If you’ve been on a CAT bus lately, someone with a clipboard might have asked where you’re going or how you think the bus system could be improved. Chances are, though, that you haven’t been on a bus. Ridership on the CAT–Capital Area Transit –is just 8,000 trips even on weekdays, and since that double-counts […]
Bob Geary
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Downtown: “A Lot of Good Things Happening”
The decision’s been made to tear out the Fayetteville Mall. A TTA commuter rail station is on the drawing board just to the west. Progress Energy is conjuring tall buildings–at least two, maybe more–to the east. The business crowd still wants a new convention center–they’ve been nursing their wounds since that referendum they lost to […]
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Does Meeker Matter?
The Sept. 17 meeting of the Raleigh City Council was a pretty good window into Mayor Charles Meeker’s first year in office. For example: Meeker spoke up for an aggrieved neighborhood group in a development case of no special importance except, of course, to the neighbors. He got voted down 7-1 by his council colleagues.
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A Textbook Lesson in Cynical Politics
For the young people aspiring to high office one day, U.S. Senate candidates Elizabeth Dole and Erskine Bowles offered textbook lessons last week on a skill needed by the modern campaigner: Having it both ways. Dole went first. No sooner had she declared victory in the Republican primary than she was challenging Bowles, the Democratic […]
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Look, Up in the Sky, It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s … COUGH
Hard to believe it’s still an issue, in the year 2002, whether cropdusters should be allowed to spray pesticides on your house. But there we were on Sunday, 50 of us in the tiny Mt. View AME Zion Church in Chatham County, recalling the “white rain” that came down on people in the Gorgas community […]
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Trotline
Solidarity Forever North Carolina’s antipathy to unions is well-known (e.g., the lowest rate of union membership in the country), and nowhere is that more evident than in public employment. Most states ban strikes by public employees, but state law here goes farther, banning collective bargaining itself–or any contract, for that matter, between a government agency […]
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Trotline
The Meeker File: Checks for Charles From Developers There’s been another, um, “modification” in Raleigh Mayor Charles Meeker’s campaign fundraising standards. He now takes money from developers.This unfortunate news came to our attention recently in the form of an invitation to join various “hosts” at a reception for the mayor. Price tag: $250 per. Among […]
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Trotline
In Nunn We Trust, But Munford Pays Cash In their race to replace retiring Republican Rep. Art Pope, R-Wake, in state House District 34, leading GOP candidates Al Nunn and R. Donavon (Don) Munford Jr. have staked competing claims to be the true conservative. Nunn, we see from his TV ads, is the man you […]
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A vanishing breed
The Lightner Funeral Home stands like a watchtower astride the spot in downtown Raleigh where Western Boulevard becomes Martin Luther King Boulevard. It symbolizes the place of Clarence Lightner in the city’s history: He was its only black mayor, serving just one two-year term in 1973-75, but he was at the center of Raleigh’s largely […]
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Exploris Under Fire
The two people who created Exploris are civic heroes. Gordon Smith and Anne Bryan shared a vision and for 15 years they fought to make it real: The museum about the world that opened in downtown Raleigh, to enormous hoopla, in the fall of 1999. Just two-plus years later, though, the heroes are under attack–and […]
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