May 18, 2008

This week’s meetings were mostly ceremonial and informative. Highlights included an award ceremony, a press conference, and a ribbon cutting.

Monday morning began with a meeting on the final STAC (Special Transit Advisory Commission) recommendations. The meeting included Trish Dowty, Cary’s representative on the committee, and Joe Milazzo of the Regional Transportation Alliance. Nothing earth shattering in this meeting. Cary is included in the future transit plans (not always the case during the process). As always, the biggest hurdle to overcome with transit is funding. STAC is recommending a ½ cents sales tax. The problem is if the county gets authority to add a ½ cents sales tax for schools and transportation they have indicated they will use it all for schools. So the funding problem will still be an issue. I think it is important to point out that this commission is recommending a lot of expanded bus service first and light rail in the future. However they would like to begin with some light rail. A combined meeting of the Capital Metropolitan Planning Organization and the Durham/Orange Planning Organization is scheduled for next week to hear the STAC recommendations. It will be interesting to see what comes out of this meeting.

Monday evening I was privileged to be a part of Cary Chamber of Commerce’s award ceremony for teachers. There were over two dozen awards presented to teachers of excellence. I was proud to be a presenter for the Town of Cary and honored to be in the presence of so many fine educators. I taught school in the 1970’s for two years and I know the dedication and commitment it takes to be a good teacher. If you are reading this and want to sponsor an award next year please contact the Chamber. It is important that our good teachers are recognized, thanked, and encouraged.

Tuesday began with a staff presentation on the downtown streetscape project. It is a wonderful project that will make downtown a destination point. The problem is that it costs $42 million. So the real decision will be during the budget. This proposed debt combined with the huge debt related to the Western Wake Wastewater Facility doesn’t leave us much flexibility for future issues. It will be interesting to see how the council proceeds.

At mid day Tuesday I attended a press conference for USA Baseball. In case you didn’t know, Cary is the Olympic training center for the USA Olympic team. They will play an exhibition against the Canadian Olympic team at Thomas Brooks Park on August 1^st. Speaking at the press conference were hall of fame player, coach, general manager… Davy Johnson and Bob Watson. One of the great perks of being mayor is the opportunity to meet high profile individuals. This was one of those days and I really enjoyed getting to talk with them briefly. Anyway, the purpose of the press conference was mainly to allow questions from the media such as “How are you going to select the Olympic team?” and “How do you plan to get baseball reinstated in the Olympics after this year?”

Tuesday evening was the combination of two work sessions. The first was on the CDBG (Community Development Block Grant) funding on how to distribute the $880,000 in funds. The Town of Cary is designated as an Entitlement Community by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and is eligible to receive Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) funds. For FY 2009, CDBG funds in the amount of $450,746 have been allocated to the Town for use in addressing the Town’s affordable housing, infrastructure and economic development needs. The main change at the work session from the staff report given at the council meeting was to move $100,000 scheduled for the White Oak Foundation to other requests since the White Oak Foundation was not ready to move forward and their needs can be addressed at a later date.

The second Tuesday evening work session was the first of several budget work sessions. The town spent a significant amount of time discussing the proposed new tax rate of $0.33 per $100 of valuation and what “revenue neutral” meant. It is important to note that every penny of property tax rate equates to about $1.9 million in revenue for the town. So the tax rate is the cornerstone for the budget discussion. We will pick up the discussion again at the work session on Tuesday, May 20^th.

The rest of the week consisted of staff meetings with the exception of a ribbon cutting ceremony for Pharmanet on Thursday. Pharmanet will move several jobs to Cary in addition to creating about 100 more. The company has an excellent reputation in the fields of biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, and medical devices to name a few. Cary would benefit greatly to have more companies of this caliber to relocate here and that is one of the goals I hope to achieve during the next four years.

One of the non-meeting tasks I had this week was writing the June script for Cary Matters. A Questions and Answers topic I used was about a legislative agenda item on at-large elections of school board members. The council unanimously approved the legislative agenda in early April which I presented to the Wake County delegation of legislators on April 28^th. We did not specify that we were unanimously in favor of ALL or SOME at-large election of school board members because we felt it was our position to point out the problem and let them craft the solution. The lack of our specificity allowed some elected officials, groups, and media to interpret our agenda item to mean whatever was convenient to them causing a lot of confusion. So in Cary Matters we will unequivocally state that the council unanimously agreed to support SOME at-large elections of school board members. As I write this journal some council members believe that most of the council was in favor of a MAJORITY of at-large election of school board members. To my knowledge there has not been a vote to that effect and I do not believe this to be true.

That is about it for this week. I will be taking Monday off, well at least most of the day, to play the Augusta National Golf course. That should be interesting. ;-) So I’ll close for now and hopefully post again by Sunday, May 25th.