In spite of the Orange County Board of Elections best attempts to stop anyone from doing this (see original PDF) I have copied the list of candiates and reformatted it into a vaguely readable list. If possible I will clean this up in a few days.

Most of these candidates will be joining us at our annual Candidate Coming Out Party today at 5:30 pm in downtown Chapel Hill, and I hope you will join us too. See all the details and RSVP on Facebook.

The Chapel Hill Town Council race will be where the party is. There are 10 candiates running for four seats, and only two incumbents.I expect the challengers have some pretty smart and interesting things to say, and some of them even have experience with local issues. For some voters, there are will be hard decisions, for some there will be clear favorites.

It's also very interesting that both our incumbent Hillsborough and Chapel Hill mayors and the unofficially-annointed challenger in Carrboro will all be running unopposed. When Lydia Lavelle takes office in December, I belive that we might be the only county in the nation with two openly-gay mayors! (Can someone fact-check me on that?)

The Chapel Hill-Carrboro School Board, Carrboro Board of Aldermen, and Hillsborough Board of Town Commissioners also mustered more candidates than seats so there will be competitive races there.

The Chapel Hill Town Council is moving forward with its advisory board restructuring process. As I described in an earlier post, the first stage of this process deals with creating a new advisory boards to oversee development review. Starting tomorrow (July 8) at 6:30PM, and continuing for the following five Mondays, there will be public input sessions at the Chapel Hill Public Library. The first session will describe what the input on this process will look like, and the next five meetings will focus on a specific board:

• Transportation and Connectivity (July 15)

• Community Design (July 22)

• Environmental Stewardship (July 29)

• Community Housing (August 5)

• a restructured Planning Board (August 12)