Molly De Marco's blog

The Chapel Hill Town Council decided last night to open the application process to fill the seat recently vacated. Applications are due April 22nd. 

The following information was sent out by the Town:

Applications Accepted for Vacant Council Seat

 

The Chapel Hill Town Council has established the process for filling the vacancy on the Council resulting from the resignation of former Council Member Matt Czajkowski. The Town Charter provides that this vacancy shall be filled by appointment for the remainder of Council Member Czajkowski’s term of office, until December 2015. Residents of Chapel Hill who are registered voters and otherwise qualified to hold office are invited to apply to fill this vacant seat on the Town Council.

In a previous post, I detailed the initial steps that the Carrboro and Chapel Hill Police Departments are taking to move toward racial equity in policing. But what about other local government functions?

The Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools Board of Education has been in the news recently because of its decisions about board composition. First, in filling the vacancy left by outgoing school board member Mia Burroughs, the school board selected a wealthy, white man, one of only two white men in a field of 15 applicants, many of whom were well-qualified women and people of color. Then, they selected two white men as chair and vice chair, passing up a woman of color who has served on the board much longer than the selected vice chair.

Orange County elected officials and health department staff have recongized the immediate need to address poverty in our county. As a result, the Orange County Family Success Alliance has been launched, modeled on the Harlem Children's Zone. The Orange County Health Department used health and school system data to select six zones with the highest need. More information can be found here. Each zone held community meetings to glean information for their applications. They then made short presentations and fielded questions. The Family Success Alliance Advisory Council developed a rubric for scoring of the applications. Below is a collection of tweets that summarize the presentations and selection process carried out on Tuesday, December 16th.