Orange County
After 6 years (term limits!) of service with the Orange County Partnership to End Homelessness Leadership Team, the last few as chair, my run ends with 2018. Throughout the month of December I’ve been curating a series of tweets talking about the state of homelessness in Orange County and nationally and the work that we and our partners are doing to make homelessness “rare, brief, and one-time.”
You can take a look at the full twitter archive here to learn about our partners, our successes, our needs, and ways you can help end homelessness in Orange County.
For years now, residents and elected officials alike have expressed concern over the affordability of housing in Orange County and the Triangle. Durham’s “Pennies for Housing” and Chapel Hill’s recent “Affordable Housing Bond” attest to the central role housing affordability has played in civic discourse in our area. Moreover, research suggests that the cost of an area’s housing is among the most prominent variables that factor into people’s decisions on where settle.
Which is why it’s nice to see articles that help us make investment decisions. Take a recent one by Derrick Miller published on the SmartAsset site. Miller uses the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)’s definition of “housing cost-burdened”—i.e., when people spend more than 30% of their income on housing—to estimate the percentage of folks in various U.S. cities who are burdened by their housing costs. His calculations reveal that Newark, NJ is the nation’s “most severely housing cost-burdened” city in the U.S. and that Cary, NC is the least housing cost-burdened city.
The latest column in the Chapel Hill News by OrangePolitics Editor Molly De Marco asks whether mobile homes should be a part of the affordable housing solution in Orange County. What do you think? Read the column below:
Are mobile homes the (partial) answer to affordable housing in Orange County? Or maybe a better question, should mobile homes be part of the affordable-housing solution in our communities?
Last night marked the beginning of a new phase for proponents of the Mountain To Seat Trail (MST) in Orange County. After several years of silence, the Orange County Department of Environment, Agriculture, Parks and Recreation (DEAPR) held a meeting at the Cane Creek Community Center on Orange Grove road, inviting all landowners touched by the "planning corridor" from Occoneechee Mountain to the Haw River, mostly following Cane Creek from its headwaters to the Haw River confluence. Around 275 people were invited and around 75 were in attendance.
See the planning corridor map here: http://www.orangecountync.gov/document_center/DEAPR/MST_thru_Orange_Co.pdf
As the holiday season sets in, many of Orange County's public bodies are taking a break. This week, only the county commissioners are meeting. They'll be electing their chair and vice chair later today. All of the other boards are off this week.
The filing period begins today for the 2016 elections. The General Assembly recently moved the state's primary elections up to March 15—an early holiday gift for local politics geeks, perhaps an annoyance for others. So, what's on the line for Orange County in the March elections?
A new month will bring new and newly re-elected officials to Carrboro and Chapel Hill, and on the Chapel Hill-Carrboro School Board. In addition to the swearing in of new members, the Chapel Hill-Carrboro school board will consider approving new courses, while the Hillsborough Town Board considers rezoning more than 1,300 acres south od downtown near the intersection of I-85 and N.C. 86.
As we welcome new elected officials, the process will also being for selecting new members for the county commission. Candidate filing opens Tuesday.
CARRBORO BOARD OF ALDERPERSONS
CHAPEL HILL TOWN COUNCIL
With the elections behind us, Orange County's boards and commissions are getting back to work. The Carrboro Alderpersons' meeting may shape up to be an exciting one, with some in the business community requesting more information from the IFC about it's planned Food First Community Kitchen. The Chapel Hill Town Council will review several concepts and hold public hearings on changes to the LUMO and a special use permit, while the Chapel Hill-Carrboro school board will discuss how to use its assigned reserve funds. The county commissions will talk living wage and consider entering into a new interlocal agreement for "Launch Chapel Hill"
Both the Hillsborough Board of Commissioners and the county school board are on break this week. The Assembly of Governments meeting originally scheduled for November 19 has been cancelled.
CARRBORO BOARD OF ALDERPERSONS
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Tucson's method of nominating city council members in districts and electing them citywide (similar to Orange County's method for electing commissioners) was unconstitutional.
I am running for Orange County Commissioner in the Democratic primary for an at-large seat. My decades of experience with county issues, my forty-plus years living in Orange County beginning in 1971 when I came to attend UNC, and my service on key county boards and OWASA have prepared me to represent the diverse communities that share our county
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