Durham City Councilmen Mike Woodard and Eugene Brown want to save the Wafting on the Eno program.
"Are we so far apart that we can't work something out?” Woodard wrote City Manager Tom Bonfield and Deputy Manager Ted Vorhess on Monday. “It seems a shame to lose this program.”
Brown, a guide/naturalist on the Snake River in Grand Teton National Park for over a decade, was more passionate -- and pointed.
“I understand what can be experienced and learned on these trips about nature and our precious environment, and it's a hell of a lot more than one learns in a environmental building center that some from Parks and Rec. staff are proposing,” he wrote in an e-mail. “This is absurd and we need to rectify it.”
Brown goes on to ask if the city is forcing changes to Owen’s program because he and his wife Josie (disclosure: I take a class at Duke with Josie) “want to see the park expanded into our state park system?”
“Why are we now, after nearly 20 years of safe trips with over 2,000 guests, demanding that he purchase liability insurance, or that we take away the blacksmith shop as his office? ... The cardinal issue is that this is a unique and educational opportunity for our citizens and it is being denied to them by one of city departments that call itself parks and rec. Sometimes our departments need to live up to their name. What's really going on here?"
