Sunday's edition of the Chapel Hill News includes two letters in response to Molly De Marco's recent guest column imploring the Boy Scouts of America to welcome gay people into the organization. The paper's editors decided to publish the letters, despite the authors' inflammatory statements and deeply hateful rhetoric toward lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. In doing so, they have sent a message to our community that the Chapel Hill News is a no-holds-barred forum for the discriminatory fantasies of bigots.
One of the letters, by Tom Evans of Pittsboro, describes LGBT people as defective and mentally dysfunctional. The other letter, by Alan Culton of Hillsborough, likens homosexuality to violent assault, marital infidelity, and pedophilia.
I’m the chair of the Board of Elections and wanted to clarify some of the discussion that has gone on about early voting:
Many of you may assume - as I did - that all the elected officials in Orange County are registered as either Democrat or Unaffiliated voters. If so, then you would be wrong.
In the process of compiling information for a forthcoming spreadsheet of candidate information, I learned that Hillsborough Town Commissioner Evelyn Lloyd recently changed her registration from D to R. Just like that, we now have a Republican elected in Orange County - breaking many years of tradition. OK.
It's not unusual for one Republican to run in the lonely primary for County Commissioner in even years. Like it or not, it's understood that they will not be elected when put to a county-wide vote (especially since the Commissioners designed their district system to only barely change the status quo) but it's certainly their prerogative to run. It is even more Quixotic to run as a Republican in odd years when we elect our municipal leaders and our city school board.
It's being reported that school overcrowding "threatens" a moratorium on construction of new homes in Chapel Hill and/or Orange County. Meanwhile, the number of "for sale" signs for existing homes in our neighborhoods are proliferating, as old listings languish and new listings appear.
I was unable to find (after an admittedly quick search) current stats for the number of houses on sale in the various school districts or for the average time a house sits on the market -- probably not numbers that local realtors consider very happy. (Did find reference to an approx. 9% vacancy rate for Chapel Hill, but not certain what that includes -- commercial? residential? both?)
However, it doesn't take a lot of scrutiny to know that there are an unprecedented number of existing houses for sale -- far more than are likely to be built new in the next year, I'd bet. And in the likely event that every one of those houses -- or even half of them -- were sold to families with children by September, the schools would have a difficult time accommodating them.
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