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FROM THE EDITOR

Posted on December 30, 2010 by Staff

Remainders

People sure meet a lot around here. Not just at restaurants and nightclubs, but officially, with minutes and presentations and decisions and all that.

Counting all the advisory boards, the number of meeting hours in Chapel Hill and Carrboro is in the thousands. As happens every December after several hours spent compiling our annual year in review issue, the time I spent observing officialdom sinks in.

This year, I logged about 200 hours attending or watching the meetings of the two towns’ elected boards. And thanks to the magic of the interwebs, I even got to go back and look at a few of those precious hours twice. Most of what stood out has already appeared in The Citizen in the form of a dryly written report to the people on what’s being done in their name. Some weeks, trying to get everything that happened into print involves serious triage, and other weeks it really would be easier to describe paint drying.

As you might guess, there are some pretty interesting moments that never make it into the meeting wrap-up. Naturally, there is the occasional expression of outrage and fury. But there are far more moments when passion for an issue comes out in an eloquent, well thought-out statement that you just know somebody sat up half the night thinking how to word.

Then there are the oddball moments, when the process veers outside of Robert’s Rules of Order. As when the other evening the county commissioners participated in a demonstration of one of the dozens of defibrillators the county had purchased. Hilarity ensued.

The oddest moment at Carrboro Town Hall came during a lengthy public hearing on Smith Level Road. After a series of opponents of the deal with DOT had made their case, Mayor Mark Chilton, who had worked hard to reach the compromise, uttered the following words: “I’m going to recognize myself.” The mayor then walked up to the podium and in a 20-minute soliloquy laid out the realities as he saw them.

My favorite moment from the other side of the tracks came during a slow-moving evening of public hearings by the Chapel Hill Town Council. An engineer working for Lowe’s was going through the technical aspects of a proposed expansion of the company’s outdoor area and the elimination of a parking lot. Then he came to the reason a particular light pole in the delivery area had to be moved.

“This light post has become a target for most tractor-trailer drivers who come into the parking area,” he said, then added: “This light post has lived a hard life.”

And, get this, they pay me to watch this stuff.

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