The Mayor of Chapel Hill has been gradually taking money and power away from the Downtown Commission and directing it toward this new body, Chapel Hill Downtown Economic Development Corporation. It's quite clear from yesterday's Chapel Hill Herald article that the University is involved deeply with this new body - not that they weren't pretty influential with the old one, for that matter. But the suggestion that the first staff person for this corporation should be hand-picked by the University is too much. And if you weren't sure whether to be suspicious, I have two words for you:

A lot of folks don't seem to want to talk about anything but the Orange County School Board race and it's ugly twin sister, the merger debate. Here's an open thread for those people so they can stop hijacking other topics of interest to the rest of us. Enjoy.

At the Carrboro board meeting tonight, there was a presentation and public comment period concerning the new "Carrboro Senior High School". One of the striking things about the initial plan is that, despite adhering to environmentally sound building design principles, the overall layout of the school still encourages the same kind of sprawl as usual. There was a disconnect between the idea of "green building" and "sustainable" development practices. For instance, the school will be extremely energy efficient and will even catch rainwater to flush toilets, but there will be 420 parking spaces and the current layout of the road system puts the nearest bus stop to the school much further away than most of the parking spaces. In a world where many of our life lessons are learned in high school, it seems like the school board would be interested in designing a school that encouraged students to use public transit or bike to school and that left a small footprint on the landscape.