Chapel Hill Town Council members are on board with the course and vision of the town's 2020 Comprehensive Plan, but questions remain on how to implement the plan's initiatives and balance priorities with funds.
The Chapel Hill Town Council members reviewed the vision, goals and next steps in the Comprehensive Plan process during a work session Monday night.
Council members heard from town staff and 2020 co-chairs Rosemary Waldorf and George Cianciolo.
The letters are still coming in pro and con on the Chapel Hill Police Department's SERT raid on the former Yates Motor Co. to remove squatters last November. (Read our most recent story here.)
We have repeatedly asked for interviews with town leaders, including the manager and police chief, to ask what we think are simple questions, including why police did not explicity warn protesters to leave before moving in. On Friday, Town Manager Roger Stancil released the following statement. (Note: our requests predate the council's decision to send Stancil's report to the new police advisory committee.)
“Out of respect for the process that began by the referral of the Yates Motor Company review to the Community Policing Advisory Board, and the Board’s subsequent discussion about a process they could follow, the Town staff will temporarily refrain from individual media interviews about the Yates Motor Company incident.
Town officials say they were justified in using a tactical squad of officers armed with semi-automatic weapons to remove squatters from a private downtown Chapel Hill building Sunday.
At a press conference today, Chapel Hill Police Chief Chris Blue and Chapel Hill Mayor Mark Kleinschmidt said the group was distributing riot literature and could have posed a threat to officers. The group included anarchists, some affiliated with Occupy Chapel Hill, but the group did not represent the Occupy Chapel Hill encampment downtown.
“We believe this was prudent, reasonable, and appropriate given what we knew,” Blue said.
He has participated in few forums and taken few hard stands this election season, but now mayoral candidate Kevin Wolff is taking aim at the homeless and a new shelter set to be built in northern Chapel Hill.
Wolff, an attorney running against incumbent Mayor Mark Kleinschmidt and fellow challenger Tim Sookram, passed out fliers last week criticizing the shelter site, arguing that when it is built, children will be “assaulted, molested, kidnapped, or killed.”
“It’s not a matter of if this will happen ... it is a matter of when,” the flier says. “Search your heart and your feelings parents; you know this is true!”
The Town Council approved a new men’s homeless shelter at 1315 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., to be operated by the Inter-Faith Council for Social Service, earlier this year.
The flier continues a pattern of controversial campaign behavior by Wolff, who also ran for mayor in 2009. Two years ago he distributed fliers describing then Town Council member Kleinschmidt as a gay rights activist who has no children and doesn’t own a home in Chapel Hill. He later withdrew from the 2009 race in an effort to swing votes to current council member Matt Czajkowski, who was also running for mayor at the time.
Efforts to reach Wolff for comment this election season have been unsuccessful.
Read the flier below:
Chapel Hill Mayor Mark Kleinschmidt says the town needs to fully prosecute the protesters who vandalized the Greebridge project Saturday to send a message their behavior will not be tolerated.
No group has claimed responsibility for the protest or damage to the Greenbridge lobby. Infoshop news and other anarchist websites described some of the protesters as anarchists, a political group that opposes government as oppressive. A photo on several wesbites shows Saturday's protesters holding a red banner saying 'Total War on Gentrification" with the letter A inside a circle, an anarchist symbol.
Kleinschmidt says anarchists come with the territory in a college town, where people tend to tolerate a wide range of political beliefs.
But, “I think there’s an appropriate limit to that tolerance,” he said in an interview. “We need to prosecute this kind of behavior to send a message this is intolerable.”
Police arrested three people at the protest but say most of a group of about 20 people inside the downtown condominium project ran out a side door before they could stop them. Two of the three approached at a court hearing Monday declined to speak with a reporter.
Kleinschmidt said he thinks the protesters, some of whom wore masks, crossed a line when they entered the building, breaking furniture, spraying foam and blocking elevators.
“At the end of the day, they invaded people’s homes,” the mayor said. ‘I would imagine in a reasonable person this would invoke a large amount of fear.”
Chapel Hill has a lot to be proud of, but tough choices lie ahead, Mayor Mark Kleinschmidt said in his State of the Town address Monday night.
“I look forward to a productive 2011, one in which we can overcome disagreement in a civil and thoughtful way,” he said.
Kleinschmidt’s remarks came amid continuing controversy over the firing of two sanitation workers.
A group of about 30 people and five speakers criticized the firings after an investigation found the men intimidated customers on their trash-collection route. The men’s supporters say they were fired for speaking out about working conditions and labor organizing.
In his speech, Kleinschmidt outlined concerns about the dismal economy and state budget cuts but also reflected on accomplishments in transit service, economic development and environmental preservation.
The town has streamlined the development review process and has enhanced the business climate without compromising the town’s environmental values, Kleinschmidt said.
“We see other communities sacrifice their values to just put in strip mall after strip mall,” he said. “Chapel Hill has continued to maintain its role as a leader and steward of [the] natural environment.”
File this under "Sentences I never imagined writing".
Holden Thorp is a mediocre dancer but a pretty good zombie.
The UNC-Chapel Hill chancellor took a couple steps outside the old comfort zone Monday, gamely taking part in a student re-enactment of the Michael Jackson "Thriller" video. You know, the one with the ghouls and zombies.
Thorp was flanked by his wife Patti on one side and by Chapel Hill Mayor Mark Kleinschmidt on the other.
(Tar Heel basketball coach Roy Williams, standing nearby, could not be coaxed into participating.)
They joined about 30 students in trying to create some buzz for the Eve Ball, a Nov. 5 fundraiser for the scholarship named for Eve Carson, the student body president shot and killed in March 2008.
I could go on and on about the chancellor's jaunty toe stepping, shoulder shrugging and hip swiveling, but really, you should see it for yourself. Have a look below or at this link.
A couple of weeks ago, Mark Kleinschmidt told me he was embarassed by a new book, "The Last Lawyer," about his former boss at the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, Ken Rose. Telling the story of CDPL's efforts to get a mentally ill client of death row, the book heaps praise on Kleinschmidt. I'm only half-way through, but I understand the mayor-elect's sheepishness.
"Mark was effortlessly handsome," wrote John Temple, a journalism professor at West Virginia University. "Polynesians thought he was Polynesian. Greeks thought he was Greek. Israelis thought he was Israeli. In fact, Mark was adopted and had no idea where his olive complexion and wavy black hair had come from."
But the book is not about appearances. In the first 15 pages after introducing him, Temple brands Kleinschmidt as an expert on mental retardation and its relevance in death-penalty cases, something I didn't know about the Town-Council member. After the General Assembly passed a law protecting mentally-retarded murderers from execution in 2001, Kleinschmidt, only a year out of law school, stayed busy drafting motions and advising lawyers around the state on how to rescue 51 men and one woman from death row.
"Mark had some personal experience with mentally retarded people -- an uncle who was slow and the occasional student in his high-school class who couldn't keep up," Temple wrote. "He immersed himself in the science of IQ testing."
The book is a good read, and I may post some more tidbits here as I read on.
Mark Kleinschmidt edged Matt Czajkowski by 99 votes, and there could be more than that many provisional ballots left to be counted. There are 78 in Orange County, and the county Board of Elections will meet no later than Nov. 10 to decide whether they're valid ballots. Orange elections director Tracy Reams is still waiting to learn how many provisional ballots came out of the tiny portion of Chapel Hill that's in Durham County.
It's not likely very many, but Czajkowski nearly doubled up Kleinschmidt, 287-146, in that section of town, so it could make a difference, at least in narrowing the gap between the two men. If it closes to less than 1 percent of the total -- probably somewhere between 85 and 90 votes, depending on the total of provisionals -- Czajkowski would have the right to demand a recount. That will only take a difference of a dozen or so votes in the provisional ballots.
Czajkowski won election in 2007 after the Board of Elections denied a recount request from incumbent Cam Hill, who lost by about 60 votes.
UPDATE: Durham County has nine provisional ballots for the Town of Chapel Hill, making for 87 total -- not enough to change the outcome but perhaps enough to allow a possible recount. Czajkowski did not return a phone call inquiring whether he was considering asking for a recount.
Former Town Council member Cam Hill registered his Chapel Hill Caucus political-action committee today, complying with state law. Hill drew criticism last week for a campaign flier attacking mayoral candidate Matt Czajkowski, who bumped him off the council in 2007. Hill had until today to register the PAC. Hill may have broken campaign-finance law by not noting that incoming mayor Mark Kleinschmidt had not authorized the flier. Hill has said he didn't know of that rule. Hill loaned his PAC $1,703.46 for the mailing, a sum he'll have to forgive or collect as contributions to the PAC. Hill will have to report the disposition of that debt in a January campaign-finance report, according to Orange County Board of Elections Director Tracy Reams.
