The closest you can get to Chapel Hill and Carrboro while still being in Chatham County is Starpoint. The intersection of Smith Level Road and 15-501 is at the county line. Starpoint is also the proposed location of a new Wal-Mart.

Elected officials in Chapel Hill and Carrboro have already asked Chatham County to allow them to conduct a courtesy review. This would allow them to formally have input, although it is not binding. According to the News & Observer "This is the first I've heard about that," Morgan said when asked about Chapel Hill's plans to request a review. "I didn't know they did that type of stuff."

Which is exactly why we should be very worried.

Guest Post by Katrina Ryan

While in Washington DC about a month ago, I attended a seminar that was sponsored in part by the 21st century democrats
http://www.21stcenturydems.org/ . It was a talk given by three mathematicians.

Davis Annick, an associate from MIT, Sam Wang of Princeton, and David Dill of Stanford took several factors including exit poll variances, early vote pattern variances, historical undecided voter patterns and new voter registration statistics into consideration. The conclusion was absolutely astounding to me. They calculated the odds against last year's federal elections being accurate at 247 million to 1. (Disclaimer Math is not my forte, but I do know that odds like that make the lottery look good. I'd link to the research for specifics, but it's under peer review.)

Dr. Dill mentioned, as he has before, that North Carolina has one of the most severe election problems in the country, citing, amongst other things, the 4400 votes that "disappeared" in Carteret County.

I am happy to inform you (before the papers do) that Mark Chilton is officially a candidate for Mayor of Carrboro!

Here is his statement posted here on OP earlier today:

With Mike Nelson stepping down, I am officially running for Mayor of Carrboro this fall. I held a short press conference this morning at Carrboro Town Hall about this and I am sure the papers will report the details tomorrow, but here is a short synopsis of what I said this morning.

1) The Northern Small Area Plan needs to be completely re-worked. 2) We should take up the Friends of Bolin Creek's challenge to create a Bolin Creek Preserve. 3) We must take a number of steps to strike a balance between increasing our commercial tax base and protecting existing neighborhoods. And 4) we need to rewrite a number of rules related to affordable housing including the Density Bonus, downtown performance standards, and voluntary annexation standards in order to increase affordable housing development in Carrboro.

I also talked some about my view of the role of the Mayor. In short I believe that I will play three roles as a Mayor - a listener, a mediator and a leader.