The City Council spent its work session this afternoon picking apart the city's new Strategic Plan. It's a scheme of "Goals," "Initiatives, "Implementation Team Structure," "Dashboard Reporting Option," etc., etc., etc.

“We have identified initiatives we think will impact the results,” said Budget and Management Director Bertha Johnson, who presented the plan for council comment.

Most of the comments were favorable and the council members expressed appreciation for the work – which, City Manager Tom Bonfield said, involved “an incredible number of employees.”

Too, some comments were kind of pointed and pithy. After the “Mission Statement” and the “Vision Statement,” the plan lays out five Goals, among them “Stewardship of city’s physical assets.”

“It's one thing to have this system of asset management in place,” said Councilman Eugene Brown. “But how in the hell are we going to pay for it?”
 

Durham officials aren't too happy about the image they think they have where the Falls Lake Rules are concerned. With some reason.

Some water-quality sampling, according to city and county reports, indicate that nitrogen and phosphorus pollution is actually declining in the lake. Some environmentalists, though, claim that Durham is only trying to weaken the regulations and cover up the dire condition in which it has put the drinking-water supply for 450,000 residents of Wake County.

"I worry that we're losing the perception battle with the public," City Councilman Mike Woodard said, at a meeting of council members and county commissioners this week. "We need to be able to counterpunch at all times."

Bull's Eye correspondent Virginia Bridges reports that, in the wake of the City Council’s rejection of Fairway Outdoor Advertising's request to loosen billboard restrictions in Durham, City-County Planning Director Steve Medlin told elected officials Thursday that his department will be stepping up enforcement of local and state regulations that require the signs to be maintained.

“There are provisions in the Unified Development Ordinance which does give us the latitude to require that all billboards be maintained in terms of their appearance,"
Medlin told the council during its regular work session.

“We as a staff are going through, doing a complete assessment and trying to identify any that are not incompliance with both our local and our state regs, and we will be working to bring those into compliance or to have them removed.”

The city can send notice of violations, which could result in fines, to companies who own billboards that aren’t maintained, Medlin said. If a billboard is destroyed beyond 50 percent of its replacement value, the city can require the company to remove the structure, Medlin said.

The supporting structure is considered to be 50 percent of a billboard’s value, with the sign’s face making up the additional 50 percent, Medlin said.

On Monday the City Council unanimously rejected Fairway’s request to change Durham's Unified Development Ordinance to allow it to relocate some of its signs, upgrade some and convert some to digital operation.

Things are mighty slow around City Hall right now, but the City Council did convene this afternoon and they took care of business with all dispatch.

At least, five of the seven members did. Councilman Eugene Brown had an excused absence and Councilman Mike Woodard was running kind of slow.

For three minutes and 34 seconds, they went through formalities to scheduling a July 22 public hearing on this fall's $20 million street-bond referendum. Most of the time was taken up by Mayor Bill Bell reading the referendum's title into the public record.

Then they spent one minute and four seconds accepting a $200,000 federal grant for brownfields job training.

Woodard arrived just as Bell adjourned the meeting. Elapsed time: four minutes and 45 seconds. Must be some kind of a record.
 

Last night's City Council vote to restrict city-business travel to Arizona if that state enacts its controversial law regarding immigration-status checks not going over well with Durham citizens -- at least, not with those making their opinions known at City Hall today.

Evelyn Wright-Corbett of the City Clerk's staff sent this email to council members:

The Mayor’s Office has received numerous calls of displeasure concerning last night’s vote in re: Arizona.  Various citizens would like the City Council to know that there is a vast amount of people in the city of Durham who are totally against the decision made on last evening; people from other counties have called stating that they will stop shopping in the city of Durham; and, Durham citizens are talking about boycotting Durham pertaining to their purchase power.[sic]

Last night's vote actually wasn't for an outright ban on official travel to Arizona; it left such trips subject to case-by-case review and decision by the City Council. The council also included a call for the federal government to reform its immigration law, with which the law being considered by Arizona's legislature closely corresponds.

Mayor Bill Bell missed today's City Council's work session on next year's budget. He was in Washington doing mayorish things. So he missed the conversation about money for non-city agencies like the Bicycle Co-op and Coalition to Unchain Dogs.

In a $353.4-million proposed budget, non-city agencies account for $178,823. And typically, the council members take up more time debating who gets what and why anyone gets anything and how the could be better and how the program used to be.

This year was typical.

Construction costs and financing for the city's contribution to the Rolling Hills/Southside Redevelopment are points of misgiving for some members of the project's local steering committee.

Concerns about a lack of money allocated for developing "human capital" in the depressed, crime-plagued area also came up during a conference call this morning among committee members, city staffers and developer McCormack Baron Salazar.

The call was in preparation for a special City Council work session Thursday on the Rolling Hills/Southside project, which covers an area of about 125 acres just south of the Durham Freeway near downtown.

Authority to recoup some public costs of complying with new water-quality regulations and more authority to block demolitions of historic buildings comprise the City Council's wish list for the upcoming legislative session.

Those, along with resolutions supporting the affected governments' "consensus principles" for Falls Lake's cleanup and stronger protections for witnesses and victims of crime, were approved in a council meeting tonight that wrapped up in less than half an hour.

"Development Guidelines" for the 2010-11 city budget are there among the items to be approved on the consent agenda for Monday night's City Council meeting.

These guidelines are points to be "considered" as the city administration juggles how little it's going to have coming in and how much it's going to need to pay out next fiscal year.

Top of the list: increase of the property-tax rate.

Times are tight all over, but it's going to cost more next year to service debt on some of those bonds the voting taxpayers approved (remember "8 Bonds For A Better Durham"?) when times were looser.

And that federal stimulus money that cushioned the sticker shock this year isn't going to be there next time.

You can read the whole rationale, and the rest of what's to be considered, at www.durhamnc.gov/agendas/2010/cm20100405/219349_6979_284204.doc.PDF.

The First Amendment comes up for a hearing tomorrow by the Durham City Council.

Citizens Richard Wark and Lee Mortimer claim their free-speech rights were violated at the Durham Performing Arts Center last November, and plan to ask the council to bring its policies in line with the U.S. Constitution.

They're on the work-session agenda for the citizens' comment period at 4 p.m., but they may be moved earlier when the session begins at 1 p.m.