for posting Godschalk's piece. I hadn't seen it. Dan I disagree and I think you post is rude to Godschalk and Hartzell. Hartzell's argument made clear that this deal is getting worse by the minute and should be rejected. I appreciate him taking the time to apply his obvious expertise to the discussion. I also think Godshalk's piece was compelling.

Precisely b/c of their "acadmeic creds" both of their arguments are all the more compelling. Yet they don't "ivory tower" their arguments. Instead they state them in a manner that the general public - like me - can understand. All too often, in my view, important local gov't discussions get so bogged down into obscure details that most of the population can't make heads or tails of what the heart of the concern really is. So thanks to Hartzell and Godschalk for their intelligent plain speaking.

The Town of Chapel Hill has in fact purchased a video-streamlining of council meetings, and we will go "live" tentatively in January (hopefully). There will be a link on the Town website, and one can access different parts of the meeting according to agenda item---you can just watch online what you are interested in. I am excited about this---no need to stay up until midnight (except for me and 8 other council members and those in the audience) to watch whatever agenda item you are interested in. Fast forward over people you don't want to listen to! etc. It will be great. Apparently Blacksburg, VA has similar council video-streaming. That's the best info I can give you right now, and the fact that I've seen an example of one of our meetings and hopefully it will useful for folks.

Dan:

I find your charactierization of Harztzell's critque to be wrong. He doesn't say "since the earlier deal from two years ago was better then the currrent deal must be a bad one".

What he says is

1) Two years I didn't think any developer would be able to make a profit on this deal at the stated costs.

2) The consultant's cost estimates are too low, especially given the fact that local experts were telling the town and the developer that there was bedrock under Lot 5, and that this bedrock would substantially increase the cost of the parking spaces.

3) Despite 1 and 2, Hartzell relucantly supported the deal.

4) Now, two years later, as Hartzell feared, the developer has asked for much more than under the original deal and the costs have increased significantly.

I guess my position is influenced by a natural skepticism I have about these kind of public/private development partnerships that depend upon taxpayer funding, whether it is something like Lot 5 or Exploris in downtown Raleigh or Union Station in Kansas City or the many stadiums built with public money across the US in recent years

The incentives to underestimate the costs and overestimate the benefits are very strong, and unlike a private development, when things invariably depart from some consultants' rosy scenario, taxpayers get to foot the bill.

Let me put it another way...if your wife could write for laymen with as much analytical rigor and clear thinking that Hartzell shows, I'd be impressed.

Beyond that, Harztell has a heckuva lot more experience of and knowledge of real estate development than any Chapel Hill Town Council member.

FYI. I submitted the following this morning because, contrary to expectations, the DDI's web site has yet to be updated with background material bolstering Council's case:

Mr. Manager, Mayor and Town Council,

Thank you for being more timely this week and publishing the
RAM development agenda item before close of business. Unfortunately, the agenda item is fairly light on the background of the "new deal".

Would you please publish the remaining reports, discussions notes, comments, etc. that went into forming the "new deal" over the Summer?

I know that there's some legal issues involved in releasing all of the notes - legal issues that will become moot after you sign the deal - so I'm not asking for ALL the information now (though I will be exercising a citizen's FOIA prerogative ASAP).

I'm asking that you release everything you can prior to the meeting, including information not protected under the confidentially agreement but also not,to date, publicly disseminated.

For instance, would you please provide details of your consultations with the Local Government Commission (LGC) on financing?

This would include notes, reports, detailed analysis, etc. Please be thorough in your disclosures.

I'm interested in the LGC's take on leveraging the secured debt, effect on our town's debt ratings, thoughts on the quoted interest rate, etc. Essentially, I imagine, the same kind of financial analysis that a private business uses in evaluating the risk-rewards of taking on debt.

Finally, the main conduit for publishing this data has been the DDI website which hasn't been updated since Spring. I've asked the Council to update the information on the RAM deal in a timely fashion. Several folks told me to "hold my horses", that I needed to wait until the "final" deal was set.

Well, the final deal is set and the public still doesn't have those details. I was hoping that this issue would be addressed over the last 9 days but it hasn't.

The public has one weekend to review these critical additional details.

Please, if you can't update the website, then submit them to the citizenry directly. If emailing or providing paper copies is easier, that's fine.

I'll make sure they get into the public domain over the weekend.

Thank you for your prompt attention,

Will Raymond

If you are running the Windows operating system the video looks very good. The archive site for the video allows you to download and or watch the video after meetings. When you watch the video in a web browser there is a copy of the Agenda on the right and links to jump to different points during the meeting. Excellent for researching a specific issue.

If you're using a Mac it works but not without reading some long instructions and downloading some software that isn't on a Mac by default. Honestly the hoops required to view the video on a Mac is unacceptable. Better than nothing but just not good enough. It excludes many users.

The video site has three RSS feeds. Video, Agenda, and Minutes. The video feed has WMV files embedded in it. (aka a Podcast feed... sorta) Handy if you'd like to be quickly updated on new video content. Again this is good but only half the way to a industry standard. Most podcast feeds work with iTunes. Plus iTunes doesn't play WMV files.

Finally putting public content in a proprietary file format like WMV is doing us a real long term disservice. Not just by making it hard for ALL citizens to view the video now but also future citizens. In the future WMV won't play on computers. Like all media it will change. But proprietary file formats will be hard to convert to new formats. Why? Because in the future companies may have little incentive to sell file format conversion software. This is a basic requirement of archivability. Long term access to information. (ex. Oral History collections require loss less file formats that are standard if not legally open. ex. WAV) Does the Town of Chapel Hill want to be left out of multimedia history education of the future?

I realize its cost effective and knowledge rich to use an outside service provider to host web video. But what happens when the company hosting the video goes bankrupt? (in a year or 50 years) Will the public video content be released to the public on demand? What happens to the publicly purchased video content when the Town wants to move their content? I hope there are provisions in any contract the Town has with this company that address this.

I'm sure other former Town Tech Board members will chime in on this. I know we gave lots of advice about this. This is the same problem the Town has with the website. They took the easy/cheap route and didn't really implement a solution that thinks about our children's desire to learn about our Town later in the 21st Century.

...