The American Heart Association named Chapel Hill Town Council member Lee Storrow the “Volunteer Advocate of the Year” this week.
The award was announced Tuesday during the association’s annual congressional Lobby Day – You’re the Cure on the Hill – in Washington, D.C.
“I’m honored to receive this award from the American Heart Association,” Storrow said. “After losing multiple family members to heart disease, I know how important good health policies are to make our state a healthier place.”
It is given each year to someone who makes a generous commitment of time, energy and talent in advocating for the association to key lawmakers, recruiting new advocates and serving as a grassroots organizer on American Heart Association issues.
Storrow is the managing director for the N.C. Alliance For Health Coalition. His work for the American Heart Association has helped to advance tobacco and obesity prevention goals. He also works on social media, lobbying and other education efforts.
The Chapel Hill Town Council isn't the only town rethinking food truck rules.
The council will get a report Wednesday night that recommends lowering fees to attract more trucks. More than the one that's taken out a permit, that is. Look for more on that in tomorrow's CHN.
The Hillsborough Town Board, is now considering allowing food trucks on private property within the Historic District on a regular basis rather than just for special events, according to a town news release.
The owners of Maggie’s Hot Tin Roof, a bar locating in the former Hillsborough Plumbing building on West Margaret Lane, requested that the town ordinance be changed to allow food trucks to operate in the Historic District provided they:
- Are located on private property.
- Do not use any additional signage beyond what is affixed to the truck.
- Provide waste disposal.
- Minimize noise via a quiet generator or an electrical plug-in to the adjacent building
- Pay all applicable fees and charges.
The bar’s owners explained that their location can easily fit a food truck and that their business model relies on provision of food from a variety of trucks in lieu of a kitchen.
The Town Board decided to research the issue, identify options and hold a public hearing on any proposed changes developed, according to the release The board also asked Alliance for Historic Hillsborough Executive Director Sarah DeGennaro, the town’s support staff to the Hillsborough Tourism Board, to coordinate obtaining feedback from downtown merchants. The issue likely will be a discussion item at the Tourism Board’s next meeting. Town planning staff also will begin drafting an ordinance amendment.
For more information, contact Hillsborough Planning Director Margaret Hauth by phone at 919-732-1270 Ext. 86 or by email. Or contact DeGennaro with the Alliance for Historic Hillsborough by phone at 919-732-7741 or by email at sarah@historichillsborough.org.
To celebrate its fourth anniversary, Taste Carolina food tour company is branching out from offering tours of the Triangle's foodie hot spots.
Owner Leslie Stracks-Mullem has organized a series of events highlighting how food artisans and chefs partner with local farmers.
The company hopes people will buy tickets to all multiple events. To attend all six, it costs $249. Five events cost $215. Four costs $180 and three costs $138. Remaining tickets for each event will go on sale one week prior to the event. Tickets can be purchased online at tastecarolina.com.
Here is the schedule:
The effect that “G.I. Joe: Retaliation” will have won’t end when the curtain falls or the box office banks its profits.
Chapel Hill actor Augustus Cho, who plays a North Korean leader in the movie, is spearheading a star-studded benefit Saturday for the USO of North Carolina and the U.S. Veterans Corps, a nonprofit community service group.
Cho also has released a public service announcement to raise awareness of the USO’s work and promote the fund-raising event - http://youtu.be/WZk39Ybr8mA.
“Paramount has really, really come through on this. They were very generous to give us this kind of support. This is highly unusual,” Cho said.
The Military Appreciation Day event will be from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at The Streets at Southpoint in Durham.
Connie Inggs, director of the USO-NC’s Raleigh-Durham International Airport Center, said she expects the event to have a major impact. The nonprofit organization relied on donations to serve 651,000 service members and families last year.
“There is a great burden on us right now to do operations, and we need community support,” she said.
The New York Times published a story that our real estate reporter, David Bracken, has been writing about for months, if not longer.
The housing industry is experiencing a standoff of sorts. There is a shortage of single-family homes for sale around the country. We have been seeing this in the Triangle. But it is a strange kind of shortage that doesn't seem to result in a big jump in prices or a buyer frenzy. It is as if supply and demand are existing in different economic universes. Let me explain.
At the end of February, there were 7,515 homes on the market here. That was 20 percent down from last year and 40 percent down from two years ago, according to Triangle Multiple Listing Services data. That means that this area has a five-month supply of homes for sale.
But the average sales price of a home is up just 1 percent and a crucial metric, the number of days a home stays on the market, continues to drop but is still at 117 days.
So, while the Times story suggests that in some markets around the country sellers are getting multiple offers, prices are jumping and the homes are flying off the shelf, something is still holding this market back.
I think that's because the Triangle housing market is still recovering. There is an undercurrent of buyers and sellers still groping around, trying to get a bead on things.
Unemployment, by Triangle standards, is still very high, at 7.7 percent at year end. At the end of 2006, the Raleigh-Cary-Durham jobless rate hovered at 3.5 percent. People without jobs don't buy houses. OK, maybe they did during the subprime days of yore when you could get a mortgage by fogging up a mirror. But not today.
There are other wet blankets on the market. Buyers and sellers are playing a waiting game. People who bought a house back in the mid-2000's for, say, $250,000, may be sitting on real estate that is now just worth $220,000. They may owe more than their house is worth, and sellers don't want to come to the closing table having to write a check to pay off the mortgage balance that the sales price doesn't cover. They were raised by their parents to believe that you walk away from closing with money, the equity that has grown over time.
Buyers, for their part, aren't sure that prices have really, finally, absolutely bottomed, despite evidence to the contrary. Somewhere, out there, is a crazy good deal where they can practically steal a house from desperate sellers.
And, believing that they have the upper hand, they want the homes to be brought up to pristine condition.
No nail holes, no carpet stains, no loose hand rails.
So while the things we learned in that 8 a.m. Econ 101 class -- you never missed a lecture, right? -- suggest that we should be reaching equilibrium soon where all buyers and sellers come together where the supply and demand curves intersect at a price they can live with, it hasn't happened. (Editor's note: For the econ professors out there, I know the curves represent "quantity supplied" and "quantity demanded." Don't email me. I was awake in Econ 101. I'm a journalist engaging in shorthand.)
Sellers are on a sort of strike, keeping their homes off the market, and buyers are being tougher than maybe they should be.
The only thing that will deliver a jolt to this impasse is going to be a significant drop in the jobless rate. In other words, more people working. That isn't going to happen fast. A couple of the historic engines of growth in the Triangle were state government and the universities. Well, the Republicans who now control the legislature and the governor's mansion are definitely not interested in boosting the number of public sector employees. The reverse is true.
They will argue that shrinking government leaves more money in the hands of the private sector, and the jobs will be created there. I have no doubt of this, over time. But it will take time for this transition. Someone who loses a government-funded job -- in the state bureaucracy, as a teaching assistant in an elementary school, or at a university -- doesn't walk into a new private sector job overnight. Then there is the sequester, which may cost this area jobs -- we have folks here who commute to Ft. Bragg and to Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, as civilian employees and defense contractors.
And there are plenty of private employers who are uncertain about what Obamacare will mean for them. Will that additional employee push them over some magic number that will increase their health care costs?
I don't want to sound overly pessimistic. Eventually, the market clears. We have been in a five-year funk. It has been so long that people forget what good times feel like. There is a lot of pent-up demand for housing. In the past five years, a lot of kids have graduated from college and are now in their mid-to-late 20s, and they are forming families and they want a backyard. A lot of folks who bought starter homes back in 2008 want to move up to a bigger house. The Triangle is still growing; Raleigh-Cary is still one of the fastest growing areas in the country.
So the housing market will continue to stabilize, prices will be firming up and rising, and more sellers and buyers will come to terms. Just how fast is tough to gauge, but things are a heck of a lot better than they were a few years ago.
A former Carrboro library branch manager will return to the area in May to lead the newly expanded Chapel Hill Public Library, town officials announced Monday.
Susan Brown will start her new job May 20. She currently is the marketing director for the Lawrence Public Library in Kansas, where she also worked as the adult services librarian. Previously, she managed the Carrboro Cybrary, was a reference librarian at the Cameron Village Regional Library in Raleigh, and a library assistant Virginia Commonwealth University's Cabell Library and the Library of Virginia in Richmond.
“We can expect to see a new library director who will be creating new connections and partnerships across the community for engagement as our library transforms for the digital age and as a center for civic communication,” Town Manager Roger Stancil said in a news release Monday.
Brown is a UNC aluma with a master's degree in library science. She also has a bachelor's degree in history from Virginia Tech in Blacksburg.
Interim Library Director Mark Bayles has led the library since September, when former library Director Kathy Thompson retired. He is now overseeing the library’s move back from University Mall to its renovated 63,000-square-foot space off Estes Drive. The $16.2 million library will open in a few weeks.
This is a post by N&O restaurant critic Greg Cox:
Giorgios Bakatsias, prolific restaurateur whose eclectic portfolio currently includes nearly a dozen establishments ranging from steakhouse (Bin 54) to French bistro (Vin Rouge), is at it again. This time, he's returning to his Greek roots.
And it looks like he's pulling out all the stops for Kipos (431 W. Franklin St.; 919-425-0760; kiposgreektaverna.com), which opened over the weekend in the erstwhile home of local landmark Pyewacket (and more recently, the Malaysian restaurant Penang). The location in The Courtyard comes with a bonus of three al fresco dining spaces that more than live up to the restaurant's name, which is Greek for "garden."
An extensive main menu of hot and cold meze, house-made phyllo pies, and entrees ranging from whole roasted fish to pastitsio and moussaka to rotisserie-roasted lamb is just part of the attraction.
Daily features include temptations such as Wednesday's braised pork shank, Thursday's lamb meatballs in Smyrna tomato sauce, and Saturday's eight-hour braised wild rabbit with pearl onions and fresh bay leaves.
You could make a vegetarian feast from the likes of gigante beans in tomato sauce with fresh herbs, simmered wild greens with lemon oil and sea salt, and a salad of local roasted beets, Greek skordalia and baby arugula in a dill lemon vinaigrette.
The restaurant and in-house bakery (which turns out an international assortment of breads and pastries) are open Tuesday-Thursday from 8 a.m. to 11 p.m., Friday-Saturday from 8 a. m. to midnight, and Sunday from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m.
Send restaurant news to Greg at ggcox@bellsouth.net. Be sure to tune in to Greg's radio show at 11 a.m. Saturdays on WPTF.
This is a post by N&O restaurant critic Greg Cox:
The space in Eastgate Shopping Center that was for many years home to Sal's Pizzeria (and more recently Carmine's) is back in the family. Josephine Finazzo, daughter of Sal's owner Leonardo Tornetta, opened Vinny's Italian Grill & Pizzeria (1800 E. Franklin St.; 919-942-6989; vinnysitaliangrille.net) late last month with her husband Carlo.
The restaurant is the latest location of a Virginia-based chain founded by Finazzo's cousin, Vinny Vitale. The family also operate the Triangle area's other Vinny's location in Hillsborough.
Carlo Finazzo has roots of his own in the local Italian restaurant landscape. His brother, Joe, owned the now-shuttered Carini in Cary.
It should come as no surprise, then, that Vinny's is a family-friendly place. Or that the specialties are New York style pizzas, subs and classic Italian-American pasta dishes - some made, according to the website, from "old family recipes."
Vinny's is open for lunch and dinner daily.
Send restaurant news to Greg at ggcox@bellsouth.net. Be sure to tune in to Greg's radio show at 11 a.m. Saturdays on WPTF.
Chapel Hill Town Council member Gene Pease said he hasn’t decided the next step in his disagreement with a Planning Board chairwoman, but it’s raising important questions.
“I don’t have an issue with disagreement. I don’t have an issue with suing the town,” Pease said. “I do have a big issue with a member of the Planning Board disagreeing with a decision and suing the town over that when they’re still involved” in the town’s business.
Planning Board Chairwoman Del Snow is part of a lawsuit over the town's approval last year of the Charterwood mixed-use development on MLK Boulevard. Pease said that is a problem, and Snow’s email to the mayor and the Town Council objecting to another recently approved project was the tipping point.
In her email, Snow said the council was wrong to approve the Bicycle Apartments, because it did not reflect the town’s 2020 Comprehensive Plan, a document guiding town growth.
Pease responded to the email by asking Snow to resign her Planning Board seat. Pease also questioned whether she and other Planning Board members are using personal bias to make development recommendations instead of facts.
You can read both letters by clicking on the link below.
