Monthly Archives: February 2010

Planning Board Meetings Could Get a Lot More Interesting

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This post at the NC Legal Landscapes blog has me thinking that when development starts to pick up again we could be in for some far more interesting planning board meetings. (Granted I might be dead and buried by the time development starts to kick into gear, but that's another story).  An excerpt:

When the economy returns, when developers begin to develop and builders begin to build, local governments will wake up to fair housing legislation passed last August.  The bill created legislative handcuffs that will affect affordable housing zoning and land use decisions in interesting ways, and you won’t need to see Paul Revere’s lanterns hanging in the church belfry to tell you that the lawsuits are coming…

Under G.S. 41A-5(a)(3), a local government will be found to have intended discrimination against affordable housing if “the government was motivated in full, or in any part at all, by the fact that the development contains affordable housing units . . .”

If I were a city or county attorney advising my board, that language would make me nervous.

The way the author, Tom Terrell, goes on to explain the situation it seems to me that planning boards and other land use governmental bodies will need to be very concerned about how they discuss a project.  In essence if the governmental body denies a zoning for a project for any legitimate reason like, say, density yet any one board member even appears to dislike the project simply because the project contains an affordable housing component, even if it's a small part of the project, then the developer can sue the board for discrimination.  Simply put the implied bias of one member on a nine member board, even a board that voted unanimously, that votes down a project that is even 10% affordable housing could be sued, probably successfully, for discrimination even if the discrimination had no real impact on the decision.

Yep, it's a safe bet that members of the boards and commissions will be much more circumspect during their debates.  If they're not I imagine there are going to be quite a few attorneys either hitting the bottle or looking for another line of practice.  Divorces probably look mundane by comparison.

One Opinion Column You Can Be Pretty Sure Won’t Be Picked Up by the Local Papers

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The Washington Post has a new opinion column called The Spirited Atheist (h/t to Ed Cone for the link).  I'm thinking it won't be picked up by the Journal, News & Record or any other local paper here in the Piedmont Triad, although if they really want to gin up some angry "Letters to the Editor" they should give it a go.

Radio Talk Show Host to Run Against Foxx

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From a press release received this afternoon:

Billy Kennedy, a Watauga County talk radio host and community leader, will formally announce his candidacy on February 8 for the U.S. House of Representatives, 5th District of North Carolina. The “Billy Kennedy Caravan” will stretch from Boone to Raleigh that day, with stops in Wilkesboro and Winston-Salem…

Billy Kennedy is a well known Friday morning personality on WATA-AM 1450 “High Country Radio,” where he has co-hosted “Watauga Talks” for several years. Kennedy has turned the “Watauga Talks” spotlight onto the work of non-profits, charitable organizations and community-building efforts. He regularly interviews both elected officials and candidates running for office. Kennedy is known for his willingness to confront tough issues and ask hard questions… 

Kennedy believes Washington is out of touch with working peoples’ lives and values. “My father always taught me to stand up for what was right and fair,” says Kennedy. “I see very little of what is right and fair on either side of the aisle in Washington.”

Here's his website: http://www.billykennedyforcongress.com/

About That Census Data

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You know how we read articles about the results of studies and carrying headlines like "In 2020 Number of Octogenarian Turtle Farmers Will Outnumber Septuagenarian Muskrat Herders."  Many of those studies use data sub-sets of the US Census that are made publicly available by the US Census Bureau for exactly that purpose.  The problem is that those data sub-sets have some glaring errors:. 

The errors are documented in a stunningly straightforward manner. The authors compare the official census count (based on the tallying up of all Census forms) with their own calculations, based on the sub-sample released for researchers (the “public use micro sample,” available through IPUMS). If all is well, then the authors’ estimates should be very close to 100% of the official population count. But they aren’t...

These microdata have been used in literally thousands of studies and countless policy discussions. While the findings of many of these studies aren’t much affected by these problems, in some cases, important errors have been introduced. The biggest problems probably exist for research focusing on seniors. Yes, this means that many of those studies of important policy issues—retirement, social security, elder care, disability, and medicare—will need to be revisited.

It's kind of hard to make good policy decisions if they're based on inaccurate information.  Still, no one is disputing the accuracy of the census itself which is important to remember as we gear up for the 2010 count.  Hopefully The Census Bureau will be diligent in making sure that the data sub-sets that are generated from the new count are far more accurate than the 2000 versions.  

Priorities

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One thing that truly gets my goat is the debate over taxes.  For too long our leaders have engaged in a simplistic, name-calling exchange in which supporters of lower taxes get labeled as mean-spirited robber barons looking out for the rich and those in favor of higher taxes on more government services get labeled as the expletive du jour, socialists.  It's overly simplistic and it doesn't get to the heart of the matter, which is that we will always have to pay some taxes because we will always need the government to provide some services.  The rub is that we need to agree on which services the government provides and then somehow create a tax structure that will fund those services.

Unfortunately our leaders have been totally negligent in, well, leading us in the essential debate on the role of government.  It's easy to blame one side or the other, but in the end it's a two way street and all of our leaders are responsible, as are we for not calling "BS" on them a long time ago.  

I bring this up today because of a couple of news items that Ed Cone pointed to.  One is about Greensboro's budget gap, and the other is about the drastic service cuts that "tax averse" Colorado Springs is having to make. From the second article:

More than a third of the streetlights in Colorado Springs will go dark Monday. The police helicopters are for sale on the Internet. The city is dumping firefighting jobs, a vice team, burglary investigators, beat cops — dozens of police and fire positions will go unfilled.

The parks department removed trash cans last week, replacing them with signs urging users to pack out their own litter.

Neighbors are encouraged to bring their own lawn mowers to local green spaces, because parks workers will mow them only once every two weeks. If that.

Water cutbacks mean most parks will be dead, brown turf by July; the flower and fertilizer budget is zero.

City recreation centers, indoor and outdoor pools, and a handful of museums will close for good March 31 unless they find private funding to stay open. Buses no longer run on evenings and weekends. The city won't pay for any street paving, relying instead on a regional authority that can meet only about 10 percent of the need.

I don't know what the leaders of Colorado Springs have been saying about taxes and city spending over the last couple of years, but if that city is like the vast majority of the country the issue was framed as a choice between paying higher taxes so that "welfare mothers" could soak the system and lower taxes that would spur a dynamic business environment.  I'm simplifying, but hopefully I'm also making a point.  


For too long our leaders have failed to do the hard work of explaining the relationship between taxes and services.  I'm sure that if you asked the citizenry you could pretty quickly come up with a list of "must have" services like fire departments, police departments and public works departments.  The harder part is getting citizens to agree on what's more important; health clinics for the poor or one more park;  a new library or a homeless shelter; adding more lanes to the roads or starting a light rail system.  


That's where leadership comes in. Explain to us the consequences of choosing the library over of the homeless shelter, or if we choose both explain to us how that will affect our taxes.  We won't all agree on the priorities, but if we're engaged in a serious discussion and treated like the adults that we are, then maybe, just maybe, we'll re-elect you even when you make the unpopular but necessary decision to raise our taxes and give us a community to safely and happily live in.