Category Archives: Forsyth County

Recent Rain Fills Reservoirs and My Front Yard

Leave a reply

According to this story at WXII the rain over the past weekend combined with the snow has gone a long way to catching us up on our yearly rainfall totals.  Local reservoirs are approaching full which is a good thing.

Here on the home front the rain fall has exacerbated our septic issues.  To catch you up on what I'm talking about:
  • During the really rainy spell in December and January we notice a muddy patch in our lawn near the road that runs in front of our house.
  • Muddy patch occassionally smells a little funky. 
  • We get septic tank pumped and that seems to help. 
  • We notice that whenever it rains a lot we get the return of the funky smell.  
  • Three weeks later we notice that the patch is still there and call a septic repair guy who's the friend of a friend.  He recommends we have the county come out to look at it.
  • A very helpful representative from the Forsyth County health department comes last week and says that while our system isn't failing our septic lines are saturated.  Basically we don't have enough septic lines for the number of people living in our house.  That's actually good news compared to what we were worried about (total failure and system replacement). 
  • He lays out a plan for more lines in our yard (thankfully we have plenty of room) and pending a test showing that our soil percs well we will get a permit to put in those lines some time in the next five years (if the system was failing we'd have 30 days). 

So that brings us to this weekend.  I'd dug a hole about two feet deep and three feet in circumference to get to the lid of our septic tank so that the county guy could access it if he needed it.  I decided to leave the hole in case I needed to call the septic pump guy to empty our tank again.  Well, when we got the monsoon over the weekend that hole started to fill with water and I worried that a couple of bad things might happen: one, the concrete lid might start leaking some of the stuff inside the tank into the water in the hole, or two, that the water would freeze overnight and crack the lid.  So guess what?  Sunday after church I was the idiot bailing water out of a hole in the middle of massive rain showers and then filling it with mud.  I'd love to know what my neighbors were thinking when they drove past.

Here's where we stand now:  We're waiting for the permit from the county so that we can get the septic contractor out here to put in our new lines.  We're probably looking at a couple of weeks before everything is done, and in the interim our yard is saturated.  Luckily it's not sewage, it's just that the gray water has nowhere to go so it sits on top of the ground and provides us with the occassional whiff of putridity (Is that a word?).  It smells kind of like swamp.

While the good citizen in me realizes that we need the rain the selfish homeowner is hoping for a three week drought.

Free Pizza Downtown in One Hour! Oh, and BTW the Oral History Project is Coming to Winston-Salem

Leave a reply

WFDD is holding a press conference in about an hour to officially kick off the first day of the StoryCorps oral history project that will be in residence here in Winston-Salem until March 21st. If that doesn't excite you this might: Mellow Mushroom's providing free pizza at the kickoff.  From the press release:

88.5 WFDD, the National Public Radio affiliate licensed to Wake Forest University, will hold a press conference this Thursday, February 26th, at 11:30am, at Winston Square Park. The press conference will officially kick off opening day of the StoryCorps national oral history project, in residence in Winston-Salem until March 21st, 2009. While in Winston-Salem, StoryCorps will be collecting the stories of everyday residents of the Piedmont Triad and surrounding region. These stories will be archived at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, and some may be selected for broadcast on WFDD, as well as National Public Radio.

At 11:30am, Mayor Allen Joines will read a proclamation officially renaming North Marshall Street between Second and Fourth Streets "Honorary StoryCorps Boulevard" for the duration of StoryCorps's visit. Remarks from WFDD General Manager Denise Franklin and StoryCorps Site Supervisor Sara Esrick will follow. The first two interview pairs of the day will be present. H'tuyet Rahlan, a member of Greensboro's Montagnard community will be interviewed by her sponsor; and James Ballew, a well-known area piano tuner, will be interview by a long-time friend. The Mellow Mushroom will provide pizza for attendees.

StoryCorps's Airstream trailer, now a sound-proof recording booth, arrived in Winston-Salem last night. Parked in Winston Square Park, near Winston-Salem's iconic Sawtooth Building, it makes for a striking visual. 88.5 WFDD is proud to partner with StoryCorps to bring the mobile recording booth to the community. It is an honor for our area to be selected as a stop on the national tour.


If You Could Describe Forsyth County in One Word

3 Replies

Yesterday I attended the first session of Visit Winston-Salem's community brainstorming project.  Basically they're looking for input for their 2009-2010 marketing plan and they've opened it up to the entire community and are hosting four separate sessions (info here).  

As part of the meeting they asked everyone in the room to use one word that would describe how they feel about Winston-Salem and Forsyth County.  I thought most of the words offered were good representations of our fair county, but I couldn't really come up with a word that would best describe how I feel about Forsyth.  Okay, I'll be honest.  I did have a word pop into my head but I didn't share it because I thought it might be taken as a negative.  However in my mind it's very much a positive.  Having escaped the hustle and bustle of Northern Virginia I love that our county is…

sleepy.

Okay, your turn. If you could describe Forsyth County in one word what would it be?

Dying Anonymously

8 Replies

Yesterday I received a text message from one of my kids that said a girl from her freshman class had died the night before.  She didn't provide details so I replied and asked if she knew the girl.  She replied in the affirmative.  I then asked if they'd been told what had happened and she texted back that they hadn't.  All she knew was that during morning announcements the principal had said that this girl had died the night before.  She also said that one of her teachers had read an email from the principal that had provided a little more detail.  My last question was to ask if the school had provided any counselors for kids to talk to if they needed it and she said that she hadn't heard of any.  My son who also goes to school there said he assumed they had because they usually do, but he hadn't heard of anyone going to see a counselor or an announcement that counselors were available.

Later in the day I went to get my hair cut and while there the barbers told me that the girl had lived right across the street from their shop and that she'd had a tough life.  She didn't know her father and her mother had moved north without her or her brother and left them to live with the girl's grandparents.  Her great-grandparents lived next door and apparently they were all pretty close.  A while back both great-grandparents passed away on the same night and not long after that her grandfather died.  Her mother moved back home for a year but then left again to return north, again without her and her brother.  Despite all that they said she seemed to be a really happy kid, always with a smile on her face. 

All of this has been running through my head over the last 24 hours.  What's troubling to me is that when we lose one of our students under tragic circumstances like a freak accident on the football field or a car full of students killed by a drunk driver, we tend to pay a lot of attention and go to a lot of effort to honor those students' memories. That's as it should be. On the other hand when a student dies in quiet solitude we don't seem to react the same way.  If we speak of the child at all we do so in hushed whispers.  We don't come together as a community to celebrate that person's life or to acknowledge the impact of their loss on our community.  I think that's a shame and I think it robs our children of the opportunity to deal with the impact of losing one of their peers.  

Sadly a young member of our community died two days ago and very few of us know what we've lost.

Sen. Burr Nominates Mt. Tabor Student for Naval Academy

Leave a reply

Sen. Burr's press office sent out notice of his military academy nominations and two were from the Winston-Salem area, including Mt. Tabor student Jennifer Penley of Pfafftown.  Sen. Burr nominated her for the U.S. Naval Academy.  Congratulations to Jennifer, and best wishes to her especially as she gets ready to head to plebe summer.  Any kid willing to give up the half of their last summer before college and to knowingly go into the grueling atmosphere of the Naval Academy deserves our respect, big time.

One of the craziest guys I knew in high school, Andrew Heino, went to the Naval Academy and the last time I saw him at a party during our college years, he said that getting through that summer was one of the hardest things he'd ever done.  He also said his whole first year was no picnic.  I haven't seen him since then, but every once in a while I'll catch word of him.  In February, 2007 he was interviewed on CNN's Accent Health show about some of his men doing yoga and at that time he was a Lt. Colonel in the Marines.  That comes as absolutely no surprise to me.  

Heino was the guy who got me through an open water test for our SCUBA class in freezing water in a quarry in West Virginia.  On that dive the visibility was about one foot and the water was literally freezing and when we got down to the dive platform (I think it was at about 50 feet) the guy next to me went into shock and the dive instructor had to do an emergency ascent with him.  There was another instructor around but we couldn't see him and I was ready to head up, but Andrew grabbed me and signalled to sit tight.  We did and eventually the instructor came back and we finished our test.  That's the kind of guy Heino was.  Also, he could recite every line of Apocalypse Now verbatim from memory, and I guess that says something too. Heck, the fact that he talked me into taking a SCUBA class says a whole lot about him.

Furloughs at Journal Now Official

Leave a reply

Media General, parent company of the Winston-Salem Journal, announced today that they're requiring their employees to take ten days of unpaid leave.  Employees have to take four days by the end of March and three days each in the two subsequent fiscal quarters. I guess if you look at the glass as half full at least these folks are keeping their jobs.  For now.

Any suggestions for what these folks should do with their involuntary, unpaid "vacation"?  BTW, I've used quotes around the word vacation ever since my wife returned to work from maternity leave and received a heap of abuse from her boss who said she should be well rested from her "vacation".  In all seriousness I have some friends that work at the Journal and this stinks for them, but I am glad to know that they still have their jobs. 

2 for 1 at Carolina Kia

Leave a reply

If you live in the Triad you've probably seen the Caaaaar-o-lina Kia commercials.  Well, according to Ben they're running a commercial offering a 2-for-1 deal; if you buy a Sorrento or Sedona you'll get a Rio for free except for taxes and tags.  As Ben mentions there's nothing about it on their website, so I can't point to details, but if you're in the market for a car you might want to make your way to High Point to give them a look-see.  

You Know Times Are Tough When…

2 Replies

You know things are tough when even government jobs aren't safe.  Growing up in DC the conventional wisdom was that if you wanted to make real money you worked in the private sector, but if you wanted stability you went to work for the government.  The joke was you'd have to die to lose your job.

Reading about the county commissioners' meeting in this morning's paper was just a tad depressing.  The commissioners were told that they were facing a shortfall in next year's budget unless taxes were raised or expenses were cut.  They said that if the cuts came from job cuts alone it would mean cutting 226 jobs, and commissioner Walter Marshall actually asked how those job cuts would affect citizens.  Well, I know what the effect would be on at least a couple of hundred taxpayers.

Commissioner Dave Plyler also asked how much money the county would save if they forced county employees to take 14 days of unpaid leave during the year.  I'm sure the county and school employees were just overjoyed to hear that question, but I'd think that they'd prefer that to the possibility of losing their jobs or of seeing their coworkers lose their jobs.

There's another old joke from my days in DC.  During snowstorms the federal government would make announcements that they were closed except for "essential personnel" and we'd always ask "If someone isn't essential then why do they have the job in the first place?"  Well, I guess we're about to find out exactly which jobs are essential.

Forsyth County Property Revaluation: Whether Now or Later We’re Going to Get Hosed

2 Replies

I have a prediction: there's going to be an absolute crap-storm when Forsyth County does its property tax revaluations, whether it's this week or in two months.  The county commissioners heard last night from the fellow in charge of doing the revaluations and he told them that he'd heard from an expert that because they'd already announced the revaluation schedule there was nothing in the state's statutes that allows them to delay the revaluation.  After reading that my first question was, "Is there something in the statutes that disallows them from delaying the revaluation?"  But after mulling about it a moment more my second thought was, "Even if they delay it six more months will it make that big of a difference?"

Here's my rationale.  They did a good thing by waiting for all the 2008 data to be in before doing the revaluation because the real estate market tanked in the last part of the year.  That said, from what I've read they only use sales data to determine the property value which means that there's no way to capture the actual loss in the value of our property.  In other words if the houses in my neighborhoods can't sell, and I mean literally can't because there are no buyers out there, and the most recent sales occured earlier in the year how is the assessor going to see that houses that sold for $250,000 last March would only fetch $215,000 this March?  Also, as I argued in an earlier post, if they take the average of the sales over the last four years, and there were hundreds of sales at the higher prices from 2005 through 2007, but only a handful at the lower 2008 price then the prices will be skewed higher.

All this leads me to the following: the revaluations do a better job of capturing an increase in property value because increased prices generally occur in a hot market with lots of sales.  As more sales occur the prices rise and they push the valuations up.  But when a market cools prices might fall but they aren't reflected in the valuations because no one can sell their houses thus the losses in value are hidden.  I might be able to claim that the realistic market price for my house is only a certain amount, but since there's no empirical sales data showing that houses in my neighborhood would sell for that, because there are very few or no sales, then as far as the assessor is concerned my property value is frozen at the higher rate.  My valuation may not have gone up any more from its high, but it almost certainly hasn't gone down to the true market price.

That's why it doesn't really matter if the revaluation comes this month or in July. For all intents and purposes our property values are frozen at an artificially high amount.  If the commissioners really wanted to be fair they'd talk about lowering the tax rate, but since they're staring budget deficits in the face there's a better chance of me becoming Pope than that happening.  Another thought: why not do the revaluations every year?  That way you can adjust to any rapid rise or fall in property rates and set taxes on current market values.  I think residents would prefer either of those proposals to the current system.  I'm not saying they'd like it, they'd just hate it less. 

School Board: Dump the Sheriff and Get On the Gang Net

Leave a reply

Recent actions by the Winston-Salem Forsyth County Schools has caused me some concern and prompted me to ask a couple of questions.  First came word that they want to put the school resource officer contract up for bid, effectively putting the sheriff's office on notice that a renewal of the current contract isn't a given. Actually there isn't even a contract at this point, so let's call it an agreement. Then in last night's meeting when they set the legislative agenda the schools' attorney said that they are talking to state Rep. Dale Folwell about introducing legislation to allow the school system to access the state law enforcement agencies' gang database known as Gang Net.  They want to be able to see if students are listed.

So here are my questions:
  • Have the schools taken into account the relationships that the school resource officers have developed with the staff and students at the various schools?  I understand that there are budgetary issues, but I hope that they take those relationships into account when they evaluate the proposals.  The SROs have literally spent years getting to know the schools they work in and just as a police officer who knows a neighborhood is considered more effective than an officer who parachutes in, I suspect that SROs who know their schools are more effective than someone fresh off the street.  I'm not saying that a different department or a private contractor couldn't build up similar relationships over time, but I am saying that I think the school system should keep that in mind as they evaluate bids. 
  • Speaking of private contractors, what are the odds that Blackwater will bid on this contract? 
  • About the Gang Net thing: I thought juvenile records were sealed. If so how can law enforcement agencies open those records to the schools even if there's a state law passed?  I absolutely understand the desire to know if gang members are in the schools, but I just don't know how the database can be opened to agencies outside of law enforcement and still protect the minors' identities.  I'm not trying to be obtuse, I'm just trying to understand.