Category Archives: Government

Local Government

Government, Ruminations, Technology

That old family jalopy…

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We’re probably going to replace one of our vehicles in the near future. Hybrid or bio-diesel?

My brother has a Honda he gets great mileage out of… Toyota has the new Camry (a car I can comfortably sit in) and the established Prius. Consumer Reports, among others, have published reports showing that the advertised MPGs don’t always add up to a substantial savings.

Xan, over at FORTH GO, reports on his Prius experience, including mileage, covering the first 8 months of Prius ownership.

Thanks for the field report Xan.

CivilLiberties, Government, Ruminations, Technology

Fiber is Future Proof

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[ UPDATE: ]

One of the best forums I’ve attended in the last 6 years!

Kudos to Laurin for organizing the program, Casey, Lynda, Ray, Chad and Shannon! They all did fantastic presentations covering a broad range of muni-networking issues – NPO-model, governmental operational efficiencies, collaboration, school and community usage, etc.
[ Original Post: ]

The municipal networking forum has kicked off.

Casey Lide, of Baller Herbst , has started out with a broad overview of business models, technologies and reasons for municipal networking.

Casey brings up the “holy grail” of FTTH (fibre-to-the-home). It’s capital intensive, but as he says, “Fibre is future proof.”

Amen!

Plenty of room and plenty of time if you want to come down….

CivilLiberties, Government, Technology

Utility Commission on the ball…

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Kudos to the folks running our NC Utilities Commission!

When the USA Today story fingering Bellsouth’s complicity in the NSA scandal broke I called our North Carolina Utilities Commission to lodge a complaint. The receptionist told me a “consumer specialist” would call within the hour to get details about my case. “Sure,” I said, pretty much expecting I’d have to call back over several days to reach the right person – that’s what we’ve grown to expect from all levels of government, right?

Within the hour, I got that call. The gentleman was direct, knowledgeable and filed the complaint without hesitation. He also said he’d follow up with any developments.

Today he did.

The case has been forwarded to the FCC, which is acting as a clearinghouse for a number of states. In addition, my case will continue at the State level until resolved by the FCC investigation.

This level of competence and service by the Utility Commission folks gives me confidence that they’ll be able to handle any fastballs the communications monopolists throw Chapel Hill’s way as the community forges ahead on the municipal network project.

Government, Technology

Technology Board: Raymond, Party of One.

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Town IT lead Bob Avery and I constituted the sole attendance at tonight’s Technology Board swan song.

During the recently well-attended dissolution of the Horace-William’s Committee, the committee members wrangled out some excellent final advisory language for Council.

Tonight, the tech board was supposed to discuss and pass on 8 final recommendations/observations to Council. Most folks had already expressed their concerns about the “lame duckness” of our final efforts, but I thought we had a consensus on, as one member put it, “a way to wrap up things nice and neat.”

Maybe, as some suggested, it wasn’t worth the effort to advise, one last time, a Council that has generally failed to follow through on our recommendations they approved.

Maybe our Mayor’s recent dismissal of the importance of technology in the new town manager selection process doused the membership’s spirits.

Maybe it was just “board fatigue”.

While I don’t have a quorum to endorse those final thoughts, I’ll present them here for completeness when I get a copy.

CivilLiberties, Government, Ruminations, Technology

Bellsouth Back from the Abyss? Denies USA Today’s NSA Charges.

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Bellsouth denies USA Today charge, claims no sharing of records.

According to CNN and other news sources, Bellsouth denies USA Today’s claim that it participated in the massive NSA privacy breach.

In several reports, Bellsouth spokesman Jeff Battcher claims

Battcher said BellSouth’s customer service department had received only 26 complaints about reports that private phone records may have been relayed to the government.

26 sounds quite low, especially since I know 5 folk, including myself, that called when the story broke.

CivilLiberties, Government, LocalPolitics, Ruminations, Technology

Bellsouth’s Billion Dollar Mistake

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[ UPDATE: ] Bellsouth denies USA Today charge, claims no sharing of records.

According to CNN and other news sources, Bellsouth denies USA Today’s claim that it participated in the massive NSA privacy breach.

In several reports, Bellsouth spokesman Jeff Battcher claims

Battcher said BellSouth’s customer service department had received only 26 complaints about reports that private phone records may have been relayed to the government.

26 sounds quite low, especially since I know 5 folk, including myself, that called when the story broke.

Verizon and ATT are still on the hook.
Continue reading Bellsouth’s Billion Dollar Mistake →

CivilLiberties, Government, Ruminations

Punish the Peeping Toms

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If you’re concerned about the widespread domestic surveillance telephone companies, like Bellsouth, have performed on innocent Americans for the last five years, please contact the following folk:

These companies violated not only their published privacy policies and federal statutes but are complicit in one the largest violations of our Constitutional rights in our history.

[ UPDATE #2: ] Bellsouth denies USA Today charge, claims no sharing of records.

According to CNN and other news sources, Bellsouth denies USA Today’s claim that it participated in the massive NSA privacy breach.

In several reports, Bellsouth spokesman Jeff Battcher claims

Battcher said BellSouth’s customer service department had received only 26 complaints about reports that private phone records may have been relayed to the government.

26 sounds quite low, especially since I know 5 folk, including myself, that called when the story broke.

Verizon and ATT are still on the hook.[ UPDATE: ]

Call 404-249-2000, Bellsouth’s CEO Duane Ackerman’s office. Report Bellsouth’s violations of both their own corporate integrity, privacy and ethics policies AND their FCC regulatory and legal requirement to safeguard customer records.

CivilLiberties, Government, Ruminations, Technology

Can you hear me now, NSA? Not if you’re the Justice Department.

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From CNN and the AP via AudioActivism and Daily Wireless.

X-posted from Brian Russel’s AudioActivism

Domestic spying inquiry killed

AP is reporting that the US Department of Justice has stopped its investigation of the warrantless phone spying done by the NSA at the approval of George Bush.

“We have been unable to make any meaningful progress in our investigation because OPR [Office of Professional Responsibility] has been denied security clearances for access to information about the NSA program,” OPR counsel H. Marshall Jarrett wrote to Hinchey. Hinchey’s office shared the letter with The Associated Press.

We can’t depend on our Federal government’s law enforcers to corral Constitutional abuses.

Continue reading Can you hear me now, NSA? Not if you’re the Justice Department. →

Government, Ruminations

Whining at the cows…

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I wanted to add the following to the HWCC’s final memorandum to Council.

We remind the Council of the scope of work proposed by the HWCC in January and suggest that the Council recognize the necessary lead time required to reconstitute a citizen’s group to explore the issues in that proposal.

The decision-making apparatus of the Town is already becoming more insular. If Council has to recreate, rapidly, a citizen’s committee to evaluate Carolina North, it seems to me they’ll choose from a small pool of the “usual suspects”.

CivilLiberties, Government, LocalPolitics, Ruminations

North Carolina Justice: Law & Order or CSI?

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[ UPDATE: ] Via WRAL-TV, the NC Supreme Court has issued a stay pending DNA tests in the case.

May 12th, the State of North Carolina is poised to practice justice Law & Order style.

Law & Order, a popular television franchise using stories “ripped from today’s headlines”, combines 22 minutes of heavy-handed police work (suspects slammed against walls) with 22 minutes of legal maneuvering (often crossing Constitutional boundaries) to deliver, usually in some surprising twist, a satisfying dramatic conclusion.

As the screen fades to black, the audience is assured that justice, as practiced by the over zealous police and prosecution, has been fairly meted out.

Surpassing Law & Order in popularity, CSI, a franchise about criminal scene investigators, follows chief investigator Gil Grissom and his crack forensic team as they use real, but not readily available, technology and techniques to ferret out the truth behind a crime. Quite often, what seems to be the truth is revealed to be wrong. The show’s writers often proffer an initial red-herring suspect – vociferously declaring his or her innocence – whose claims are vindicated in an equally satisfying dramatic conclusion.

Justice, often meted out on the end of a DNA probe, is not perverted by zealous prosecutorial misconduct.

Jerry Conner, a death row inmate,is scheduled to die May 12th in spite of the real possibility of his innocence.

Exculpatory DNA evidence – evidence not conclusive using the original 1991 DNA technology – is available to be tested. It will definitively rule, one way or another, on Conner’s claims.

Our State Bureau of Investigation’s lab, like the lab in CSI, has the new DNA technology. Yet the State, on our behalf, refuses to test the evidence.

I don’t know if Conner is guilty or not.

  • He originally confessed, but 1 out of 4 persons exonerated by DNA evidence have also confessed.
  • He’s on death row, but in the last 23 years 25 states have released 123 death row inmates on grounds of innocence.
  • He had a juror that lied about her knowledge of the case, but two of three U.S 4th Circuit Court of Appeals judges ruled against Conner, to the strong dissension of the third, Judge Michael Luttig, who wrote that the behavior of the juror clearly “constitute[d] a quintessential instance of actual juror bias.”

I know this.

  • I know it took less than a week to test 46 Duke lacrosse players DNA in a recent Durham rape case.
  • I know the Federal government has pledged $1 billion to assist DNA evaluations, leading to post-conviction exonerations like that of Kirk Bloodsworth.
  • I know we only have to look slightly westward, to Winston-Salem’s Darryl Hunt case, to see how an individual, 18 years proclaiming his innocence, was wrongly convicted but eventually exonerated because of DNA evidence.

There’s a reason CSI is so popular. Folks, like the good citizens of North Carolina, want to bring every technique and technology to bear in order to prove innocence.

Let’s call on our State to stand firm for real justice and demand a DNA test before killing a potentially innocent man.

Contact Governor Easley
Contact Attorney General Roy Cooper
Contact Your North Carolina Legislators

More on what you can do to help at the Jerry Conner ‘blog.

Government, Ruminations

More than a nickel…

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From today’s eventually-to-be-paywalled HeraldSun

The town of Chapel Hill figures it spent about $134,700 on hosting this year’s Apple Chill street fair and handling events both during and after the official hours of the festival.

That total includes about $85,700 in costs for police, although Town Manager Cal Horton said the figure for police costs still could change.

That’s a chunk of change.

Surely we can “recover” some the arts events that have slipped Carrboro-way with an investment of just $65K?

Government, LocalPolitics, Ruminations

Shell Game? Transfer Development Rights

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[UPDATE:] Some good coverage of the initial steps towards TDRs in today’s soon-to-be-paywalled HeraldSun.

6:30pm Tuesday, May 9th, Battle Courtroom on Margaret Lane, Hillsborough, NC

The county is starting a dialogue on a transfer of development rights program (TDR) for Orange County.

Last year, the county recruited local citizens to the TDR taskforce. The membership is comprised of a who’s who of folk interested in local development.

Overly touted by some, the program essentially trades your right to develop one piece of property (say your farm) for the right to (over?) develop another.

The real estate industry has prepared a summary that covers TDRs fairly well from their perspective.

Locally, Nick Tennyson,executive vice president for the Home Builders Association of Durham, Orange and Chatham Counties weighed in observing “TDR is a concept that in the abstract people find interesting, but when you really start working on where it’s going to apply, it has fizzled many times in the past.” (via today’s HeraldSun).

Though troubled a bit by the eminent domain issues around TDRs, I’m interested in the concept as a potentially valuable planning and zoning tool.

Tonight Orange County will present their first pass analysis of using TDRs – I look forward to seeing the proposal.

Government, LocalPolitics, Ruminations, Technology

NextBus – The Proposal

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I’ve been reading through the town’s Request for Proposal (RFP) for our new Real-Time Passenger Information System and Automatic Vehicle Location system for Chapel Hill Transit.

There’s some interesting goofs (missing section 3.B.6) and specifications (Microsoft ODBC) in a document which appears to be a cut-n-paste of Triangle Transit, Federal and local requirements.

From the RFP we see

The System shall undergo functional testing onsite in a test environment for a minimum of 2 weeks prior to May 1, 2006. Confidence testing shall occur during production use of the System between May 1, 2006 and June 15, 2006. Every route must be assigned an equipped vehicle and data collected for comparison to the actual. CHT will issue written Acceptance of the System within 15 days of establishing that the System meets all contract requirements and upon completion of the Confidence testing period.

I’ve yet to see the actual results of the functional testing, the results of evaluating the RFP’s stated criteria (including the ADA requirements) and whether we solicited bids from vendors known to use WiFi/WiMAX technologies but probably not be aware of our town’s interest in their RTIS/AVL systems.

Ellen, over on OrangePolitics, wonders if NextBus will deliver digital signs with audio alerts for “a person who is blind gets there and tries to access then and cant read it or a person who cant read but can hear and understand verbal communication”.

While the RFP mentions ADA 49CFR Part 37.167 and 49CFR Part 38.5 , both which require some kind of audio notifications, we won’t know for sure if those requirements were adhered to as part of the evaluation process until we see the results of the functional testing.

It’ll be a shame if, on top of a wasted $950,000 opportunity, the town has to kick in extra funds to be ADA compliant.

Continue reading NextBus – The Proposal →