Blogs
On Monday, Feb 28, the town of Chapel Hill will hold a public forum in response to Lex Alexander's petition to allow food trucks to operate on private property within town limits. Food trucks, such as Parlez-Vous Crepes and Only Burger, have a dedicated following in Durham and Carrboro, but are prohibited by zoning ordinances in Chapel Hill and Raleigh. These businesses are currently required to meet state health department regulations. At the local level, they pay for a variety of licenses, including a business license and an itinerant merchant permit. In Durham, they are required to be "tethered to a brick and mortor kitchen" and they also pay "rent" to the business whose private property they operate from (same as in Carrboro).
One of the positive economic development efforts by Orange County in conjuction with Alamance, Chatham, and Durham Counties is the Piedmont Food Processing Center. As it's website says its "A business incubator for food entrepreneurs and farmers in the Piedmont Region to add value to local farm products and create new local food businesses." Today they announced that a manager for the Center has been hired. See the press release below for more information.
The Chapel Hill Town Council, in June 2010, adopted a goal of creating one-page strategies for Public Art, Communications, Sustainability, and Affordable Housing like the one-pager created for Economic Development. The Affordable Housing Technical Advisory Group was recently formed to aid town staff in developing a one-pager for Affordable Housing. The Technical Advisory is made up of representatives from The Community Home Trust, Habitat for Humanity, IFC, EmPOWERment, Inc., CASA, Justice United, East West Partners, Radway Design Associates, Orange County Housing, Human Rights, and Community Development, the Chapel Hill Public Housing Program, and the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Chamber of Commerce.
I thought this was a very direct point about the philosophical divide on economic development (ED) from the Carrboro Board of Aldermen's recent annual retreat.
The aldermen agreed that some organizations just don't get Carrboro's vision, especially the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Chamber of Commerce, and Orange County's Economic Development Commission, and they wondered aloud whether they should seek support from those two groups for the Think Local First Campaign.
- The Herald-Sun - Carrboro wants people to Think Local First, 2/2/2010
Brian has written about this divide before, but I've never seen it laid out quite so starkly. Can't we all just get along?
Last week The Carrboro Citizen reported on Orange County leaders congratulating themselves on making major technology improvements over the past two years. "“Today’s servers are tomorrow’s mainframes, and we do have to have that kind of continuous upgrade of systems,” board Vice Chair Steve Yuhasz said." He's right of course, but it sounds like many of the changes were to internal infrastructure, so it's hard for us average residents to tell the difference. I'm wondering what technology OP readers would like to see the County improve?
One improvement that I did notice was the update to the web-based GIS system. Mostly it caught my attention because the County's site was down and/or malfunctioning for a while following the upgrade. It is now easier to use than before, which I would characterize as a step up from requiring a graduate degree to use, to merely requiring a lot of patience and guesswork.
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