Geoff Green's blog
By a vote of 29-19, the NC Senate overrode the governor's veto of HB 854, the anti-woman bill which imposes significant limitations on the availability of abortions and makes numerous intrusions in the doctor-patient relationship. A 3/5 vote was necessary to override, and the 29-19 margin just made it.
But wait, aren't there 50 members of the NC Senate? And didn't 20 members of the Senate vote against the bill when it came to vote, meaning it shouldn't have passed? You would be right. Senator Stan Bingham, Republican who represents Davidson and Guilford counties, was the only Republican to vote against the bill when it was originally passed and continued to oppose it up until yesterday. However, in an event which will go down in history as one of the most cowardly acts ever taken by a politician, he absented himself from the Senate today and thereby paved the way for the veto to be overriden by the narrowest margin ever.
I wrote a letter to Senator Bingham which I've reprinted below. It's not the height of political criticism, in large part because I wrote it quickly, in anger:
On June 27, the Chapel Hill Town Council will be providing recommendations to the Durham-Chapel Hill-Carrboro Transportation Advisory Committee regarding the alignment of the proposed light rail line which will connect Chapel Hill with Durham, UNC Hospitals with Duke Hospital and downtown Durham. As a Meadowmont resident, I'm particularly interested in the choices of routing which involve Meadowmont, and I'm interested in what others in the local progressive community think about the options.
When the approval of the Meadowmont community was up before Town Council in 1995, one of its selling points, and presumably one of the reasons Roger Perry and East-West Partners were allowed to build at such high densities, was the reservation of a 50-foot wide mass-transit corridor (see also here). The corridor is still there, still free of development, and passes by the commercial area and rental apartments before making a turn behind the residences in the Cedars retirement community.
Ruby's recent post about the problems with the Town's communication strategy regarding the new Downtown Development Framework got me to think about the ways in which our town's government does not use social media to communicate with constituents. I'll have more to say about this hopefully in a future blog post, but this one item jumped out at me:
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