Yesterday I received a call from a woman who lives in a tent she assembled in the woods east of the railroad tracks near land that Chapel Hill purchased from the estate of Leo Merritt. I have known her for several years and she has been a part of the downtown Carrboro community for a long time. I had mixed emotions about what she had to say. She is moving next month to be with another member of her family in a nearby state. On the one hand, I am happy for her that she will (presumably) have more formal housing arrangements, but on the other hand I will miss seeing her around Carrboro.

Tonight I went to the Abbey Court HOA meeting about the Human Rights Center.  Here's the short version of what happened…

I suppose you've all heard about how the Abbey Court Homeowners' Association (HOA) is giving the Abbey Court Human Rights Center (HRC) the boot. The Human Rights Center is a great community center providing many critical human services within Abbey Court, including mentoring, after school care, tutoring etc.  In short, the HOA is arguing that the HRC is in violation of the HOA rules by using their unit for non-residential purposes and kicking them out, under threat of a $300/day fine.

The HOA meeting was tonight at 6pm in Raleigh and was closed to the public, however this afternoon it occurred to me that the non-profit organization I work for owns one of the units at Abbey Court, so I went to the meeting to represent our organization's miniscule rights—and to record the meeting.

I spent most of Sunday afternoon out at the Haw River just outside the mill village of Swepsonville about five miles upstream of Saxapahaw.  I managed to enjoy most of my time out there even though I was there was because I have been having trouble there with trespassers.  The land I own out there is the hydro-electric power plant that formerly powered the cotton mill in Swepsonville.

My hydro-electric plant has been out of operation for about 40 years and the windows in the building are almost completely broken out.  Inside the building are huge, deep holes in the floor where the generators once sat atop the turbines.  I have been gradually working on making the interior of the building safer by covering over the huge holes in the floor, but the building is definitely not a safe place for unwary visitors.

In 1991, as a 20 year-old rising Senior at the University of North Carolina, I did the most outlandish and absurd thing I have ever done in my life.

[At the March 1, 2011, meeting of the Carrboro Board of Aldermen, in response to a request from the OWASA Board of Directors to facilitate greater access to water from Jordan Lake, Mayor Mark Chilton made the following remarks. The Editors of OP asked if we could publish his comments here as a blog post, and he agreed. -Ed.] 

What the evidence that was just laid out before you clearly shows is that our community is capable of living with the water supply we have now, that the water supply now is very substantial, is scheduled to grow significantly in 2035, and that water conservation efforts have proved to be more effective than—I think they've really proved to be more effective than anybody would have guessed 10 years ago, than the most wild-eyed optimists would have believed 10 years ago. We've been more successful than that. We have not even exhausted the water conservation and water efficiency technologies and policies and procedures that even possibly could be implemented within our community.