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.