City Council candidate Donald Hughes (right) said Saturday that he is not in any alliance with Mayor candidate Sylvester Williams.

Hughes was responding to comments made by council candidate John Tarantino, who said Williams' campaign workers were distributing sample ballots with Williams's name marked along with Hughes's and council candidates Solomon Burnette and Victoria Williams. (See item below.)

"I have not authorized my name to be used on any sample ballot," Hughes wrote in an email to Bull's Eye.

"Any citizen has a right to support me, but I want to make it completely clear that my campaign has not authorized any individual or campaign to use my name on a sample ballot. Mr. Tarantino stated, 'the candidates scrambled and formed an alliance' — this is completely false. I have not formed an alliance with any candidate in this year's election. It is clear that Mr. Tarantino's endorsement and accusations are a desperate final attempt to gain votes ahead of Tuesday's primary election."

City Council candidate John Tarantino (right) said this afternoon that he's endorsing County Commissioner Joe Bowser for mayor in Tuesday's primary election.

"I'm aligned with Bowser and encouraging my friends to vote for Bowser," he said.

Bowser (below), who has more than a year left on his commissioner's term, is challenging incumbent Mayor Bill Bell. Retired salesman Ralph McKinney and minister Sylvester Williams are also in the race.

Tarantino is one of seven candidates for three at-large Council seats. Tuesday's voting will eliminate one, as well as two mayoral candidates, leaving the survivors to face off in the Nov. 8 general election.

Tarantino said he decided to come out for Bowser after Williams's campaign began passing out sample ballots encouraging votes for three black City Council candidates: Solomon Burnette, Donald Hughes and Victoria Peterson.

"The worst thing that can happen is nothing," he said.

Tarantino said he was miffed because he had given Williams support, including financial support, in a past campaign for City Council.

Bowser is also black, as is Bell; Tarantino is white, and said Williams, Burnette, Hughes and Peterson appeared to have formed a bloc after the Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black People, one of Durham's major political organizations, decided against making endorsements for the primary.

Williams, Hughes and Peterson have said the Durham Committee's political subcommittee recommended them for endorsement, but the full Committee did not accept the recommendation. Peterson said the political subcommittee also favored Burnette, but Burnette declined to comment.

"The candidates scrambled and formed an alliance," Tarantino said.

The People's Alliance, another major Durham PAC, has endorsed Bell along with council incumbents Eugene Brown and Diane Catotti and former School Board member Steve Schewel. An Alliance campaign mailer promotes the four as a team in the elections.

Brown, Catotti and Schewel are white.
 

Durham Mayor Bill Bell plans to appoint Lea D. Henry to the Workforce Development Board, resolving for practical purposes a dispute among the Durham County commissioners.

"I haven't met the lady, but it seems like she's qualified," Bell said this morning.

The commissioners have twice postponed voting on the county's appointment to the workforce board, which oversees how federal and state job-training money is used. They have been divided on the propriety of a recommendation for Henry's appointment by the workforce board's executive committee.

Donald A. Hughes, currently a candidate for the Durham Public Schools Board, has also applied for the workforce position. Henry has served for two years on the workforce board's youth council.

If Bell, who as mayor also has a workforce board seat to fill, does appoint Henry, it would make her candidacy for the county appointment a moot issue, according to County Manager Mike Ruffin. Unless the commissioners decide to re-open applications for the seat, it would also give Hughes the appointment by default.

For the second time, Durham County commissioners put off voting on an appointment to the Workforce Development Board.

"This has probably been one of the worst appointments I’ve ever dealt with since I’ve been a commissioner," Chairman Michael Page said, "because of the unclarity.”

The appointment was on the agenda for today's work session. The vote to postponey came after Donald Hughes took issue with statements made at the commissioners' March 22 meeting about his application for the seat.

Comments by James Dickens, the board's Youth Program Coordinator, were "a deliberate attempt to misrepresent," Hughes said.

At the earlier meeting, Dickens said Hughes's application was turned in after that of Lea Henry, who was recommended for the position by the board's executive committee.

He also said that Hughes had been offered a seat on one of the board’s committees, which would not require him to hold a seat on the workforce board itself, and that he believed Hughes had accepted it.

This morning, Hughes said his application was in fact turned in a month before Henry’s; that he had never heard an offer of a committee seat and would not have accepted it if he had.

Asked to respond, Dickens said he had been mistaken at the March 22 meeting.

"This has been a messy, messy situation," Page said, "and I have lost confidence in any of our departments" to make recommendations on board and commission appointments.

Thr commissioners did not set a date for voting on the appointment.

"I don't want it back until we get some clarity," Page said.

"The purpose of the board is to facilitate, plan and coordinate workforce development resources,” according to its Web site, www.durhamnc.gov/departments/eed/dwdb_index.cfm.

Read more: http://blogs.newsobserver.com/bullseye/home#ixzz0kEonY2Oa

A long-anticipated political contest got real this afternoon, when Donald A. Hughes filed for election to the Durham Public Schools board.

Hughes, 22, is opposing incumbent Omega Curtis Parker for the District 1 seat. Parker filed for re-election last week.

This is Hughes's second run for a Durham public office in less than a year. Last fall, he challenged Cora Cole-McFadden for the City Council's Ward 1 seat; within weeks of Cole-McFadden's re-election, rumors were out that Hughes would try for the school board.

Ward 2 City Council candidate Darius Little took a shot at City Hall during a candidates' forum Thursday.

Asked for his philosophy on the budget, Little brought up the city's Youth Council. Created in 2003, the council is supposed to involve its members in city boards and commissions and service projects.

"The Youth Council is the Jesus Christ of crime prevention for the City Council," said Little, who claimed the youth on the council don't represent depressed neighborhoods or gangs.
"There are two administrators that run the youth council," he continued. "Guess how much they make? $234,000. ...

"Why don't we cut some of the pork out of the youth council?"

Churches, he said, could perform the same functions for free.

 *  *  *

Duke Energy's request to raise its rates has drawn opposition from City Council candidate Donald Hughes.

"At a time when our citizens are burdened by a struggling economy, rising water and sewer rates and increased taxes, a 13.5 percent increase in Duke Energy rates is unbearable," Hughes said in a prepared statement.

Hughes also said the utility's plan to build a new coal-powered plant is "unacceptable."

The request is before the state Utilities Commission.

Durham County's commissioners praised Mount Zion Christian Church tonight on the occasion of its approaching centennial.

Established Sept. 13, 1909 as Good Hope Baptist Church, Mount Zion now has branches in Henderson, Raleigh, Hillsborough and Rocky Mount, and in Durham has established a 24-hour daycare center, a school, beauty college, food pantry and nationally renowned basketball program.

As the county considered its resolution, City Council candidates Donald Hughes and Darius Little took the opportunity to say words of their own.

"It's a pleasure to stand up and commend ... [an organization] actually doing positive things," Hughes said.

Little added, "We don't get to talk about positive things very often."

Later, Hughes said his campaign Facebook page has garnered 600 followers; the goal is 1,000, he said.

Donald Hughes filed for election to the City Council's Ward 1 seat this morning, accompanied by about 20 supporters who included his mother, former council and school board member Jackie Wagstaff, and county commisssioner Joe Bowser.

"Win, lose or draw, may the campaign bring you joy," elections director Mike Ashe said when Hughes had signed the requisite papers and paid his $188.35 filing fee (below).

Hughes is challenging incumbent Cora Cole-McFadden, who defeated Wagstaff's council re-election bid in 2001.

"I'm focusing on my own campaign," Cole-McFadden said, speaking by telephone from New York, where she is attending the NAACP convention.

Before going to the Board of Elections to file, Hughes opened his campaign with a rally on Alston Avenue, across from Eastway Elementary School (above).

"This election is about inspiring Durham," he said, recalling his own inspiration as an Eastway pupil when a then-council member Cynthia Brown spoke to his class about community participation.

A May graduate of UNC Greensboro, Hughes said his campaign will take full advantage of technologies such as Facebook and Twitter with which he and his contemporaries have grown up.

"It is now our time," he said.

Political newcomer Donald Hughes takes the plunge into Durham's city election tomorrow, with a 10:30 a.m. rally on Alston Avenue.

"It's just been in me for as long as I can remember," Hughes told Bull's Eye this afternoon.

Hughes is challenging two-term incumbent Cora Cole-McFadden for the Ward 1 City Council seat.

"I really want to see Durham come together and move for action," he said.

Speculation around town has put Hughes into the city council field for months. A 2005 graduate of Hillside High School and 2009 graduate of UNC-Greensboro, he has made his opinions known at several city council and county commissioners' meetings this year.

"Being a native of Durham and growing up in the community ... I saw the importance of standing up for what you believe," he said.

Hughes is the son of former city councilwoman and former Durham Public Schools board member Jackie Wagstaff, Cole-McFadden defeated Wagstaff's bid for re-election to the council in 2001.

"My mother stressed the importance of giving back to my community at an early age," Hughes said.

The Durham city council has set April 6 for a public hearing on the way it is elected.

"Let the public discourse begin," said elections director Mike Ashe.

By voting Monday night to hold the public hearing, the council began the process that could change Durham's council elections from a non-partisan primary and general election system to a non-partisan pluraity system.

That means holding one election instead of two — or three, when a runoff primary is needed.

Durham County Board of Elections chairman Ronald Gregory requested the change in a February letter to council members and Mayor Bill Bell.

According to Ashe, the switch would save taxpayers between $170,000 and $180,000 per municipal election year.

"This is purely a way to save money we don't have right now," Ashe told council members Monday.

"We don't believe this helps or hurts anyone, any group, any candidate," he said.

Read more about it in Wednesday's News & Observer.