Wake County school board member Keith Sutton has raised nearly $24,000 in his bid to retain the District 4 seat.

A new campaign report filed this week shows Sutton had raised $23,872 as of Sept. 26 with $15,386.04 on hand. Venita Peyton's new report isn't up yet but she was at under $1,000 raised at the end of August.

The largest donors for Sutton in the new report are the $2,000 from Capitol Broadcasting CEO Jim Goodmon and $500 from Wake Citizens for Good Government.

Wake County school board member Kevin Hill and Raleigh City Councilman Russ Stephenson are joining forces tonight for a fundraising event.

The joint fundraiser will be held at 6 p.m. at Milton's Pizza & Pasta in North Raleigh. You can find more info here at the Wake County Democratic Party website.

Officially, both Hill and Stephenson are running in non-partisan races. But the reality is both the Democrats and Republicans will be just as actively involved in this fall's school board elections as they were in 2009.

CORRECTION

The info I received ahead of time was in error. It was only a fundraiser for Hill.

Taxpayers won't be footing the bill for four Wake County school board members to attend this week's Greater Raleigh Chamber of Commerce trip to the Greater D.C. area.

Chamber VP Drew Moretz said that the group wanted school board members to attend the trip so much that they're picking up all the costs. School board members Debra Goldman, Anne McLaurin, Deborah Prickett and John Tedesco are attending.

But taxpayers may foot the nearly $2,000 cost to send four county commissioners on the trip.

CORRECTION/UPDATE

The chamber says that McLaurin paid for the trip herself.

Parrish said Gurley has reimbursed the county for his share of the trip.

Three of the eight members of Raleigh's City Council came up with another idea this week about what to do about the the Clarence E. Lightner Public Safety Center.

Start over.

In a two-page memorandum, councilors Thomas Crowder, Bonner Gaylord and Russ Stephenson, asked city staff to figure out how much it would cost to renovate the current police headquarters at 110 S. McDowell St. and build a new emergency communications center just for 911 dispatchers.

"At a time when some are calling for burdensome tax increases and others are calling for painful sevice cuts, we believe there is a middle path that is responsive to our long-term emergency services needs -- without raising taxes or overshadowing other important current and future needs of our citizens," the three wrote in a letter to the rest of the council and Raleigh City Manager J. Russell Allen.

The proposed Lightner Center had been in the works for years, but catapolted into the public arena once Allen unveiled the proposed way to pay for it -- by bundling it with $250 million worth of public works projects and raising property taxes by 8 percent.

If built, it would house police administrators and detectives, fire adminstration, the emergency communications center, traffic management staff and the city's information technology department.

The Lightner Center, named for the Raleigh funeral director who served for one term and was the city's first and only black mayor, would be 17-stories high and 300,000 square feet. It'd be the biggest, and most expensive, city building. 

There's little about the building that hasn't become controversial, with differing opinions from different city political corners weighing in on whether its needed, what it should cost and who should decide if the public safety center should be built.

The most controversial aspects have been the proposed tax increase to pay for the
building, a call to have the decision to build decided by voters at in
a citywide bond referendum and original plans to include up to $705,000
in public art in the project.

The request for a tax increase comes in the midst of an economic recession, and Raleigh's entire council has gotten hundreds of e-mails protesting the project, or asking to delay the project until the economy gets better.

Many of the opposition letters were identical, and appear to be a push from conservative quarters that think the issue should be decided by voters and not by city councilors.

Mary-Ann Baldwin, one of the council members, said she doesn't think the plan rolled out by Crowder, Gaylord and Stephenson meets the needs of the city, and reiterated that hte current 50-year-old bulding is falling apart and not suitable.

Raleigh Mayor Charles Meeker, who wants the project to go forward in order to cash in on what he says is $50 million in savings, hopes it will still pass, but with a different funding scenario. Some of the remote operations projects can be delayed, and the cost of the building might be able to be absorbed by impact or facilities fees. Meeker also asked that the art budget be narrowed to a third of the size. 

The council has avoided taking action on the Lightner Center three times this year, and it's expected to be back in front of them at their next meeting on Feb. 16.

Some prominent local officials are putting their money into this fall's school board races.

Campaign finance reports filed last month show a local who's who of Democrats and left-leaning unaffiliated voters among the donors for school board candidates Rita Rakestraw and Lois Nixon. Based on the report, both candidates seem to have deeper war chests right now than their opponents.

The latest reports from most candidats show relaively small amounts raised so far. The exceptions were Rakestraw, Nixon and Horace Tart.

Lee Sartain announced today that he is running for one of the two at-large Raleigh City Council seats. Sartain works on education technology issues at the William and Ida Friday Institute for Educational Innovation at N.C. State. He also graduated from NCSU.

Sartain is the fourth person to enter the race for the two at-large seats. The two current at-large members, Russ Stephenson and Mary-Ann Baldwin, are running for re-election. Realtor Champ Claris announced last week that he is also running.

Sartain's announcement said his campaign would focus on growing new jobs, comprehensive public transportation and strong neighborhoods:

“Raleigh’s high quality of life and embrace of education, technology, and innovation has led to rapid growth over the last twenty years. More people are calling Raleigh home than ever, and the pace is not expected to slow. This growth has also placed us at a crossroads, and Raleigh must take several strategic steps to ensure a bright future. Stepping up job growth downtown, building strong neighborhoods, and building a reliable transportation system will ensure that Raleigh is a destination city for years to come.”

Sartain also wants to create something called the Raleigh Innovation and Technology Zone in downtown Raleigh. He says it would be an economic development zone designed to compliment and model the success of the Research Triangle Park.

Local realtor Champ Claris announced today that he is running for one of the two at-large seats on the Raleigh City Council. The two at-large seats are currently held by Russ Stephenson and Mary-Ann Baldwin, both of whom have already said they will seek re-election.

An e-mail announcing Claris’ candidacy says that “Champ believes his fresh perspective on our issues and responsible approach to government spending will greatly benefit the City of Raleigh. He looks forward to leading a renewed focus on common sense priorities such as: strengthening our economy, reducing crime, improving our roads, and protecting our water supply and natural resources.”

Claris also said, if elected, that he would focus on reducing taxes, improving
public safety, and making Raleigh government more efficient.

Claris grew up in eastern North Carolina and has lived in Raleigh for the last 14 years. He attended N.C. State. Since 2003 he has worked for York Simpson
Underwood.

It will be a shame when the city of Raleigh finally switches over to tiered water rates and the City Council has to find something else to discuss incessantly.

On Tuesday, the council found itself, once again, wondering aloud why the transition to tiered rates can’t happen sooner.

You may recall that last month it was agreed that residential water customers in Raleigh and Garner would move to a three-tier rate structure on Dec. 1. The structure is designed to encourage conservation as the rates will rise according to consumption.

City Manager Russell Allen has told the City Council on numerous occasions that Raleigh can’t make the switch until it has new billing software in place.

But on Tuesday, Councilman Russ Stephenson asked for an independent investigation to see whether that truly is the case. Yes, an investigation to see whether the city’s own staff truly knows what it is talking about.

The independent inquiry was one of a laundry list of utility-related issues that Stephenson wants both the council and the city staff to take up immediately. Others include a drought surcharge, water audits of area businesses and new capacity fees on water hook-ups.

Allen admitted serious frustration at the fact that Stephenson wasn’t buying staff’s explanation for why the shift to tiered rates can’t happen until December. Councilor Mary-Ann Baldwin said even she was frustrated by Stephenson’s request.

That caused Stephenson to play the garbage disposal card, telling anyone who would listen that the public utility staff giving them advice is the same staff that told the council it needed to ban garbage disposals. (We all know how that turned out, don’t we Neusie.)

Councilor Philip Isley eventually told his colleagues that they were exhuming a dead horse by raising the tiered rate issue, which led to a series of unfortunate horse puns.

So what’s really going on here?

Allen is recommending that the council raise water rates immediately by 17 percent to offset sluggish water sales. This unwelcome news has caused Stephenson to ask city staff why they haven’t made more progress on all the issues he’s been raising for months.

Stephenson essentially described the public utility department as being a black box that has been reticent about changing its ways. “None of us really knows what the reality is,” he said.

(Let's just hope Raleigh Public Utilities Director Dale Crisp wasn't involved in any credit default swaps.)

It was agreed on Tuesday that Stephenson’s issues would be discussed at the next council meeting on April 7. Some of Stephenson’s initiatives would encourage more conservation among Raleigh water customers, which could exasperate the revenue shortage that the department is currently experiencing. Other initiatives would create new revenue streams for the department, which could shift some of the burden away from residential rate payers.

The switch to tiered-rates has been talked about so much that it would be easy to mistakenly think of it as an elixir for all the city’s water woes. But the actual transition has the potential to introduce more instability into the department’s revenue model. The city’s consultant is designing the tiered rate structure to be revenue neutral, but the city won’t know if that’s truly the case until it puts it into practice.

In the meantime, the City Council is likely going to have to explain to customers who answered the call to conserve that their reward is an ahead-of-schedule rate hike.

Last year at this time Raleigh was mired in a historic drought and Mayor Charles Meeker's used much of his state-of-the-city address to talk about the need for water conservation. During his address on Monday, Meeker noted that water issues have taken a backseat to other matters this year, thanks both to the tanking economy and the fact that Raleigh has received 50 inches of rain since last spring.

But Meeker still used a portion of his 12-minute speech to talk about conservation. He said the city needs to renew its focus on conservation by making a push to install more low-flow devices and to use less drinking water to irrigate lawns. (The city is also expected to adopt tiered water rates later this year, a system that charges customers higher rates the more water they consume.) More notably, Meeker on Monday took a jab at City Council members who have made an issue of rising water rates.

Raleigh increased water rates by 15 percent in July, and City Manager Russell Allen anticipates that another 15 percent increase will be needed to pay for expensive capital improvements that are now being made to the system. Meeker said Monday that Raleigh's water rates remain among the lowest in the state and he went on to explain why conservation should be pursued even if it temporarily increases water rates: 

"This is a challenge very simply because you sell water to pay for the improvements ... at the same time the City Council doesn't want to increase the rates because the customers don't like rate increases and the customers happen to vote in city elections. But our community has got to be better than that ... we don't need to be using drinking water to irrigate our lawns as much as we are ... even though it may not be popular in the short run because it will affect rates, it's the right thing to do in the long run."

This debate over water rates is likely to resurface at the City Council's special budget work session in March and then continue on until a new budget is adopted in May or June. Councilmen Thomas Crowder, Rodger Koopman and Russ Stephenson have all expressed their displeasure with water rates increasing and are likely to press hard for the city to find some way to spare residents a rate increase this year. Meeker made his position clear in Monday's speech. 

Prior to laying out a budget proposal that was quickly approved by the City Council last night, Mayor Charles Meeker handed out copies of an MSNBC feature that merged all the "best places" rankings together to come up with the best places list to end all best places list. (Essentially, the author unscientifically combined the best lists from Forbes, Kiplinger, Money Magazine, Fortune and Relocate-America.com.) And guess who ended up on top? That's right. Raleigh, North Carolina.

Meeker used this press clipping to argue that such a ranking was in no small part due to the recent decisions made by the City Council to tear up Fayetteville Street, build the convention center and make other major investments in the city. According to Meeker, the city is at yet another crossroads now and needs to keep investing if it is to stay on top of the rankings. (Just think what Raleigh will be ranked after the new public safety center gets built!)

Meeker went on to make one of his more astute political moves in recent years. He took the money that will be raised from the recently enacted higher impact fees and put it towards paying down the city's debt. This enabled the council to reduce Russell Allen's proposed property tax increase from 5 cents to 4.18 cents. Granted, the decrease is less than a cent, but it allowed Meeker to make a connection between higher impact fees and lower property taxes. The move was sort of a local version of President Bill Clinton announcing that the budget surplus should be used to save social security.

A final note: The only two council members who voted against the budget were Philip Isley and Russ Stephenson. Bonus points to the person who can come with another vote when those two ideological soulmates represented the only opposition on an issue.