Ruby Sinreich's blog

County Commissioner Chastises Town Planning Board Chair

Newly minted county commissioner (and former Chapel Hill Town Council member) Penny Rich just sent a letter (quoted in its entirety below) to Chapel Hill mayor Mark Kleinschmidt. In it she takes strong exception to the behavior of Chapel Hill Planning Board chair Del Snow, who attended a county commissioners meeting last month to speak against the implementation of the Orange County transit plan. (See OP's live coverage of the meeting and discussion of the transit vote.)

While I wholeheartedly share Penny's concerns about Del misrepresenting the town, her call for the town to remove Del from the Planning Board will probably provoke a defensive response about municipal sovereignty, which will make it politically difficult for the town to actually do anything about it. Frankly I'm even more bothered that someone in a position of planning leadership such as Del is working to undermine the large-scale community transportation planning that is so critical to our future. Either way I'd like to see some new leaders on the Planning Board, preferably who appreciate both planning and process. But only the Chapel Hill Town Counil can make that happen.

Orange County Steps Boldly Into the Twentieth Century

Someone please help me out if I'm missing some hidden value here, but it seems to me that Orange County has found a way to spend money on technology while serving a few residents as little as possible. According to a press release issued today (below) the county is installing monitors in three county buildings with the time, weather, traffic updates, and emergency alerts when they are available. Because, you know, when there is danger afoot the first thing I do is get in the car and drive to a government administrative building.

When I attended the presentation of the County's technology plan last fall, I heard a lot of technobabble about citizen engagement and delivery of services. I can't see how these glorified smart phones fit into the plan.

Thanks to students, taxis in Chapel Hill will now serve us all better

Starting tomorrow - just a few hours too late to help revellers tonight - you might actually want to take a cab in Chapel Hill! In the past, their fees were so exorbitant that cabs were only for the very desperate. But the Town Council has reformed the system in response to a request from UNC students. The change will also help regional commuters (like me) who can get a bus back from Durham or Raleigh after 7pm, but then are stuck walking the last mile to get home.

We need your help to update OP

As I wrote three months ago, OrangePolitics is overdue for a software upgrade. 5 years ago, you donated $1,000 to help move the site from WordPress to Drupal, and I think it was well worth the effort! Unfortunately, the software of the site has not seen a major update since that time. We need professional help again to upgrade the site from Drupal 5 to version 6 or 7, which will also allow us to move to cheaper web hosting. (I currently pay $35/month, but it could be a low as $10/month if we move the site.)

With the state of our local media ecosystem, OrangePolitics will only become more essential. And as Jeff wrote, we have added some great features such as live tweeting local government meetings and our own online candidate forums along with the always-informative blogging of your fellow community activists.

We're very grateful to the 15 people who already donated $500 last fall, and hope that a few more people can step up and get us the rest of the way to $800.

Civil rights advocates call for diversity in school reassignment

Mark Dorosin - who is the managing director of the UNC Center for Civil Rights, a father of three, and a recently sworn-in in Orange County Commissioner - has written a letter to the Chapel Hill Carrboro School Board about the current school reassignment discussion. I couldn't agree with him more about the thinly veiled racism in the sudden clamor for "community schools." A term which is still fully tainted by the Republican takeover of the Wake County School Board, and rings hollow in suburban Chapel Hill where almost no schools are realistically walkable.

“Unless our children begin to learn together, there is little hope that our people will learn to live together.”  Thurgood Marshall

Dear Chairperson Brownstein and Members of the Board of Education:

As you begin to discuss the various redistricting options, I urge you to make racial and socio-economic diversity the highest priority in the redistricting criteria under consideration.  As the Chapel Hill-Carrboro School Board, like its peers across the state, continues to work to improve student achievement and close the gap between white and minority students’ test scores, it is critical that every available resource be utilized.  These resources include, in addition to technology, books and high quality teachers, students and families. Extensive social science research demonstrates that students learn from their peers, and that racial and socio-economic diversity among students enhances that learning.   All students, regardless of their individual socio-economic status or race, achieve at higher levels in socio-economically diverse schools.

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