I thought at first I’d simply stick with endorsing a few of the places we like to frequent but the change at both Open Eye and Driade has been so disappointing I went ahead and called them out by name.

I really like Driade’s location, it’s quite accessible via our backyard and the Bolin Creek trail. We used to meet fellow families there – sometimes gathering several dozen folks to sit out back with the kids as we bought several rounds of coffee.

We went there for many years – learning to tolerate the growing problems as its level of service and cleanliness declined.

Like I said in my post, there were still a couple baristas there who were friendly and efficient but the trend was set – it was more likely than not you would end up with surly service – grudgingly taking orders, acting as if they were doing us a “favor”.

The final straw happened several years ago when my son got an adulterated coffee milkshake (previously a family favorite). When he started to drink it he found a bunch of solid bits mixed in. My son and wife quickly discovered that one or more wooden stirrers had been ground up into the mix.

When my wife brought it to Driade’s snobarista’s attention his response was “Huh…wonder how it got there?”.

No apology. No offer to fix the problem. Instead he turned to the next customer, pointedly ignoring my wife.

That was it. They finally lost a family of customers (and their friends) who had been going there since it opened.

I just had a very rousing meeting with a local group committed to improving the Bolin Creek watershed. The issue is a bit tough as 7 or 8 distinct governmental agencies control that corridor’s future. There’s been a lot of back-n-forth in terms of policy but we decided that if we looked as hard as Fox, we would find that the truth is out there – somewhere.

http://koosn.tripod.com/e-beyond.html

As you know, the rotten economy has spurred demand – Orange County is creeping towards a 20% poverty rate, while the unemployed rate seems to have stabilized (I think folks have given up) we know there are many who are underemployed, the number of local families who are one paycheck away from ruin is way up. At the same time we’ve closed local clinics, put a crimp on parolee services, cutback community health outreach, etc. One dollar of that $1.6M I advocated for will do more to increase the capacity and improve the delivery of service to the growing local population of folks on the edge (or off) than it will within the school districts.

Just as State and Federal support wanes for critical services, prioritizing these services in the budget is critical. If we don’t start now to close the gap that has been widening over the last five years, then when?

Unlike OWASA, other utilities pass on the cost of upgrading their infrastructure at the time of need rather than all along as the machinery and equipment is depreciating/aging. Look at beach communities, like Beaufort, or locally, Pittsboro, if you want a good example. OWASA builds in the cost of maintenance with current service costs. So the people who are here now, using the services, are paying for the full cost of the utility which includes the water, the staff, the equipment, and the maintenance. If the towns (and the school system) would calculate maintenance into their operating budgets, we’d probably have fewer buildings, less equipment, and instead of having classrooms with mold, we’d have nice healthy environments for our children.

If you want a challenge, try to get the projected growth numbers from OWASA that are driving the need for this Jordan Lake allocation. You’ll learn that they “worked with town staff” to determine the demand at full build out 10-15 years ago, but I’ve never been able to get the details of what “full build out” means. When the towns decided to increase density by building up, did that change the projection numbers? Is that why we need to Jordan Lake back up allocation? The rock quarry was supposed to be sufficient to need our needs into 2050. On this issue, I miss Bill Strom. He would have opposed it.

Who was the single vote against the deal?

In addition to the wasted money and the ruined reputations of the two men, I’m afraid there will also be more fear on the part of employees to speak up when problems occur.

Throughout this whole process there has been an unhealthy undertow caused by an event which no one will describe and a person who remained nameless.

The Town was happy, it seems to me, to heap every misery in the PW department on this nameless one – which seems awfully convenient.

Having only looked at the operations of the Town from the outside, having only talked to a couple dozen staff members with serious complaints the last decade, my take is that there were and remain substantial structural issues within the organization tracing their lineage back to Cal Horton’s reign. Dumping it on one person just doesn’t jibe with what I know now.

I didn’t realize until several months afterwards that you no longer worked for the Town. I thought it was an amicable separation and you had moved on to greener pastures. Now I realize that something happened – do know what – and you lost your job because of it.

The way Town tried to skirt mentioning that incident (or incidents) only added to the festering feel of the current Bigelow/Clark mess.

What happened? Can you talk about it?