April 14, 2008

This week was a vacation week which is the reason for the tardy post. Before leaving on vacation I attended two meetings, a school board leaders and a town council meeting.

On Monday afternoon before the council meeting I, along with Mayor Pro-Tem Julie Robison and town manager Bill Coleman, met with school board chairman Rosa Gill, school board member Beverly Clark, and Superintendent Del Burns. This was a follow up from the small group meeting with the same people (except myself – council member Portman attended in my place) in February. The reason for the meetings were two fold, to understand how we could better work together as boards and how Cary could best provide concerns of its citizens to the board. At the conclusion of the two meetings the school board Chairman Gill promised to continue the relationship with Cary and said her staff would be willing to provide data as long as it doesn’t require significant research by their staff ( their staff time is already challenged with other duties). She also noted that the school board would like to hear about issues unrelated to assignments since they are working on addressing those issues. Regarding board to board meetings she felt it would be in Cary’s best interest to submit questions and concerns to them so that they can give in depth, complete answers. That is, face to face meetings wouldn’t allow them the opportunity to give all the necessary information needed. As a result they believe that a meeting of both boards would not be as beneficial. She recommended that their staff present information in response to questions at a future council meeting. It is disappointing that our two boards will not be able to meet as a group. I fear this decision will cause further divide between the two boards. I, like Chairman Gill, will do my best to keep the boards working together.

At the Monday evening council meeting there were two controversial issues on the agenda, the US Climate Protection Agreement and impact fees. The objection on the US Climate Protection Agreement was that many of the measures were already in place and that the Kyoto agreement had items that were objectionable. The majority of the council, including myself, felt that the US Climate Protection Agreement does not include or endorse the Kyoto agreement but only includes portions of it. The council passed this item 6-1.

The second controversial issue at the council meeting was on impact fees or development fees. A minority of the council felt that fees were already high enough and that we were high compared with neighboring municipalities. Data provided by staff showed that if we went with their recommendation, 75% of cost, we would still be only the third highest in fees for residential development. Non residential did show we were the highest but did not take into account two main points. The first is that only Cary and Raleigh had the authority to charge these fees and other municipalities were charging these fees without authority and thus kept their fees low. The second is that Cary and Raleigh give developers credits for various development implementations beneficial to the town. Another recommendation on the impact fee decision was to spread the increase over two years. According to staff information this would have cost Cary taxpayers $1.6 million in revenue. Although some council members did not completely support the impact fee proposal it was a unanimous decision. I believe this is a step in the right direction and provides some relief to our taxpayers. In addition, it allows us to be competitive in a fragile real estate market. We will need to continue to pay careful attention to the economy to prevent problems related to real estate and other businesses. To date, the economy doesn’t appear to have had a dramatic effect on the town’s population growth. Our latest data shows that the town population grew to over 129,000 during the last twelve months which was a 6.3% increase.

The remainder of my week was spent in Augusta, Georgia where I worked as a scorer for the Masters Golf tournament. This was my 30^th year working in scoring. It is a joy and a pleasure working for the Augusta National during the Masters and is one of the highlights of my year. Although, I will have to admit that beginning days before 5 AM and ending at midnight did take its toll on me. Needless to say I was glad to be home on Sunday.

Well that’s about all for this week. I hope to post next week on Saturday, April 19th.