Blogs

Red Means Stop

The Town Council will take up the Red Light Camera issue on Monday. Half of the Council seems squarely and enthusiastically in the pocket of the company that runs the system, in fact they recently held a "forum" in which several of this company's lobbyists were given the Town's bully pulpit to advocate for their client/sponsor, ACS.

Fortunately, Council Member Mark Kleinschmidt has petitioned the Council to return to due process for red-light runners. And the Chapel Hill News weighs in with an editorial in favor of eliminating the program:

There are numerous problems with the concept — technological flaws, incursions on privacy, conflict with state public records law — but the basic issue stems from introducing commercial, for-profit enterprise into a basic governmental law-enforcement responsibility.

Pardon the Rant

I was about to post about the big decision on Monday about Red Light Cameras, but I am once again stopped in my tracks by the Town of Chapel Hill's website, which is so haphazardly cobbled together that instead of seeing the front page I am seeing this:

Forbidden
You don't have permission to access / on this server.

What the heck is going on? Can someone (Terri?, Paul?) tell me why there isn't room in Chapel Hill's multi-million-dollar town budget for one qualified, full-time webmaster and a consultant to redesign the site and make it useable?

Is Chapel Hill About to Fracture?

Guest post by Nick Eberlein

Once the brouhaha over November's council race and the implications it would have for the town - and more pointedly, for town-UNC relations - died down weeks afterward, we have seen very little in the press about what we may expect in the coming months, years, etc. between the two parties. But when I was made aware of Bob Burtman's fresh column in this week's Indy, it seems that a whole new round of mud-slinging, compromising, controversy, stonewalling, or stalemate could easily begin very soon.

The article, I think anyway, does a good job of weaving a synthesis between the successful advocacy candidates, the gearing up of Carolina North negotiations, the matching of university powerbrokers with elected officials to shoot the bull over common issues, and the ensuing lobbying petition that has resulted. What makes this article interesting is it sourced entirely with anonymous quotes (e.g., "a council member," "a student enrolled in Jonathan Howes' class") and makes some pretty damning allegations.

Blogs and TV Don't Mix

I guess this story continues our on-going documentation of the lazyness of professional journalists. You have to wonder about NBC 17 when they decided to do a story about blogs without talking to anyone but Todd Melet and Henry Copeland. They must have picked up on Todd's spokesperson status from his WCHL editorial calling 2004 "The year of the Blog" a few weeks ago.

Here is how NBC 17 introduced their story: "If you are so inclined, you can snoop inside someone's online diary... It's also an opportunity for local businesses to make more money." That pretty much sums up their story. Yep, voyeurism and capitalism, that's blogging.

Props to Chatham Residents

The Chatham County political scene's decay means more than most of us want to admit. We've depended upon that large forested county to stay large, unpopulated, and forested so that we can uphold our own quality of life in southern Orange County. Part of the allure of living in the western edge of the Triangle here is that we can go north, south, or west and hit farmland and rivers and general pastoral ambiance and breathe. That's all about to change in a big way now that the Chatham board of commissioners is firmly under the control of uber-pro-development forces. The county is poised to add a LOT of people over the next 10 years, further clogging all the southern routes into and out of Chapel Hill and creating larger car and water pollution problems for the area in general. And next year's election in Chatham will only decide two seats, both of the seats currently held by those perceived to be least pro-development. It don't look good.

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