Call these endorsements or not -- whatever. Enough people have asked me to post these over the past few elections that I feel like doing one here. I do my best to be clear with just how much knowledge (or lack thereof) about the candidates I'm basing my decisions on, so I don't give any false impression of expertise. Anyway, enough primary blather to choke a horse awaits just below the fold....
(I've put whom I'm voting for in bold, for perhaps easier reading.)
At work, running low on sleep, and not having blogged in a while, this post at Barry's got me thinking:
By the way, Wichita KS is in Sedgewick County, not Wichita County, which can be confusing, at the least.
For all the talk about merging city and county governments here (which I continue to think is a ridiculous idea -- hopefully more on that soon in my primary election post), one reason it actually could work is that the city of Durham, NC is actually in Durham County, NC. Oddly enough, this seems to be the exception rather than the rule in NC. This is an attempt to come up with all of the oddly mismatched city/county names in the state. I'm sure I'm going to miss an awful lot.
I've listed the cities and the counties they're in, along with the counties and their county seats.
Asheville -- Buncombe County
Asheboro -- Randolph County
Ashe County -- Jefferson
Alexander -- Buncombe County
Alexander County -- Taylorsville
Graham -- Alamance County
Graham County -- Robbinsville
Greensboro -- Guilford County
Greenville -- Pitt County
Greene County -- Snow Hill
Pittsboro -- Chatham County
Beaufort -- Carteret County
Beaufort County -- Washington
Washington County -- Plymouth
Henderson, NC -- Vance County
Hendersonville, NC -- Henderson County
Franklin, NC -- Macon County
Franklin County -- Louisburg
Cherokee, NC -- Swain County
Cherokee County -- Murphy
Jacksonville, NC -- Onslow County
Jackson County -- Sylva
Waynesville, NC -- Haywood County
Wayne County -- Goldsboro
Yanceyville, NC -- Caswell County
Yancey County -- Burnsville
What have I missed?
To touch on a topic I keep trying to get to, it seems that the future of public transportation in the Triangle has come very quietly to a critical turning point. It appears that most of what's going to be said in public has been said, and the talk made its way from the pages of the newspapers to the back rooms, where I can only speculate that haggling over the process seems to be still going on. Given the amount of time and effort put into the STAC, I can't imagine that the process has already fallen dead. At least I certainly hope not.
To recap, following the final collapse of the originally proposed Raleigh-to-Durham high frequency rail service, the state government appointed a Special Transit Advisory Commission (a.k.a, the STAC), to be hosted out of the Triangle J Council of Governments. The purpose, ultimately, was to revisit every step in the decision-making process, to go back over all the options, and to see if out of the ashes of the original TTA plan, something could be made to work politically and financially. It consists of all sorts of movers and shakers from across the Triangle, from business folks, former elected officials, university leaders, and activists. The STAC met monthly for the past year or so, working with staff members from the various local governments as well as the state. In February, the STAC unveiled a draft report of its recommendations, which showed an ambitious $2 billion comprehensive plan for transit in the Triangle, to be funded through some sort of local tax, similar to Charlotte's .5% sales tax. One of the Indy's blogs captured it nicely in a post last month, wherein the stresses in the agreement started to show. Not surprisingly, the fault lines fell along much the same lines as before. There's all sorts of ways to describe that rift, but ultimately it boils down to the Durham-Wake county line.
Continue reading "Transit in the Triangle: Together, or apart?" »
While I'm not looking forward to the Democratic nomination getting ugly, there's a bright side here. In an election that everyone expected to be over in February, North Carolina's May primary will actually matter. Between now and then, the only other large population state to vote is Pennsylvania.
Since North Carolina has been ignored in every presidential election since I was old enough to vote, and its primary has always been so late that the race was always decided by then, I'm pretty excited about this. It's the first time I'll get a meaningful vote in a presidential election.
I've been sitting on the idea for a blog post for a couple of months now that I've never gotten a chance to write, because I never feel like I have the whole story. But Bruce Siceloff at the N&O just broke the story of the Special Transportation Advisory Committee for Durham, Wake, and Orange counties releasing its recommendations for how to go forward with transit in the Triangle, and based on one article, it looks like a home run.
The original TTA plan centered around the plans and developments under the Clinton administration, under which cities around the country got seed money to plan new public transportation infrastructure, with the understanding that any reasonably good proposal would have a good shot at funding. These funds emphasized getting the first lines built, which always cost the most, so that future lines could grow off of those. Like in so many cases, however, the Bush administration had other ideas, and gutted funds for the plans, and made up for the loss by increasing the bar on the projected operating efficiency from day one. That moved the bar from where TTA had been aiming to a level it couldn't reach, particularly with all sorts of idiotic nonsense from Norfolk-Southern and the North Carolina Railroad about right of way uses, as well as intransigence from senior officials at Duke wanting to protect the bucolic charm of the Erwin-Fulton intersection. The result, of course, was that TTA had to give up on federal funds.
The new plan takes a much different tack. It still looks for federal funds, but instead of counting on them for over 60% of the cost, the way TTA originally did, it calls for local funding sources, in the form of a half cent special sales tax increase and a $10 increase in the car registration fee (the latter of which is sure to make heads explode at the John Locke Foundation). This would pay half the cost of a massive $2 billion plan, with the remainder coming in the form of 25% from the state and 25% from the feds.
And for that matter, the plan looks much better to begin with.
I chided the Mayor a couple of days ago for leadfooting the move towards tiered water rates, when the difference would only be a couple of months. Well, if we're looking for things to move quickly, here's another one. (At least to get started on -- this too wouldn't be an instant process.)
In summing up last night's drought forum at Duke Gardens, Kevin reports this from the meeting:
Voorhees went into more detail on water reclamation; he agreed that this could have some benefits and is widely used in western states, but is something which North Carolina has less experience using. Gray water -- the form coming out of sinks and bathtubs -- is one thing to re-use (though technically a state violation to use, Voorhees added that no one in the City of Durham will bother you about that -- to raucous applause from the audience.) Waste water coming from human waste plumbing is another, though, and requires significant treatment. Voorhees noted that major changes to building codes are needed to accommodate such changes, and that state-level action is required to have an impact.
I got into the subject of gray water last year, and how even pretty sane uses are completely banned by the state. On the one hand, I applaud Voorhees for looking the other way for reasonable gray water use. But the truth is, there are some actual public health reasons for how we treat "gray water" (which also includes dishwasher and washing machine effluent). Somehow, having an unreasonable total ban at the state level and no enforcement at the local level seems like a bad combination.
What's needed, then, is a sane, statewide gray water law that puts some basic restrictions on uses that might actually be dangerous, but allows for some sensible uses with some basic, common sense restrictions. I posted this link last year, but some folks who put in gray water systems for a living have set up an online policy center for what gray water law should look like. I'd like someone with a background in the relevant public health issues to look at these before we go forward, but they cite the Arizona gray water law, and the New Mexico law that was modeled after it, as being ideal in simplicity and effectiveness. The gist of the New Mexico law, quoted from their site, is as follows:
Currently, even the most no-brainer of gray water uses -- taking sink water and using it to flush a toilet -- is completely prohibited under NC law. So does anyone know if the period for introducing new bills into the short legislative session has already passed yet?
Now here's something which had escaped my notice. From an editorial in the Winston-Salem Journal:
Legislators, rather than increase the gas tax and plug an estimated $65 billion shortfall in transportation needs, passed the buck. They passed a law last summer, which became effective on Jan. 1, saying that counties can now pay to build roads. This likely means that counties will sell bonds and pay for them with property-tax revenues.
Now, just to recap, going back to the Great Depression, North Carolina has forbidden county governments from even thinking about touching road building. This is, of course, in stark contrast to most states, where a great many of the roads, often the majority, belong to counties.
I completely missed the passage of this bill, even though Frank Duke told me last year that there was a chance that it would happen. As such, I don't really know the details on it, beyond what the W-SJ provides. Would counties then own the roads, or can they simply commission NCDOT to build them? The W-SJ does add this:
This may be a good idea. Local leaders may better know local needs, and they may have more determination to confront them. But if they do so with property tax revenues, they will either have to raise taxes or cut other spending, most likely in education. Neither is desirable. And, if they do use property taxes, they will be using a revenue stream that does not link road users and the road revenues. People who pay high property taxes may not use the roads the most, and vice versa.
If legislators wanted to give commissioners this new authority to build more roads, they should have also given them the power to institute local fuel taxes.
While I'm not sure I follow their logic that it will result in cuts to education, I completely agree that a local option fuels tax would be a great, great thing, particularly if it could be instituted at the county level. I would happily pay a nickel a gallon more if I knew it were going to Durham County, with the chance of improving transportation.
In any case, cutting the binders on county governments was the right thing to do. Hopefully it's a first step towards allowing the wealthier urban parts of the state to both build and pay for their own infrastructure.
This week's Indy features a special section looking back at the whole of 2007 in music. The whole thing is a good browse, but I particularly liked the piece by Rick Cornell about the state of roots music in North Carolina. In particular, Cornell focuses on how successful roots music continues to be throughout the state, in various forms.
I'm drawn to this piece not just because Cornell romps through some of my favorite local musicians, although that's certainly a plus. He touches on a variety of excellent acts, from the Avett Brothers to the Midtown Dickens to Chatham County Line, to personal favorite (okay, so they're friends of mine, I'm biased) the Carolina Chocolate Drops. (Another shameless plug: Cornell didn't mention other friends-of-the-blog Little Windows, but should have!) The main reason I'm linking here is because he touches on something I've thought for a long time, and is a big reason why, after spending college in a town in Minnesota that could be a dead ringer for Lake Wobegon at times, I ended up back in North Carolina. The way I've put it in the past is that in North Carolina, music just seems to be seeping out of the ground, or at least running through the trees like the pine tar from the lost longleaf forests. It's not any one kind of music, but it almost seems like everyone here is doing music in some form or another, to a far greater extent than anywhere else I've spent much time. Cornell puts it another way, attaching a name to it that I think is pretty good too:
But above all else, I point to "The Echo" for this state's current role in roots music. It's the sense that, if you put your ear up to a pine tree, you can hear a mountain ballad or four-part harmony. If music isn't everywhere in this state, it's just two mandolin players away from that goal. "You walk out your front door, and it's hard not to bump into someone who plays piano or sings in the choir at church, or does some pickin' on the banjo or guitar," says Dolph Ramseur, who finds time to manage The Avett Brothers and the Carolina Chocolate Drops when he's not running Ramseur Records. "Growing up in the Piedmont, it seemed that every family I knew had a piano in the living room, and somehow I am sure this helps make a difference." For Merlefest Director Ted Hagaman, it's this simple: The music is part of every North Carolinian's heritage.
Perfectly said.
I get e-mail:
Attention NCSSM Alumni,
Be sure to come out tomorrow evening, Friday, November 16, to support the NCSSM Men's Varsity Soccer Team as they play in their first-ever NCHSAA 1-A State Championship against East Montgomery. The game is tomorrow evening at 5 o'clock at:
Durham Bulls Soccer Stadium
At WRAL Soccer Center
7700 Perry Creek Road
Raleigh, NC 27616-5704
Okay, let me get this straight. There's a Durham Bulls Soccer Stadium. In Raleigh. In NORTHEAST Raleigh, a good 40 minute drive from Durham.
WHAT THE HELL?
Yes, I know. Capital Broadcasting owns Durham Bulls and WRAL, so they're using this as a marketing opportunity. But look at it again.
The naming rights to a stadium have been bought. By another sports franchise. IN A DIFFERENT SPORT THAT DOESN'T EVEN PLAY THERE! INCLUDING THE NAME OF A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT CITY!
On a remotely related note, WRAL-FM has now started playing Christmas music, earning them a nomination for the coveted Christmas Creep awards, joining 102.9 in that dubious distinction. (More on the CC Awards soon.)
Oh, one more thing...
Secant tangent cosine sine!
3.14159!
Physics, Bio, Polymer Chem!
Give 'em hell, Go S&M!
So, like many people in North Carolina, I've been getting pretty crazy with my attempts to save water. Most things I'm doing are pretty typical -- including catching the water I have to run off to clear the lines for hot water, using the cutoff valve on my shower head, and all that. One experiment I tried this weekend was to take my 22 quart canner and set it on top of the washing machine, then pull out the drain hose out of the fixture in the wall (funny thing if you've never done this -- your washer drain hose typically just sits loosely stuck down a PVC pipe hole, without any threading or anything) and hung it over the side. Then, as I ran a load of clothes in my super water efficient front loading machine, I just bailed the "grey water" out of it as the machine ran, and took it outside and put it on my plants.
Now, I did first check to make sure that the detergent I was using wasn't going to be horrible for my plants. Granted, it's probably not great, but most of the soils in my yard are the typical red or grey ultisols that are typical of the area, although the area around the bog garden is significantly more alluvial. (Sorry, geeking out again...) These are the kinds of soils you typically put lime on to raise the pH, so adding some organic bases in the form of BioPac laundry detergent might even help break up the clay a bit. In some ways, I was a little alarmed at just how much water was coming out of the drain, even on my water efficient model. I had to bail rather quickly, particularly after the wash cycle, to keep up. However, I ended up being able to give my younger trees and a few of the herbs I'm trying to keep alive until next year a good healthy dousing.
It wasn't until afterwards, when I was thinking about how I might be able to install a full grey water system on my house and doing some Googling on such, that I realized that I was breaking the law. Grey water can be a public health hazard, particularly when it's spread on the surface. The primary concern is water from kitchen sinks, dishwashers, and showers, which can contain high amounts of organic solids and can lead to the spread of dangerous bacteria. (Toilet water is considered "black water," and is, of course, right out.) Some states have adopted regulations for installing grey water treatment systems, but North Carolina isn't one of them.
Granted, I don't think the police will be showing up at my door any time soon. Washing machine water, from what I can tell, is one of the least dangerous forms of grey water, and given that I'm pretty certain absolutely none of it is going to make it past all of the incredibly thirsty plants and into my ditch, where my bog garden would suck up anything that was left, I'm probably okay. But as we all rush to find ways to conserve water, sometimes we trip over regulations we never realized were there.
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