This week was made up mostly of council and staff meetings. The one exception was the leadership dinner where former Governor Hunt was the emcee.

Monday started with the biweekly agenda meeting. The agenda was fairly bland so the main item of discussion was council member Robinson wanting to add something to the agenda after the post date. It is important for citizens to know that we post the agenda on Friday before a Thursday council meeting. After that point items may be added to the agenda at the council meeting when we adopt the agenda. To add it at the council meeting would require at least four votes. To get an item on the agenda before the post it on the web only requires two votes. So to honor council member Robinson’s request would have required us to violate our policy or to suspend our rules of procedure. I talked with council member Robinson about this and she agreed to put the item on at a later date. I believe this is good policy because it allows the citizens to have time to review the topics we will discuss and vote on. IMHO, to add something at the last minute has to be time critical. This was done by Mayor Pro-Tem Robison at the last meeting when she wanted to report on the $520 million grant from the federal government for high speed rail.

Monday night I attended the Leadership dinner for the two day Emerging Issues forum. It was a collection of  business leaders and politicians. I arrived at the social hour and wondered around looking for someone to talk to. Fortunately, I found Congressman Brad Miller and we struck up a conversation for about twenty minutes. We talked about several issues including the economy and his upcoming election. He is a great guy and I love talking with him and working with him on issues. I will be visiting him and other congressman and senators in Washington in a couple of weeks. After talking with Congressman Miller I found an old tennis buddy and we talked for a while. Then I mingled around and talked with people from Blue Cross and Blue Shield. At that point we were shuffled in to the dining area and I asked if I could join them at their table. I had a great conversation with the gentleman beside me, Bob Greczyn, who just retired from being the CEO. Mr. Greczyn lives in Cary and is a big fan of NASCAR.

Emceeing the Leadership dinner was former Governor Hunt. He really hasn’t changed much over the years and seemed as energetic as he had in the past. He recognized sponsors and then introduced the featured speaker Dr. Goodnight from SAS. Dr. Goodnight’s talk focused on education. He believes that this country is not producing enough science and math students and eventually we will become a service country and other countries will take the technological lead. He mentioned how test scores improved for middle school students in Wilson County once all of them received a laptop. In case you don’t know, he and his wife Ann have been huge advocates for education for years. God Bless them. At the end of Dr. Goodnight’s talk he answered questions. It was interesting that he refused to answer one question because he said it was a social issue. Governor Hunt then jumped in and answered it. Very entertaining. It was a good talk and I believe everyone enjoyed it.

Tuesday we held a work session on transit. We had five different presentations: Pat Simmons from NCDOT Rail talked about high speed rail and regional rail, Joe Durham and Tim Maloney from Wake County talked about county governance of transit, David King from TTA talked about transit, and Ed Johnson from CAMPO talked about their involvement as a metropolitan organization. All of these folks represent groups from different aspects of rail. It is important to know that high speed rail, regional rail, and local transit will all be using the same tracks and will all have to coordinate and work together.  It was estimated that Cary won’t see transit for at least a decade even if a ½ cents sales tax was passed to pay for it. An important point made by Mr. Simmons was that for areas to be economically successful in the future they will have to include rail.

Thursday’s council meeting was uneventful and the issues were not controversial. That leads to short meetings. We actually spent more time in closed session than we did in open session.

Friday I had my quarterly dinner meeting with Mayor Pro-Tem Robison. We talked about a dozen issues and finally stopped when it started snowing heavily (we wanted to make sure we both got home safely). It is important to know that Ms. Robison attends almost all mayor meetings during the 9 to 5 hours. So when we get together she spends a lot of time filling me in on the details that I have missed. She does a wonderful job representing the town and has actually taken leadership roles in some of the statewide committees.

Emails this week included taking abortion off our healthcare plan, getting the town involved in the Google fiber program, and compliments to staff for addressing safety issues.

One pressing issue after another round of snow is potholes. There are two problems we are facing. One is that a lot of the roads are the responsibility of the state. The other is that asphalt plants are closed until there is warmer weather. That leaves the only option of filling potholes with “cold patch” which is, for the most part, temporary. Of course when you apply a temporary fix then that cost more. Right now we are focusing on major potholes no matter which government agency they belong to. Hopefully, we will have all the major ones filled very soon.

Well that is all for this week. I plan to next post on Sunday, February 21^st. Please feel free to leave a comment on my post.