Southside Neighborhood Association President Marie Hunter thanked the City Council this afternoon for its attention to her community, but she took issue with a city report indicating a decline in crime there.

"We don't know what to do," she said. "We talk and talk and talk and the same things are going on all the time."

Meeting this afternoon, the Rolling Hills/Southside Steering Committee endorsed the idea of a "summit" meeting on low-cost housing, neighborhood revitalizing and public money -- then handed off to City Hall.

Whether City Hall carries the idea anywhere remains to be seen.

"A request has been made and we heard it," said Larry Jarvis, assistant community development director.

Lorisa Seibel (right), interim director of the Durham Affordable Housing Coalition, raised the idea earlier this month. She has been among the most vocal opponents of a city plan to dedicate future federal grant money to Southside/Rolling Hills.

Seibel is also chairwoman of the Rolling Hills/Southside Steering Committee's housing subcommittee, which submitted the summit proposal for today's agenda.

Ray Eurquhart, a Southside resident who has actively promoted the revitalization project and served as the Steering Committee's co-chairman has also called for a summit.

Seibel did not attend today's meeting and Eurquhart attended only long enough to announce his resignation.

"I'm going to work on other things in Durham and the [Southside] community," Eurquhart said. "But I'll be around, I'm not dropping off the face of the earth."

Former Durham City Councilwoman and Durham Public Schools Board member Jackie Wagstaff (right) was seen working the polls during early voting, presenting herself as a write-in candidate for Soil and Water Conservation District Board of Supervisors.

Two positions are up for re-elections, with two incumbents running unopposed.

Wagstaff did not respond to Bull's Eye's voicemail requesting comment, but one of the incumbents she is challenging, Ray Eurquhart, did have something to say.

"It's just a back-end way of doing things," said Eurquhart, (below right) who has been on the Soil and Water board since 1994. "Her thing is just being a big shot."

Soil and Water Conservation programs began in the wake of the 1930s Dust Bowl; Durham has had a local program since 1939, to provide technical assistance to landowners and promote conservation to the general public. Stream restoration and sediment and erosion control are among its current priorities, in town as well as in the country.

Eurquhart and fellow incumbent Robert Rosenthal filed for re-election this fall; no one filed against them.

"I was trying to retire," said Eurquhart, who is also co-chairman of the Rolling Hills/Southside Steering Committee and a member of the city-county Environmental Affairs Board. "But nobody didn't ever come forward.

"We certainly want some people there who can work with the staff and work with famers and work with developers," he said.

Elections for the Soil and Water District Board are typically low-key affairs, and typically draw a great many write-in votes: 676 in 2008, 708 in 2006.

Durham County Board of Elections results show that among the write-ins, votes went to John Muir, Mike Nifong, Durham Voter # 642520, Clint Eastwood, Homer Simpson, Eugene Debs, Smoky Bear, Humpty Dumpty, Muddy Waters, Greg Fishel and Daffy Duck (left).
 

Larry Hester, the would-be developer from whom the city repossessed the unsold part of Rolling Hills for delinquent loans, spoke up at Thursday's City Council work session on redeveloping the 20-acre site and adjoining Southside neighborhood near the Durham Bulls Athletic Park.

He objected.

The Rolling Hills/Southside Steering Committee staked a claim Tuesday for more say in the multi-million dollar redevelopment project.

"We're the ones who are going to have to be living with this," City Councilman Howard Clement said during the committee's meeting with Karl Schlachter and Esther Shinn of the development firm McCormack Baron Salazar.