Blogs

An effort to tally the number of homeless people in Orange County came up with the magic number of 236. While it's certainly a good idea to measure this, the methodology sounds pretty weak to me. Law enforcement literally went around and counted people. How can they possibly have seen and talked to every one? According to the Chapel Hill News:

The Chapel Hill police found six people without any shelter and 20 in doubled-up housing. Carrboro police found 24 with no shelter, Hillsborough police 10, and UNC police 10. The count also found one homeless person sheltered at Club Nova, a psychiatric rehabilitation center, 143 at the IFC's Community House, and 42 at the IFC's HomeStart facility.

This is a national story, but I thought some folks around here might be interested in what was happening to former Durham Police Chief Teresa Chambers. It seems that Chambers is about to be fired from her job as the chief of the National Park Police because she went on the record with a Washington Post reporter describing very specifically how her agency was underfunded, and what that meant on the ground.

http://www.slate.com/id/2093330/

I commend her on her courage and forthrightness, but I hope I'm not the only one who's struck by the irony. In Durham, Chambers was not known as someone who was forthright with the press. Indeed, she did everything she could to manage the department's image, which in her mind meant choking off the local press's access to police officers and police documents. Her feud with the Herald-Sun was particularly nasty and personal.

Then she goes to Washington and suddenly she's a whistleblower and a friend of the press? Better late than never, I suppose.

Some folks who live near the University have started an online petition. I don't know how effective these things are, but I guess it can't hurt, right? Here's what it says:

To: UNC-CH trustees, Chancellor Moeser, the UNC Board of Governors, the developers of Carolina North

We, the residents of the Towns of Chapel Hill and Carrboro, in recognition that the Towns benefit from the University and the University benefits from the Towns, ask for careful consideration of this petition.

The best faculty recruitment tool the University has are neither salary compensation, nor health benefits, but the Towns of Chapel Hill/Carrboro themselves, their natural resources and public facilities including the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools.

In this spirit, to maintain the desirability of Chapel Hill/Carrboro as a place to live and enable the University to recruit the best faculty far into the future, we demand that any Carolina North plan for the Horace Williams Tract have a designated public school site before Trustee approval.