Patrick M's blog

Ever Park in Downtown Chapel Hill or Downtown Carrboro? Please Take the GoTriangle Survey!

GoTriangle invites anyone who works, lives, or visits Downtown Chapel Hill or Downtown Carrboro to take a survey to help evaluate transportation and parking in the two downtowns. This is important because parking needs have a major impact on planning our local and regional transportation infrastructure.

To participate, follow this link: https://www.rsgresearch.com/triangleparking

Individuals who complete the survey have the option to enter a drawing for a 16GB Apple iPad.

The survey will take approximately 12 minutes. Your answers will be kept confidential and will only be used for  transportation planning purposes. This study is being conducted for GoTriangle by Resource Systems Group, Inc. (RSG), a national transportation market research firm. 

Thank you for helping improve transportation throughout the Triangle region.

Feel free to contact us at triangleparking@rsginc.com if you have any questions.

On Panzanella Closing and The Responsibility of Community-Owned Businesses

Panzanella RestaurantLate this afternoon, via social media linked to a News and Observer article, came the gut punch news that beloved local restaurant Panzanella is closing.  On a personal level, this is just very, very sad.  Since my wife and I got married over a decade ago, we have celebrated all sorts of major life events, and perhaps most of them– graduations, birthdays, wedding anniversaries, rare visits from cherished friends, you name it – at Panzanella.  With such good food, valuable relationships with local farmers, brewers, and other food producers, not to mention what has always been consistently a warm and friendly staff– this is a big surprise that nobody saw coming.

Orange County to Discuss Strategic Library Plan Tuesday Night

At 7:00 pm on Tuesday night, at the Southern Orange Human Services center at 2501 Homestead Rd in Chapel Hill, the Orange County Comissioners will discuss the Orange County Public Library Draft Strategic Plan for 2013 - 2016.  The draft plan can be found in the Work Session agenda (PDF) on the county website. 

The last time the library was discussed at the BOCC, the county staff suggested that the plan, which is being written up by Dr. Anthony Chow, an assistant professor in the Department of Library Science at UNC-Greensboro, would be critical to informing the site selection of the Southern Branch of the Orange County Library.  The plan begins on page 29 of the PDF after Dr. Chow's Curriculum Vitae.

Appendix A provides a link to a Library Needs Assessment with a completion date of January 2, 2013, which seems to be much more substantive, containing significant amounts of qualitative and quantitative data.

http://orangecountync.gov/library/documents/ocpl_community_needs_analysis_2013.pdf

Carrboro: North Carolina's Market Town

Carrboro Farmers' MarketPreviously on CityBeautiful21 I talked about Informal Markets -- events that are marked by an agreed-upon time and place to sell and buy goods, but may lack features of a permanent retail establishment.  When I think about the things that the town of Carrboro has going for it, our talent for finding room for Informal Markets is near the top of the list.  When I began researching this post, I was not surprised to find that Carrboro has been finding a place for Informal Markets in the community for over 35 years.

Like Krakow, Carrboro has nurtured an informal market into a formal one in the heart of the community- the Carrboro Farmers' Market. On their website, the Farmers' Market even refers to itself as a previously informal market!

Lawson Push Polling in NC-4

I was push-polled by Edge polling on behalf of the Lawson campaign or some other Republican PAC this evening.  The questions were reasonably straightforward for the first 5-7 minutes, then got more paranoid about illegal immigration and whether or not the country had abandoned the Constitution.  It closed with something like, "David Price, a college professor and your current representative, is an 11-term incumbent who supports Barack Obama's takeover and bailouts for companies that are too big to fail, and votes with Nancy Pelosi more than any other member of Congress.  If this makes you more likely to vote for him, press 1.  If it makes you less likely, press 2."

Final question, same button choices:

 "BJ Lawson is a father, a medical doctor, and a successful small businessman who is reported to have strong grassroots support who will lower taxes and restore the Constitution blah blah blah..."

 The most interesting question was about whether or not I supported Federal regulations that may add burdens to local and small farmers who sell at Farmer's Markets.  Perhaps Lawson is trying this out as a wedge issue against Price?

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