Election returns

Two years ago, Kevin, Michael, and i were in Alivia's, liveblogging a very exciting municipal election night. Mayor Bill Bell beat back a very strong challenge from former Councilman Thomas Stith, who had received a lot of backing from national right-wing groups; and the at-large race for Council went down to the wire, with just a couple of hundred votes separating Farad Ali and David Harris.

This year?

Not so much. So, with 0% of the vote tallied, and exactly 0 precincts reporting, i'm calling the election for all 4 incumbents.

Have a good night.

Continue reading Election returns

Election pondering

Municipal primary turnout in previous 7 elections:
Date Offices Registered Voted Percentage turnout

10/10/95 Mayor, City Council 92,265 14,272 15.4%
10/7/97 Mayor, City Council 115,326 15,843 13.0%
10/5/99 Mayor/Council 124,740 20,400 16%
10/9/01 Mayor & Council 127,858 15,387 12.03%
10/7/03 Mayor/Council 104,384 16,993 16.28%
10/11/2005 Mayor/Council 118,376 13,103 11.06%
10/09/2007 Durham City Council at Large 121,026 12,875 10.64%

This year's numbers:
10/06/2009 Council Ward I and II 139,980 6,097 4.36%

Couple of things to keep in mind. 2001 and 2005 were Ward primary elections; 2003 and 2007 were at-large primaries. I can't recall which of the ward seats were primaried in previous elections, outside of 2001 when my neighborhood association president finished 2nd in the primary ahead of incumbent Jackie Wagstaff. So it may not be a true apples to apples comparison. Also, that 139,980 registered voter number looks pretty good compared to two years ago, up almost 19,000 voters, or just over 15%.

Unfortunately, that's also down almost 40,000, or about 22%, from last year's number.

Since 1995, general election turnout in off years has increased from the primary turnout by anywhere from 40% to about 100%. Even if this year we end up at the high end of the scale, we're still looking at less than 10% turnout, or about 13,000 voters in the entire city making decisions about our leadership.

Hope you're one of them.

Continue reading Election pondering

Go vote

If you want to bitch about shit in Durham, the least you can do is cast a ballot.

Continue reading Go vote

Traffic enforcement

I want to thank commenter eah919 for pointing me to Tom Vanderbilt's recent article in Slate.com, In Praise of Traffic Tickets.

I've emailed copies of the article to our Police Chief, City Manager, and Council members. If you agree that the article makes some very good points, particularly the analogy of speeders and other driving violators as mobile "broken windows," (a point which Michael Bacon and i have both made on numerous occasions) please consider letting our elected and appointed officials know.

Email them at:
Tom.Bonfield@DurhamNC.Gov; Jose.Lopez@DurhamNC.Gov; Council@DurhamNC.Gov.

Some excerpts from the article:

The consequences of not issuing tickets were shown in a recent study of traffic violations in New York City. From 2001 to 2006, the number of fatalities in which speeding was implicated rose 11 percent. During the same period, the number of speeding summons issued by the NYPD dropped 11 percent. Similarly, summonses for red-light-running violations dropped 13 percent between 2006 and 2008, even as the number of crashes increased. As an alternative approach, consider France, where the dangerous driver is as storied a cliché as a beret on the head and a baguette under the arm. As the ITE Journal notes, since 2000, France has reduced its road fatality rate by an incredible 43 percent. Instrumental in that reduction has been a roll-out of automated speed cameras and a toughening of penalties. For example, negligent driving resulting in a death, which often results in little punishment in the United States, carries a penalty of five years in prison and a 75,000-euro fine.

The "folk crime" belief helps thwart increased traffic enforcement: Why should the NYPD, whose resources and manpower are already stretched, bust people for dangerous driving when they could be going after murderers? Well, apart from the fact that more people are killed in traffic fatalities in New York City every year than they are in "stranger homicides," there is the idea, related to the link between on-and-off-road criminality, that targeting traffic violators might be an effective way to combat other crimes. Which brings us to the third benefit of traffic tickets: increased public safety. Hence the new Department of Justice initiative called DDACTS, or Data Driven Approaches to Crime and Traffic Safety, which has found that there is often a geographic link between traffic crashes and crime. By putting "high-visibility enforcement" in hot spots of both crime and traffic crashes, cities like Baltimore have seen reductions in both.

The program recalls the "broken windows" theory, made famous by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling, which argued, using the metaphor of one broken window on a building inexorably leading to more, that not enforcing smaller, "quality-of-life" issues encourages larger transgressions:

Window-breaking does not necessarily occur on a large scale because some areas are inhabited by determined window-breakers whereas others are populated by window-lovers; rather, one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing.

Both broken windows and data-driven policing have offered as at least partial explanations for New York City's declining crime rate, and it would seem logical that a similar program would help reduce the level of traffic deaths and injury. One person driving fast, or going through a red light, or even failing to signal, is essentially a broken window—a sign that no one cares. But again we come up against social resistance in equating aggressive driving with crime. This was nowhere more evident than in a review of my book Traffic by James Q. Wilson himself, who opened with the statement: "I drive my car very fast." Now, I have no way of knowing how fast "very fast" is or where he does this fast driving. And even though the review is a nice one, I couldn't help but notice the irony that this behavior is presumably against the law, and the fact that he does it without reprimand contributes to a lessened respect for traffic law and perhaps the law itself. ("We suggest," as it was put in the broken-windows article, "that 'untended' behavior also leads to the breakdown of community controls.")

Continue reading Traffic enforcement

Marriage equality resolution passes Durham City Council

No link yet, but all my Facebook friends are saying it, so it must be true.

Unanimous vote. Good for us.

Why were the local media playing up the "controversial" aspects of this?

Continue reading Marriage equality resolution passes Durham City Council

Shooting the Bull

Just wanted to give you all a heads up that Donald Long, Director of the Solid Waste Management department for the City of Durham, will be joining me and Kevin tonight on Shooting the Bull. We'll try to get to the bottom of why the new recycling program has been so difficult to bring into operation, among other things.

WXDU, 88.7 FM at 7:30, or listen online.

Podcast on iTunes this weekend. I promise.

Continue reading Shooting the Bull

Speaking of starts

We're well into the second week of Durham's new curbside recycling program. That's the one where you put all of your recyclables, unsorted, into one big 90 gallon rollout cart that gets picked up every two weeks.

The idea is that it's more cost effective for the city to do it this way, being able to use the automated trucks for pickup, being able to cover the whole city with fewer people, since it's only picking up half the city every week, and increasing participation and amount of recyclables kept out of the waste stream. The pilot program started in a couple of Durham neighborhoods last year supposedly increased the number of household that were recycling by some 40 or 50%, and the volume of goods picked up by even more than that, over the square 20 gallon blue bins.

That's the theory, anyway.

In my neighborhood, which i think had a pretty high participation rate under the old program, there are still entire blocks waiting for their new rollout carts. I posted a message to the neighborhood listserv asking for people who hadn't gotten carts yet to drop me a line, and my inbox is pretty much filled with them this morning. I'm willing to cut Solid Waste a little slack on this, but i may be in the minority based on what i'm reading. Here's a taste:

This morning I went outside to find a blue recycling cart in front of our house. No other houses received them. I took it back beside our house, dumped in all of my accumulated recycling, and it's now 75% full.

About an hour later, a crew came by and started delivering carts to all the homes on E. Trinity, including giving us a second cart. I saw this and gave it back since I don't need a second one. They didn't seem to have any idea that anybody else was delivering them.

Oh, and another thing I just realized; none of the carts included the promised plastic bag with information about the new recycling program. How are people who are not on a mailing list supposed to know that their recycling day changed from Friday to Wednesday, much less about the additional items that can be recycled, the new bulky item pickup, or the day-after pickup of yard waste and bulky items.

Oh yeah, I hope that you can read English because I have yet to see any information about the garbage/recycling changes available in Spanish.

Can you say clusterfuck? I knew you could....

And altough i'm going to protect my emailer's identity, you should know that this person is actively involved in neighborhood uplifting, and not someone who, like me, just prefers to whine about how things are going.

Continue reading Speaking of starts

An open letter to Durham City Council regarding barking dogs

UPDATED BELOW

I had a frustrating day in court yesterday trying to deal with this issue, as the citation issuing police officer did not appear to testify in the case against one of my neighbors. I'd like to review the history of the barking dog issue, and ask some questions of the City Council.

Prior to September 2006, there were three ordinances that pertained to barking dogs. There was the city noise ordinance, Chapter 26, Article II, Section 26-23, Paragraph b3, which reads: Particular noises prohibited. The following acts, among others, are declared to be unreasonably loud and disturbing noises in violation of this section but the enumeration shall not be deemed to be exclusive, namely: (3) The keeping of any animal or bird which, by causing frequent or long continued noise, shall disturb the comfort and repose of any person in the vicinity.

There is also a county ordinance which reads similarly. But, prior to September 2006, primary enforcement of barking dogs was carried out by the county Animal Control Department under the nuisance animal provision of the County Code. This provision declared that dogs which barked in excess of one time per minute for ten minutes were nuisance animals, and could be impounded by the Animal Control Department.

In September of 2006, following months, if not years, of non-existent enforcement of this provision, the Board of County Commissioners, at the request of the director of the Animal Control Department, struck this provision from the nuisance animal section of the code, reasoning that the noise ordinances, which were enforced by City of Durham police officers (or County Sheriff's Deputies in the unincorporated areas of the county) would be a more efficient and effective method of combating this infringement on the quality of life of Durham residents.

In December of 2008, citing in large measure the volume of calls received by the Durham 911 system relating to barking dogs, the City of Durham announced the creation of a non-emergency number for residents to call instead of 911 to make complaints about barking dogs, among other non-life-threatening violations. I asked Jim Soukup, the director of the Durham 911 system, how many requests for service regarding barking dogs were actually received. Jim reported to me that between January 1, 2007 and November 30, 2008, a total of 7299 barking dog violations were reported to Durham 911. This amounts to about 310 per month for each of the 23 months in the period studied. Jim also reported to me that this number represented 1.7% of all calls for service received by the 911 system.

I think it's reasonable to assume that the actual number of instances in which residents had their "comfort and repose" disturbed by barking dogs during that time was significantly higher, as many people will be naturally reluctant to use the 911 system to deal with a quality of life issue. As the use of the new non-emergencynumber grows, it will be interesting to see by how much calls for service for this particular violation grow.

On July 12, 2008, one of my neighbors was issued a citation for allowing his dog to bark for approximately 5 consecutive hours, between 5 am and 10 am, on a Saturday morning. That case was supposed to be heard in court yesterday, January 13. I was subpoenaed as a witness for the state. The citing officer did not appear, and the state was reluctant to bring the case before the judge, assuming that the charges would be dismissed outright. Instead, I was asked to attend a mediation session with the defendant. Given the alternative of having the charges dismissed, I agreed, although in no way do I accept that the situation represented a "dispute" that needed "mediation." Rather, we have a clear violation of the law that needed to be dealt with. We reached an agreement that is, for all practical purposes, unenforceable, and i see no reason to believe that it will be honored.

Here are the questions I have for the city council.

Of the approximately 7300 complaints received in the period discussed above, how many were responded to by Durham police officers?

Of these, how many were resolved to the satisfaction of the complainant?

Of the remainder, how many resulted in citations for violating city ordinances?

How many of these citations were paid? How many were challenged in court? How many guilty pleas were entered?

How much money does the city of Durham estimate that it spends each year responding to barking dog complaints? How much money does the city collect in fines each year as a result of these violations?

Is the city proactively monitoring the number of complaints made under this ordinance now that a non-emergency phone number has been established to receive these calls? What plans does the city have to minimize the occurrence of this particular quality of life violation?

I recognize, especially now, that with property crimes increasing at an alarming rate in many parts of the city, quality of life violations may not be the highest priority of our law enforcement officials. However, as numerous studies have shown, deteriorating quality of life encourages productive and law abiding citizens to move out of neighborhoods, lowering property values, reducing tax receipts, increasing vacancy rates, and in general contributing to a downward spiral in the life of a neighborhood. Barking dogs are merely one symptom of a decay in quality of life in our city, but one that carries with it, i think many hidden costs. I am curious as to whether or not these costs are being recognized by you as our elected leadership.

Thank you for your time,
Mr. Dependable

====================

UPDATE: I did get some communication back from Durham PD indicating that the citing officer was home yesterday with sick children, and that the DA's office should have been aware of that, and asked for a continuance on that basis. Time will tell whether the mediation was a superior solution or not.

Continue reading An open letter to Durham City Council regarding barking dogs

Budget cuts

County Commissioner Michael Page comes up with the understatement of the year in this morning's N&O, noting "I have a feeling we're going to be bombarded" after County Manager Mike Ruffin announced some pretty draconian cuts across the board in county operations and services.

See, here's what i think needs to happen.

Mike and i need to sit down over lunch and figure out what services i need provided by the county. Then, we'll make sure that those get fully funded. Any other county services that i never use? Cut those to the bone. Hell, why should my taxes pay for things like schools or a Life and Science Museum when my kids are already grown?

Continue reading Budget cuts

Right on time

Back in the day, one of my public policy professors opined that a new supervisor's window of opportunity for making significant organizational changes was 90 days. Try to do too much earlier than than, and you risked alienating the people who were going to be implementing your ideas because they would think you didn't know enough about how things really got done. Wait much longer than that, and people would think you didn't care or have any ideas worth carrying out.

Just three months into the job, City Manager Tom Bonfield is putting his brand on Durham.

On Thursday, Bonfield unveiled a reorganization of the city's administration to "promote departments working together."

Bonfield's plan aligns the city's 23 departments into three "teams" or "theme areas," each under a deputy city manager charged with "facilitating" inter-department cooperation.

"It isn't about controlling anything," it's about facilitating," he said.

I'm sure i'll have some uninformed and completely spurious opinion about the significance of these developments soon.

Continue reading Right on time

Pass the popcorn

Let's hope the new Board of County Commissioners lives up to its potential to become Durham's best entertainment value.

Returning Commissioner Joe Bowser, who served on the board from 1996 to 2004, is also interested in becoming chairman. He chuckled when told of Page's interest in the job.

"I had twice the time as commissioner and twice the time as vice chairman that Michael has," he said.

Bowser wanted to become chairman of the board in 2002 and feels he could have had the job had he not deferred to Reckhow, who had greater time as a board member and vice chairwoman.

According to Bowser, Reckhow promised to support his future bid to become chairman if he supported her in 2002 -- and says now she's reneging. He said "she felt that a number of things had changed" in the intervening years.

"I don't remember the conversation six years ago very well," Reckhow said, "but I would say that given his hiatus from the board, I think it's important for him to gain some experience on our board, on our current board."

Continue reading Pass the popcorn

Another bus design

From reader TM.

Continue reading Another bus design

Buses - money where my mouth is

Mrs. D's effort to liven up the new bus designs (below) got me thinking i should probably do more than just kvetch about how ugly they are.

So here's some possibilities.

first, in response to Tony in the comments, who wants to see a Camo bus.

Next, reader NS emails to say that the new designs don't let anybody know that the new buses are more environmentally friendly.

Or this one, which is the beaver lodge behind Compare Foods off Avondale and I-85:
My problem with the proposed designs is that there's absolutely nothing Durham about them. (Some folks might argue that the lack of identity is a Durham quality. I say those folks should STFU.) Here's some Durham-centric options.


And, finally, a crowd shot at the Durham Holiday Parade, from 2007.


Contemporary printing technology allows for very short run printing to be adhered to buses, making lots of different designs feasible. Surely a city with the world class aspirations of Durham can do better than the generic blandness proposed below. click on any of the photos to see a (slightly) larger version.

Got any ideas of your own? Email 'em to the address on the right sidebar, and i'll post 'em, you betcha.

Continue reading Buses - money where my mouth is

Bus survey

Hot on the heels of the city's successful contest to name its official dildo (sorry, Operation Green Light road paving project mascot), they're now asking for input as to how the new hybrid buses, due to hit the streets next year, should be painted.



Seriously. The city wants to know which of these marginally different curvy stripey designs will make you feel better about living here. (Ooops. Designs C and D don't have any curves. They're just stripey.) Where are the choices that have stars in them? Or the choices between full panel home oxygen canister ads and full panel ambulance chaser ads?

Or better yet, how about a survey that asks how often you'd ride the bus if it came by more than once every half hour, had a destination other than the main bus depot, and you didn't have to stand in the mud and rain waiting for it?

UPDATE: Mrs. D weighs in with another option.

Continue reading Bus survey

What happened to the new guy?

Kevin's got a post up earlier today with some informed speculation about "Guy," the new Durham blogger who showed up earlier this week with some "insider" information about city and county government. And shortly after Kevin's post went up, showing some strong evidence that "Guy" was none other than Durham County Manager Mike Ruffin, "Guy's" blog disappeared. It wasn't up long enough for Google to have cached any of the pages, at least that i can find, and the Wayback Machine doesn't show any of them either. By the time i got around to grabbing some screen shots earlier today, it was too late.

I did, however, quote some text from "Guy's" first post the other day, which i'll reprint again here, emphasis added:

If you read my posts regularly, you will soon learn that I am no stranger to Durham politics, or the inner circle in Durham that runs our city and county. Having said that, I am also not a cynic, something that I have to say I see all too frequently in other Durham blogs. I don't always agree with decisions that our leaders make, or how they make them, but many times, because I am on the inside, I see another side that helps to explain why a decision was made.

So, the non-cynical "Guy" uses his insider information to puff himself up and trash the reputation of someone he doesn't like, while hiding behind a facade of anonymity. And he's not even smart enough to cover his tracks.

Exhibit A for why some of us are "frequently cynical."

UPDATE: To be fair, Kevin stops short of saying that "Guy" is in fact Mike Ruffin, and leaves open the possibility that a third party is deliberately creating the impression that's the case. I'm a firm believer in Occam's Razor myself. Since the speculation and the evidence is out in public, and the website was taken down within hours, if not minutes, of its publication, that "Guy" is Ruffin is the simplest explanation. Were it a third party with an agenda of embarrassing the manager, why take the site down?

Continue reading What happened to the new guy?

What the hell is Bill Bell thinking?

Ray Gronberg, in yesterday's Herald-Sun, tells us:

Thanks to a push from Mayor Bill Bell, officials are considering a developer-backed procedural change that would allow them to vote on rezoning requests before hearing about a project's traffic impact from state road planners.

The idea could shave from one to six months off the time it takes the city or county government to review zoning requests, administrators say.

But it would also cost Durham leaders a chance to make sure developers, local officials and the N.C. Department of Transportation are on the same page about the road and sidewalk improvements new neighborhoods or buildings might need.

The change would result in a system for reviewing traffic impact that's "absolutely less coordinated" than the one Durham already has, Deputy City Manager Ted Voorhees told City Council members earlier this month.

So, what's the rush? Considering that Durham is pretty far behind the curve of growing American cities in planning for the transportation needs of the 21st century, how does not even waiting to look at the traffic impacts of new sprawling development benefit anyone except a small group of developers?

My gut instinct is to think there must be a very specific project out there on the books that will benefit from this change.

Here's the kicker:

Nonetheless, Bell said the group that initiates land-policy changes, the Joint City/County Planning Committee, should review the proposal and offer a recommendation.

The committee has looked at the idea before and refused to support it. But members like City Councilwoman Diane Catotti fret that it lost influence with the council and the commissioners. Bell isn't a member of the panel.

)Deputy city Manager Ted) Voorhees noted that the city could, theoretically, make the change on its own. He also noted that city officials in Raleigh don't wait on DOT to finish its work before acting on zoning requests.

Which should be the prime argument against adopting this policy in Durham.

There's also been some interesting conversation about this topic in the Inter-Neighborhood Council listserv today. I'll have more to say about that later.

Continue reading What the hell is Bill Bell thinking?

Gee thanks, Time/Warner

I'm sure i had something to say yesterday, but since my internet connection was down virtually all day, i have no idea what it was. Since the tech is due here in about an hour, i'm sure the connection will be working fine until 20 minutes after he leaves.

I hope you get a chance to listen to the podcast of our interview last night with Tom Bonfield, Durham's new city manager, on Shooting the Bull. Mr. Bonfield shares his first impressions of the city, and his vision for the Durham of the future. It'll be interesting to watch him working with our current City Council over the next year or two. Nothing against Patrick Baker, but it's been some time since Durham had a manager quite like our new guy.

Here's a question for you. I've snarked in the past about how the Mercer Group, the headhunters who managed the search for our new manager, should give us a discount on our next search, since they overlapped the Wichita, Kansas manager search onto our own. Mr. Bonfield confirmed last night that he was also in fact asked to interview for the then vacant position in Wichita as well as Durham. I don't have much experience int he "executive recruiting" field. But am i wrong to think that there's some ethical conflict here in taking money from two different cities at the same time to basically give them the same pool of candidates from which to choose? If there really is only one very small pool of qualified city managers, what value add does the search company bring to the table. Why not just contact the professional organization that city managers belong to and post your job openings there?

Continue reading Gee thanks, Time/Warner

Welcome to Durham, Tom Bonfield

I assume that making sure bond money is spent for, you know, voter approved bond projects will be part of your portfolio.

Continue reading Welcome to Durham, Tom Bonfield

Rezoning

Ray and Kevin both have pretty good rundowns on the Council's rezoning of the "Fairfield" project off of Hillandale Road and I-85 last night. I'm not convinced that an apartment complex like this one will necessarily "destroy" the neighborhood. As i've written before, the apartment complexes off of Constitution Drive in the American Village neighborhood seem to co-exist pretty well with their single family home-owning neighbors.

Here's the real problem, though:

Opponents filed a formal protest petition against the project, under a state law that forces applicants of a contested rezoning to muster six votes for passage. Signatures on such a petition have to come from the owners of adjoining properties.

But city officials late last week ruled the petition invalid because some of the adjoining owners who'd put their names on it changed their minds.

Project opponent Laura Suski said one of Fairfield's lawyers, Craigie Sanders, visited petition signatories recently to lobby them to take back their signatures.

That does not bode well for Craigie Sanders' current tenure on the board of the Inter-Neighborhood Council. We'll see how that gets addressed at the next INC meeting.

Continue reading Rezoning

Courage of his convictions

From the N&O:

L.F. Eason III gave up the only job he'd ever had rather than lower a flag to honor former U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms.

Eason, a 29-year veteran of the state Department of Agriculture, instructed his staff at a small Raleigh lab not to fly the U.S. or North Carolina flags at half-staff Monday, as called for in a directive to all state agencies by Gov. Mike Easley.

When a superior ordered the lab to follow the directive, Eason decided to retire rather than pay tribute to Helms. After several hours' delay, one of Eason's employees hung the flags at half-staff.

. . .

He told his staff that he did not think it was appropriate to honor Helms because of his "doctrine of negativity, hate, and prejudice" and his opposition to civil rights bills and the federal Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.

It's customary, and may even be part of the flag code, to fly the flag at half-staff in the state after the death of a Senator, regardless of how odious that Senator's career.

In the event of the death of a present or former official of the government of any State, territory, or possession of the United States, the Governor of that State, territory, or possession may proclaim that the National flag shall be flown at half-staff. The flag shall be flown at half-staff thirty days from the death of the President or a former President; . . . and on the day of death and the following day for a Member of Congress.

Seems like a curious thing to give up a career over, but there's no denying that Mr. Eason took the full consequences of his position. Gotta wonder why the state couldn't come up with some other discipline besides forcing him to retire, though. It's not as though good lab managers with 30 years experience grow on trees.

Continue reading Courage of his convictions