Orange Progressives' worst nightmares are spreading faster than H1N1 swine flu. A new political blog, Chapel Hill Watch, has opened for business in southern Orange. Not only is it (gasp!) an open forum (read, not censored), but people are going to that blog and expressing views not in line with the Orange Progressive ideological dogma. They also allow the infamous “anonymous blogging”.
Gad zooks! What will they allow next? Free speech???
Orange Progressive “public mental health officials” are worried. Is “Mad Matt disease" spreading? Will more candidates be elected in the November municipal elections that don’t take the prescribed “bobblehead medication”?
US Senate races are expensive. In defeating Ms. Elizabeth Dole, Ms. Kay Hagan spent over $8,500,000 in 2008. Unless you are Mr. John Edwards, that money comes from contributions. What better way for Senate hopeful, and current Chapel Hill Mayor, Kevin Foy to start the contributions running than to bail out a group of big pocket Chapel Hill real estate investors.
Lame duck Mayor Foy held a special closed meeting to buy a white elephant that’s draining the coffers of Developer Dream Team member D.R. Bryan, developer of Southern Village. This company is filled with campaign contributors who dutifully give local campaign contributions in response to their favored real estate development treatment, people such as the former mayor of Chapel Hill, Ms. Rosemary Waldorf. (It's all perfectly legal mind you.)
Hopeful Foy Senate campaign contributors have been sucking air on an unoccupied, spanking new 70,000-square-foot office building for sale off Weaver Dairy Road in the Vilcom Center area. Over 18 months of interest payments on a commercial loan and no occupants in sight (until now), another example of the commercial and retail real estate bubble collapsing around you.
To the rescue comes Mayor Foy, who just happens to need oodles of boodle if his dream of a US Senate run is to come to pass. Foy and his fellow Councilors approved negotiations between The Town Council, in a closed meeting, directing Town Manager Roger Stancil to continue negotiating with Red Wing Land, a D.R. Bryan affiliate. It's marketing “Dawson Hall” as separate office condos for about $150 per square foot, a steal at only $10,000,000!
Why should Chapel Hill buy a building convenient to nowhere after having just spent $25,000,000 on a new town operations center? The excuse given is that the town needs a temporary home for the library while the old one is being rebuilt and needs a permanent home for the police department on the northernmost edge of the town.
Which begs the question, why was the Chapel Hill library built not to be expanded while maintaining current operations? Which begs the question why can't the police department facility be expanded in place? Which begs the question is any municipal act done competently in southern Orange?
That’s right, Mayor Foy appears to be unaware of the concept of leasing temporary space. Pulpsters, needn’t ask why the police need a new permanent home on the northernmost edge of the town when they already have one centrally located on Airport Drive (MLK Boulevard) that could be expanded.
Mayor Foy pulled the old “we don’t have to time to think” ploy for his fellow Councilors. After months of sitting vacant, the keen negotiator Mayor Foy believes that listing agent Gary Hill with Grubb & Ellis/Thomas really is negotiating with two real future tenants and a real condo buyer for parts of Dawson Hall. What timing!
In an apparent attempt at humor, town manager Roger Stancil said, ”Any decisions have to be made in public. The town
always operates with a lot of transparency.” (See N&O Campaign Contribution Story.)
In most of North Carolina, state employees are holding on to their job at any cost. Times are tough. Private jobs are being shed, not added. That attitude would be particularly true for a land use planner being paid about $74,000 a year.
But Orange County isn’t like most of North Carolina. Here a land use planner can slide from gown to town and back to gown, if the need is there for UNC. The factory university town of “Chapelboro” specializes in having local residents pay for university costs or expenses. From subsidizing free student transportation to lowered municipal water and sewage costs to revitalizing UNC-owned Franklin Street properties, it’s all about feeding the big blue academic smokestacks.
As reported in the Chapel Hill News, Ms. Mary Jane Nirdlinger resigned her $74,000-a-year job at UNC earlier this summer, allegedly without having another job lined up. (There aren’t too many of those jobs lying around on campus at that salary.) In the past few years, she has concentrated on the development of Carolina North and the ancillary public-private development of univeristy housing called Carolina Commons.
Ms. Nirdlinger is most famous among the adjacent Carolina Commons neighborhoods for pulling a bait-and-switch on the public-private D.R. Bryan-UNC partnership. She saw no need to inform neighborhoods about the particulars as to how seven high-end executive homes built individually transformed into a non-publicly bid UNC partnership deal of 19 homes built by D.R. Bryan, and how the land would be sold by UNC. She is remembered for her indignance at neighborhoood informational public meetings for being questioned about her lack of openness.
Now, Pulpsters are supposed to believe that Ms. Nirdlinger decided to cast off from the moorings of a well-paid state planning job with no job in hand, and no intention of landing a job with the town of Chapel Hill. Reportedly, she just happened to be hired by Chapel Hill Town manager Roger Stancil as a “special projects manager” after letting Mr. Stancil know she was leaving her UNC job. According to Mr. Stancil, “I wasn’t recruiting people who work for the university to come work for the town. She was leaving, and I diverted her path.”
Ms. Nirdlinger certainly was in luck. Mr. Stancil was willing to pay her even more than she made at UNC - $78,000 a year. Such managment skills by the town manager, offering someone without a job more taxpayer's money in the midst of the “Great Recession”.
What will Ms. Nirdlinger do? How about laying the regulatory foundation for Carolina North over the next few years while the state waits for the economy to recover before funding the next mega-round of capital investment in UNC? Much work must be done to align town regulations with UNC desires for Carolina North.
With the pressure on the UNC budget, and the high visibility of a UNC planner making $74,000, what better solution than to have the town pay for the planner doing the work needed by UNC? In the words of Ms. Nirdlinger, “I care about what happens in my community, and I care about what happens at the university.”
No word from Mr. Stancil as to why Ms. Nirdlinger needs to be hired in the midst of a commercial and residential building meltdown.
