It looks like the Friends of Diversity held their Oct. 5 press conference without having to pay to use the Raleigh Convention Center.

Raleigh City Manager Russell Allen told local conservative political activist Joey Stansbury that nothing was charged because the space "was available and would require no support or expense from the Convention Center operation."

The city owns the convention center, which hosted the press conference on the day before the school board election. Local dignitaries, including Raleigh Mayor Charles Meeker, attended the event to urge voters to support keeping Wake's socioeconomic diversity policy.

The school board has junked plans to build a new elementary school in the Falls Lake watershed that had been opposed by the City of Raleigh.

As noted in today's North Raleigh News article, the school board voted last month to terminate the contract it had approved in January to pay $2.47 million for 30 acres on the northwest corner of Shooting Club and Creedmoor roads. The district is now looking for an alternative site in the northwest Raleigh area.

The decision was hailed by Raleigh leaders, who had opposed the construction of the school on that site because of concerns about its impact on the environmentally sensitive watershed.

School board member Ron Margiotta has never been a fan of that location, being one of two board members who had opposed buying the land in January. But he said that Raleigh and Wake County either needs to restrict development in the watershed or make it easier to build schoosl there.

If downtown Raleigh had as much interest from lenders as it did parking, the City Council and City Manager Russell Allen would be very happy people.

Last week the council voted to lease the property at 301 Hillsborough Street to Campbell University so that the school can turn it into a parking lot. You may recall that the land was supposed to be sold to the Reynolds Company, who were going to develop it into a hotel. But Reynolds could never nail down financing for the project, and the City Council and Allen got tired of waiting so they terminated the agreement earlier this year. 

Now the giant hole in the ground at 301 Hillsborough has been filled, and Campbell Law students and faculty will soon be able to park across from the school's new home, which opens next month. The lease agreement was approved at the same meeting where the council gave the developers behind Charter Square more time to get their two-tower project off the ground. The developers were given an extension largely because they are about to finish an underground parking deck below the site, which is at the south end of Fayetteville Street next to the City Plaza. 

The city will buy the deck for about $25 million once it's complete. And let's not forget the Wake County parking deck that was just finished on the other side of the convention center. That deck is supposed to be surrounded by Empire Properties L Building, another project halted by the credit crunch. 

Downtown Raleigh already had a lot of parking before these latest decks, so it seems reasonable to ask why the city appears to have never met a parking deck/lot it didn't like. The leasing of 301 Hillsborough is a sensible short-term use of the property, but are all these parking decks necessary? They're not cheap, after all, particularly when they're being build underground. 

What do you think?

Raleigh’s recently adopted $697 million budget was sharply criticized this afternoon by Wake County Republican Chairman Claude E. Pope, Jr.

In a speech before the Wake County Republican Women’s Club, Pope said the council’s budget was stuffed with unnecessary spending at a time when everyone, particularly governments, should be cutting back.

Pope criticized the council’s decision to not reduce funding for the arts, and also took a shot at City Manager Russell Allen for accepting a $10,000 raise.

Pope compared Raleigh’s budget, which increases spending by $53 million, unfavorably with Wake County’s budget, which reduced spending by $30 million.

Pope said the presence of three Republicans on the Wake Board of Commissioners showed that the GOP is the party of fiscal responsibility.
“We applaud the efforts of the Wake County Board of Commissioners,” Pope said. “In contrast to the city, the county commissioners passed a budget that cut spending, showed compromise and fiscal restraint.”

Pope also criticized the City Council for adding $1.85 million in new spending by reducing the amount the city will put towards paying of existing and future debt.

“If you put off paying your mortgage for a year, you would no longer have a house to live in,” Pope said.

Pope praised Councilman Philip Isley, the only Republican on the 8-member Raleigh City Council and the only councilor who voted against the budget.

Pope said after his speech that he hadn’t spoken to Isley since the budget was adopted on Tuesday.

At least one of Pope's criticisms showed an unfamiliarity with Raleigh’s budget. Pope said the city should have cut inspectors since new building permits have dropped as the housing bubble has burst.
“Have any of these jobs been cut?” he asked.

The city’s adopted budget cuts 15 positions from the Inspections Department.

After his speech, Pope fielded questions from reporters. He said the City Council’s recent actions are an opportunity for Republicans to win back seats. City Council elections are officially nonpartisan, but the number of Republicans on the council has been shrinking in recent years.

Pope acknowledged that the GOP needs to field a stronger slate of candidates this fall.
“The Republican Party needs to do a better job fielding qualified candidates,” he said.

The filing deadline for this fall’s election is July 17.

City Manager Russell Allen has told Raleigh Mayor Charles Meeker that he will accept any decision by the City Council to lower his recent $10,000 raise.

Lowering Allen’s salary would be in violation of the city manager’s employment agreement, which states that the “employee’s base salary or other benefits shall not be decreased during the term of the agreement.”

But Meeker said Allen won’t object should that occur. “Russell Allen has told me that if the council wants to adjust his salary based on budgetary reasons he will not hold us to the written contract,” Meeker said.

Meeker said last month that the council would revisit its May 5 decision in light of public anger over Allen’s annual salary being increased by 4.76 percent from $210,000 to $220,000.

Allen’s raise is three-quarters of a percent more than any other city employee would be eligible for under the city manager’s proposed $696 million budget for next year. The raise was criticized by a number of speakers at Tuesday night’s public hearing to discuss the city manager’s budget.

Meeker said Allen’s raise will be reviewed after the council has looked over the entire budget. The council will meet each Monday at 4 p.m. until a budget is passed.

The City Council spent 95 minutes in closed session during its May 2 meeting discussing Allen's performance review. Only Councilman Thomas Crowder voted against the raise after that discussion. Councilman Rodger Koopman did not attend the meeting.

Some councilors wanted to give Allen a larger raise than he received, while others wanted no raise.
Meeker said today that the purpose of the raise was to reward Allen for a job well done.

“What the council was attempting to do was reward an outstanding manager for excellent performance,” Meeker said.

Critics of the raise have said the council’s decision was tone-deaf given the current economic environment and the budget cuts being implemented by the city. The decision drew even more criticism after Allen released his budget, which calls for smaller raises for city employees, the elimination of a cost-of-living adjustment and higher health care costs for some.

“It’s certainly a perception issue. It’s not a lot of dollars but it’s a perception issue,” Meeker said. “And the council pays attention to perception so we’ll take a look at it.”

The City Council held its first budget workshop late this afternoon and it included the release of more details about the proposed cuts in City Manager Russell Allen’s budget. Among the more interesting items included in the budget notes were:

•  The cut backs at parks facilities include the closing of the Shelley Lake Boathouse, as my colleague Sarah Lindenfeld Hall reported last week. The boathouse is currently open Friday afternoon and all day Saturday and Sunday. Councilwoman Nancy McFarlane asked Parks and Recreation Director Diane Sauer about why the boathouse was closing all operations. (Most of the other cuts involved scaling back hours at all facilities during nonpeak hours.) Sauer said the boathouse’s facilities weren’t used much, the concession stand typically lost money and vandals frequently targeted the boathouse. Add paddle boat rentals and flavored icy drinks to the list of items not immune to the current recession.  

•  Cutting the arts funding from $4.50 per resident to $4 per resident would mean a 14 percent funding reduction for those receiving money under the program. Total funds would decrease from $1.71 million to $1.52 million.

• If the City Council decides to move forward later this year with construction of a series of remote operations facilities and a new public safety center downtown it will require a 1 cent property tax increase in fiscal year 2011 and 2 cent property tax increases in fiscal years 2013 and 2015. The combined cost of the two projects is a little more than $400 million. The City Council won’t make a decision about whether to move forward on these projects until the late summer or early fall, and Mayor Charles Meeker has already said the council is unlikely to green light a tax increase until the economy improves.  The council doesn’t have to take any action on these projects as part of this budget discussion because no additional funding is being included in Allen’s budget proposal. Councilman Philip Isley, an arch opponent of moving forward on the public safety center, reiterated that point this afternoon. City Manager Allen responded by saying that before the council makes any decision about delaying the safety center and remote operations buildings it should tour the city’s existing facilities. Allen said city staff are operating in buildings that are meant to service a city with a population of 100,000, not one approaching 400,000 people as Raleigh is.

The personal finance magazine Kiplinger's has released its 2009 list of the top cities in the U.S., and Raleigh is ranked 10th. While most cities would likely be happy with a top ten finish, Raleigh ranked second on Kiplinger's 2008 list and has been the Tiger Woods of municipalities when it comes to these sorts of rankings in recent years. (Raleigh's abundance of accolades has been mentioned as a reason why City Manager Russell Allen was recently given a 5 percent raise.)

Why the drop in the Kiplinger's list? It likely has something to do with the Raleigh area's unemployment rate, which has doubled over the last year to 8.6 percent, as Kipplinger's notes.

If there is a connection among many of the cities ranked in the top ten it is that most are state capitals or university towns, meaning they are places with a large number of relatively stable public-sector jobs. The top ten cities, from one to nine, are: Huntsville, Albuquerque, Washington D.C. , Charlottesville, Athens, Olympia, Madison, Austin and Flagstaff. (Huntsville doesn't have a major university and is not the capital, but it is a major center for the missile-defense and aerospace industries.)

The question for Raleigh and the politicians who love citing the city's rankings is whether Kiplinger's is a sign of things to come or an aberation. These things tend to go in cycles, and it could be that the list-makers are looking for some new city to anoint.

Next week the City Council will hold a public hearing to discuss City Manager Russell Allen's proposed budget. Allen released his budget last week, and it recommends reducing or eliminating funding for a number of local groups. Those groups are likely to plead their case at the June 2 hearing, which starts at 7 p.m. in the council chamber at City Hall, 222 W. Hargett St.

Here's a list of those that would have their funding reduced or eliminated under Allen's proposed budget:

* Groups whose funding would be cut by 10 percent: DHIC, Raleigh City Museum, Healing Place, Kryan Anderson Academy, Kids Voting, Passage Home CDC, Southeast Raleigh Assembly, Downtown Development for the Downtown Raleigh Alliance

* Groups whose funding would be elminated: International Affairs Council, Lost Generation Task Force, Raleigh Area Development Authority

* Some arts nonprofits would also be hit, as Allen's budget recommends reducing the city's per capita spending on art from $4.50 per resident to $4. (This would reduce overall grants by 11 percent.)

* A number of downtown events would also be reduced or eliminated, including MOvies in the Market, St. Patrick's Day event, Christmas Parade floates, Bike Fes and Raleigh Wide Open. No word yet on whether the city could still afford to hire the likes of Eddie Money to perform at RWO.

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.

The Raleigh City Council is likely to approve on Tuesday a resolution that would allocate money towards  creating public art in the city. The program being proposed is similar to what many other cities across the country have adopted.

It's worth noting how this funding mechanism would be different from what Raleigh currently spends on art. Raleigh does allocate money towards the arts, just not specifically to creating public art. The city allocates $4.50 per resident towards the budget of the city's Arts Commission. This year that budget totals about $1.65 million (Raleigh's population being 367,995), but about 85 percent of that money is disbursed as grants to nonprofit art groups in the city. Very little, if any, is spent on actually creating public art.

The Arts Commission's proposal to create a percentage-for-art ordinance in Raleigh also calls for a full-time Public Art Program Administrator position to be created. This person would run the program. City Manager Russell Allen said this week that the salary for this position would have to come out of the Arts Commission's existing budget. Raleigh has had a soft hiring freeze in place since July and is only filling positions related to public safety.

A few readers have contacted me raising issues with the percentage-for-art program. One caller called it inappropriate for Raleigh to be adopting something like this given the economic uncertainty about the next six months to a year. Another caller said he supported the program, but was concerned that local artists would not be hired and used on these projects. There will be no stable of artists designated to work on these projects, so only time will tell how many of the jobs go to locals.