This week’s most significant event was approving a $348 million budget for fiscal year 2011.

Monday I called all council members to see if they had any questions for Thursday’s council meeting. I was only able to get in contact with council members Portman, Smith, and Adcock. None of them had any concerns or questions. As a result, the meeting with staff about the agenda went very quick. The conclusion was that the meeting would go quickly unless council members had a new problem with the budget. After the meeting I spoke briefly with the town manager on a variety of issues including transit.

Monday night the Holly Springs mayor, Dick Sears, and Joe Zonin of Carolina Brewery hosted all mayors, spouses, and town managers with a tour of the brewery. Mr. Zonin gave a history of the brewery and information about other breweries in the area. At the time Carolina Brewery started investigating whether or not to start a business in this area there were only two breweries in North Carolina. This type of business has increased drastically over the last few years in North Carolina and now there are a few new startups in the area. Mr. Zonin was a great host and a good time was had by all. BTW, in case you are wondering beer tasting was provided in addition to water and soft drinks. But as expected all in attendance behaved responsibly and truly just tasted.

Tuesday morning I briefly attended the State of Cary being held at Prestonwood Country Club and hosted by the Triangle Business Journal. I attempted to give a state of Cary update in two minutes which turned into about five. Even though I ran over I was still very rushed and I am sure my thoughts sounded a bit disjointed. Nevertheless, I did get major points across including how we are in great position to lead the region out of the recession. And I encouraged the businesses to work with the town and elected officials to partner in moving the town forward.

Wednesday I did a taping of Cary Matters with council member Adcock. The main topic was on the budget. There were also questions on noise, green initiatives, and potholes. The taping went smoothly and we were done in 37 minutes.

Thursday started with an interview by WRAL on Mayor Meeker’s comments about the Wake County School board’s policy direction. My understanding is that Mayor Meeker wants to form a group of local leaders to see if what is being done is legal and if not then he intends to file suit. In the interview I stated that I would rather not comment on what Meeker said without talking to him first. Then I was asked about my personal opinion. My response was that I can only speak as mayor and as mayor it is my responsibility to work with any school board that is elected. This includes the majority members and minority members. I have followed this policy since being elected in 2007. I meet and/or talk regularly with school board members. I feel that I have a strong relationship with several of the current school board members on both sides of the issues.

After the WRAL interview I met with representatives from the SV Temple. They recently had a complaint about noise and wanted to make sure I knew they complied. These people desperately want to be good neighbors and good citizens of the town. I am thankful they are here in Cary.

The council meeting followed and lasted only 55 minutes. The main topic was the budget and there was only one issue which was brought up by council member Frantz. He was opposed to the $348 million budget because there was a transportation cost increase for council members. The increase amounted to around $10 a month. While I respect his opinion, I do not believe this is a reason to vote against a budget which has the lowest tax rate in Wake County with the highest level of service.

Emails this week were mostly about abortion with most of them asking us to keep it in our health care plan. Other emails included a comment against shared sick leave and a comment against Mayor Meeker’s position against the school board.

Next week is 4^th of July week. Currently I have a couple of meetings scheduled and a ribbon cutting for the new Raleigh-Garner-Cary animal shelter.

Well that is all for this week. My next post will be on Sunday, July 4^th. Please feel free to email me with a comment.

This week consisted mostly of meetings, an interview, and a reception.

On Monday evening I was interviewed by the Cary Citizen. We talked for about an hour and a half. Our discussion covered anything and everything you can think of related to Cary. We probably could have easily talked for another hour and a half but fortunate for them I had another engagement to get to. I really loved the article. The Cary Citizen does a great job of fair and balanced writing. There was only one error/misspeak in the article. When I talked about green businesses I was praising our Gold LEED certified businesses in town. Those businesses are McDonalds on Kildaire and Siemens. Somehow the article says McDonalds and ABB instead of McDonalds and Siemens. While ABB was one of the new businesses that came to Cary last year along with Deutsche Bank, it is not in a Gold LEED certified building. Anyway, if you would like to read more the interview can be found at http://www.carycitizen.com/2010/06/15/profile-cary-mayor-harold-weinbrecht.

Tuesday I blocked any evening business with the town so that I could pick up my daughter who was coming home from Italy. She made it safe and sound on time even though her luggage didn’t. Fortunately, her luggage arrived a couple of days later.

Wednesday I attended a legislative reception hosted by the Greater Raleigh Chamber of Commerce. In attendance were most of the movers and shakers in the area. Most of the locale legislative delegation made an appearance along with local elected leaders from the various Wake County municipalities. In my talks with the legislators we mostly discussed the email list proposal being considered. Based on what I heard this may be voted on during the next week. If it passes the law will allow anyone to view the town’s email lists but the town wouldn’t be required to provide the list. This would be a big improvement. While at the reception I also talked with leaders from Fayetteville on the relationships between the county and municipalities. Before leaving I had discussions with several of the sponsors including Hospice of Wake County which recently opened a facility in Cary.

Thursday was the quarterly meeting of the Economic Development Governing Board. In case you are wondering who makes up that board it includes the mayor, town manager, a council member, and two members of the chamber. Information presented on unemployment showed that Cary’s unemployment rate through April was 6.2% (down from 6.5% in March) which shows we are still doing better than anyone else in the region. At the same time, a majority of more than 1100 Chief Financial Officers polled in a recent survey said their firms would not return to pre-recession levels of employment until 2012 at the earliest. So it looks like unemployment rates are going to remain about the same or slightly better over the next couple of years. Additional information on existing business and industry was also presented:

• John Deere is relocating its engineering center from Charlotte to Cary. It will move approximately 90 jobs to Cary.
• Sears Regional Routing call center has consolidated to Cary. This brings about 115 jobs averaging about $30,000 a year.
• Ply Gem, which relocated its headquarters to Cary in October 2007, have employed 58 people so far with jobs averaging $78,000.
• Garmin International is settling into Regency Park and has employed about 40 researchers and engineers so far.
• The new Siemens gold LEED facility will increase employees by 300 over the next few years that will bring their total employment to 1000.
• The Wake County Public Schools will move its main administrative offices to Cary’s Crossroads Corporate Park over the next year.

There were several new recruitment projects in progress which include:

• A telecommunications company with about 200 jobs that hopes to make a decision within the next month.
• A home health care provider from Pinehurst
• A law firm from Virginia
• A California firm looking to open a lab
• A 2^nd telecommunication company looking for office space

The business outlook still looks cautiously optimistic as we continue to experience a long slow recovery from this recession.

Thursday night I met privately with an individual who helps maintain my personal web page on which this blog is posted.

Saturday I attended the 10^th Anniversary of the Koka Booth amphitheater. There was a reception before the 7:30 concert that was attended by former mayor Booth, former town manager Coleman, Mr. Woolner who owns Regency, Mr. Wolters who is President of the Symphony, council members Portman and Adcock, town manager Shivar, and several others. We were treated with cupcakes and champagne  and I toasted the first ten years of the symphony and Booth amphitheater. At 7:30 I said a few words, read and presented a proclamation to the Symphony President David Wolters.

A biannual survey was held this year. Following the survey two focus groups gave their opinions about the results. Those results were provided to council members this week. There were several interesting facts that came out of the groups that included:

• The two groups were divided on whether or not the town should provide growth rates.
• Both groups named several traffic problem areas mostly on the western part of town and downtown.
• Both groups complained about potholes especially on Maynard and Kildaire Farm but neither realized those were state roads.
• Both groups felt Cary was presently doing a good job of living within its budget.
• Both groups supported adding more council members due to the growth in town.
• The groups made suggestions on communications including: improvements to Channel 11, representing all regions effectively, and creating an online suggestion box.

Emails this week included complaints about road safety, noise, excess development around Jordan Lake, abortion, and shared sick leave.

Next week will be busy for me with a mayor’s association outing, a two minute state of the town, a taping of Cary Matters, and a council meeting to approve the budget.

Well that is all for this week. My next post will be on Sunday, June 27^th. Please feel free to email me with a comment.

This week was a busy week with a budget work session, a council meeting, and high school graduations.

On Monday I met with staff, directors, and management about Thursday’s council agenda. Our estimation at this point in time was that the council meeting would be fairly short since the only item of contention seemed to be the special use application for a communications tower.

Tuesday I met with the finance directors and attorneys to sign bonds. Since the mayor has to sign all official documents there were a lot of bonds for me to sign. Nevertheless, the entire process only took 10 to 15 minutes.

Tuesday night was the second work session on the budget. Our first discussion centered on potholes. First a little background on the pothole situation in Cary. The town has received 95 complaints about potholes on Cary roads and has fixed all of them. There have been 334 complaints about potholes that are the responsibility of the NCDOT. Cary deemed that 13 were dangerous and fixed them. NCDOT has yet to repair these potholes. The budget question that I asked council was if we should consider repairing some of those potholes. The council wants NCDOT to fix their own potholes and is not interested in fixing them for NCDOT. My concern is that the number of potholes is having an effect on quality of life in Cary. Some of these state roads, like Maynard, are in very poor shape. The town will continue to ask NCDOT to fix these roads. If you want to know which of these roads are the responsibility of NCDOT you can go to http://209.42.194.57/CaryMap/ViewMap.aspx?ItemID=39&PortalID=1.

Our second discussion at the work session was on the operating margin. Council member Frantz and Portman expressed a concern about future revenue projections being lower than future expenditure projections. What is important to remember is that our revenue projections are extremely conservative. For example, this year we will receive an excess of over $4 million in revenues over the revenue projections. So the projections are somewhat misleading in that they are mostly a worse case scenario.

Next the council discussed the proposed downtown manager and whether or not this should be a town position or position associated with a private organization. The town manager expressed the need for coordination between planning and implementation with the manager. The town manager also expressed that with the substantial financial commitment, council should be able to control costs. One other point the town manager made was that the downtown manager should meet a goal of ten times his cost with generated tax base. So basically to have better control of the downtown manager the town manager believed it should be a town position. After his explanation the council agreed.

Our last budget discussion was on whether or not we should make a decision to take abortion out of the health care plan. There was no motion made on this topic. First let me say that I have strong personal beliefs on this issue. Having said that, I don’t believe it is a local government’s responsibility to question Supreme Court decisions regardless of how strong we feel about a decision. This particular coverage hasn’t cost Cary a penny in the last five years so it is a political and moral issue. And the Supreme Court has ruled that this is a legal medical issue. I think it is important for everyone to know how political this issue is. A local political party has performed polling and identify that 70% of voters oppose having this in the health care plan. The problem with this poll is that the implication is Cary is spending money on this which is not true for the last five years. So, this controversial issue is being used as an important political “wedge” that can help their candidates. Iit is clear to me that someone is using this for political gain which is unfortunate. The Cary council is better than that and is more professional than that. We should stick to issues that directly affect our citizens that we have authority to address, not question Supreme Court decisions.

On Wednesday we held our biweekly council meeting. We scheduled this council meeting on a Wednesday so that council members could attend high school graduations for local Cary High Schools. As predicted at the agenda meeting on Monday, the major focus of the council meeting was the special use hearing on the communications tower.

Thursday I attended two high school graduations on behalf of Cary. Green Hope High School was at 8 AM and Panther Creek was at 8 PM. Panther Creek was graduating the first class that went to Panther Creek all four years of high school.

Friday I attended the graduation of Cary High School. This is the oldest high school in Cary and has a lot of tradition. It was fun to watch the parents, teachers, and administration interact with each other. There is a strong bond between them at this school and you really feel it.

Saturday I attended a free health fair at the Morrisville Hindu Temple. This health fair is held once a year and approximately 60 doctors provide free medical services for anyone. The organizers expressed a desire to get the word out that this is open to the public not just to the Indian community. It is my hope that we can help them get the word out in the future.

Sunday I attended a fundraiser for County Commissioner candidate Steve Rao. The event was well attended and included Congressman Brad Miller, the Secretary of Treasurer Janet Cowell, Raleigh Mayor Charles Meeker, several state representatives and council members from Raleigh, Cary, and Morrisville. I have known Steve for years and believe he has a key ingredient that makes him a future great leader. And that is the desire to serve others.

There have been tons of email during the last two weeks including a request for a duck crossing sign, many requests for a screening wall at Cameron Pond, a request to put the guardrail between the sidewalk and road on Kildaire Farm Road, a complaint about the appearance of Waverly Place, several about a cell tower (which I couldn’t read because it was a quasi judicial matter), and information about our Cary Teen Council receiving a national award for service.

Next week looks a little lighter than this week and includes an interview, a legislative reception, and a meeting of the Economic Development Board.

Well that is all for this week. My next post will be on Sunday, June 20^th. Please feel free to email me with a comment.