Sheriff Taylor in the voting booth

Mount Airy’s cultural icon just keeps popping up in state political discussions. First came Andy Griffith’s ad touting Democratic gubernatorial candidate Bev Perdue. Then Perdue’s opponent Pat McCrory used Griffith’s most famous character, Sheriff Andy Taylor, to drive home points about the state of the NC criminal justice system during a debate last month.

Now a Raleigh-based polling organization, Public Policy Polling, has released the results of its latest survey: who would Sheriff Taylor vote for in the presidential and governor’s race? Check out the results here.

I’m not sure which is more interesting, that Sheriff Taylor would split his ticket (McCain for president, Perdue for governor) or that 11 percent of all Republicans surveyed have an unfavorable opinion of Griffith as a person. Only 5 percent of Democrats feel that way, probably because he often endorses that party’s candidates.

Among the most interesting results to the poll’s coordinator, Tom Jensen, is that 6 percent think Sheriff Taylor would vote Libertarian.

Surry’s most urgent needs … via dots

Bright sticky dots to be exact, put to work during Monday’s Golden LEAF Foundation meeting (reminds me of that funny Nextel commercial from a year ago). As detailed in Tuesday’s paper, the foundation met with around 70 folks from Surry this week to identify the key issues facing the county. After a couple of hours of discussion, the concerns expressed were grouped into 12 topics, and everyone voted on the most important. Each attendee got two red dots for a first place vote, one green dot for a second place vote and a blue dot for a third place vote. Attached above are photos of the presentation sheets have the votes were cast.

Here’s the tally of how each topic scored, using a system I just devised of 3 points for a red dot, 2 for a green and 1 for a blue.

 

 

WATER/SEWER

Red: 30

Green: 9

Blue: 2

Total points: 110

 

JOBS/WAGES

Red: 28

Green: 7

Blue: 6

Total points: 104

 

EDUCATION/RETRAINING

Red: 26

Green: 8

Blue: 2

Total points: 96

 

DOWNTOWNS

Red: 14

Green: 4

Blue: 4

Total points: 54

 

AGRICULTURE

Red: 8

Green: 7

Blue: 16

Total points: 54

 

TOURISM

Red: 5

Green: 10

Blue: 12

Total points: 47

 

RECREATION

Red: 9

Green: 5

Blue: 8

Total points: 45

 

HEALTH CARE

Red: 5

Green: 9

Blue: 4

Total points: 37

 

AMENITIES/ QUALITY OF LIFE

Red: 7

Green: 4

Blue: 6

Total points: 35

 

POVERTY

Red: 2

Green: 4

Blue: 5

Total points: 19

 

POPULATION GROWTH

Red: 1

Total points: 3

 

NATURAL RESOURCES

Red: 1

Green: 1

Blue: 2

Total points: 7

 

When zoning lines become battle lines

One month. Three passionate zoning battles.

We started June analyzing a dispute over a racetrack in Patrick County and a fight over a scrap metal operation in northern Surry County. Now we’re ending the month with another business vs. the neighbors dispute, this one in Mount Airy.

In the pre-zoning era, you likely wouldn’t have three such disputes all at once. But now Surry County and Mount Airy have land use plans (you can see the county’s here, while the city’s isn’t up online) with zoning ordinances to carry them out, and Dobson is developing one. So there’s more restrictions on landowners, and neighbors unhappy about an operation next door have more precedent to call for (or at times demand) such restrictions. Now that budget season is over, the next city council and county commissioner meetings will likely spend much if not most of the time on these cases. Expect lots of debate weighing the rights of a property owner versus the will of a neighborhood, with the benefit of the community falling somewhere along that spectrum.

Budget debates, circa the 1880s

The process of settling on a spending plan for Mount Airy has produced an ample supply of analogies and metaphors both acute (Todd Harris comparing the city’s ride of industrial users to pay water expansion debt to Big Brown coming up short in the last sprit) and bizarre (see the post below).

But the best one yet arrived Thursday evening from Dean Brown, who cast a pivotal swing vote in favor of the budget. Brown recounted a contentious budget from the late 19th century, when Mount Airy commissioners were debating which of two mules to buy to haul the trash cart. The bigger mule cost $75 more and was a mean thing that snapped at everybody. But commissioners bit the bullet and purchased that animal because it could haul considerably more trash and would help in the long run.

“I guess today we bought the mean mule,” Brown said right after the budget vote.

The airport and jobs

What does the Surry-County/Mount Airy airport have that commercial airports in Asheville and Wilmington do not? Apparently an impact of more than 3,000 jobs, at least according to the DOT. The local airport’s much debated expansion picked up steam at the state level after an economic impact study done by the DOT ranked it fourth in the state in number of jobs impacted directly and indirectly by its presence. The estimated $387 million economic impact of the airport also ranked fourth (behind Charlotte-Douglas, RDU and PTI)

The full study is posted here. Scroll down to appendix B for the charts with all the data.

The DOT study was made as part of a request for federal aviation funding, so the agency has some incentive to pump up the overall numbers. But the discrepancy between the Surry County airport and others of its size is startling.

Weed crackdown … the Mount Airy way

No, not THAT kind of weed. Just the kind that sprouts up in unkept yards.

Sen. Don East got a little more popular in the legislature as of late. It appears that Mount Airy’s request to streamline the process of fining property owners with overgrown yards has a handful of other municipalities jumping on board.

We reported on the front of the March 24th edition about how most city officials wanted to reduce the amount of warnings given property owners before fining them. So East introduced this bill adding Mount Airy to a list of municipalities that only have to give warnings once a year. It sailed through the Senate and gets taken up by the House today. Only now the bill has been amended to this. A few other Senators apparently thought their municipalities would like to follow Mount Airy’s lead.

Budget talks with a heavy metal soundtrack

During a Mount Airy City Council budget meeting where commissioner Tom Bagnal quoted Bette Davis (”Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night”) and Commissioner Dean Brown quoted Larry the Cable Guy (”Let’s get r done”), by far the most entertaining quote to sum up the situation came via Commissioner Deborah Cochran. She opened the meeting with an anecdote about this recent encounter she had with an employee at McDonald’s.

“He saw me and said ‘heavy is the head that wears the crown.’ I asked if that was Shakespeare. ‘No,’ he said. ‘that’s Metallica.”

 

My google searching couldn’t find that particular quote from the heavy metal band. Cochran may have been getting mixed up with the Limp Bizkit song Re-arranged. But for the purposes of having a laugh at this dramatic budget season, here’s a few other quotes from Metallica hit songs that could apply to the process.

(on the acrimonious debates on whether to raise water rates) “This is cloud that swallows trust. This is the black that uncolors us.”

(on the relentless search for ways to reduce those rates) “They’re off to find the hero of the day. But what if they should fall by someone’s wicked way?”

(or on the risk of depleting savings or putting off projects to fix crumbling infrastructure) “Then it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel. Was just a freight train coming your way.”

The cost of living

Navigating budgets and separating the “fat” from the “bone” is tough without the expertise of actually running a department. But there’s one optional expense everyone can weigh in on without knowing the inner workings of utility systems, patrol divisions, building permits, etc.

That would be pay raises, this year specifically, cost of living pay raises. They’re included for all employees in local government budgets … for now. The across the board raises look like they’ll stay in Dobson and Pilot Mountain’s budgets, while they’re targeted for elimination in Mount Airy and the county’s budgets.

Agreeing on even what constitutes a “cost of living” increase is hard enough (it’s 3 percent for Dobson and the county, 4 percent for Mount Airy and Pilot Mountain). Whether or not to fund them is an argument of both fairness — should government employees be punished for private industry layoffs, or do they owe the unemployed to have their paychecks slashed in real dollars? It’s also an argument of fiscal prudence — do governments save money by holding off on raises or will that just cause turnover that costs more in the long run through having to train new employees?

County officials meet tonight and Mount Airy officials meet tomorrow to crunch budgets. Expect this topic to get plenty of discussion.

UPDATE SINCE THIS WAS POSTED: COLA raises did get plenty of focus during budget talks, and both county and Mount Airy commissioners were in pretty much unanimous agreement to slash them from the budgets. Nothing’s final yet, but it’s highly unlikely they’ll be put back in.

Learning to share (a $2 million grant)

community-assistance-initiative-outline-20082

Want to see how a number of competing interests can all agree on how to share $2 million? June 30th could provide perfect example on how to do it … or not to do it.

That’s the next time folks from The Golden LEAF Foundation are in town to facilitate a process of deciding by consensus what the priority uses are for the $2 million the foundation is reserving for the county through its Community Assistance Initiative (an overview of that program is attached as a word document).

The gloves are off, in that most any type of use for this money qualifies as long as A. it improves the economy, and B. it has countywide consensus.

Easier said than done, and already some alliances are forming to ensure no one gets excluded from the money entirely. But it’s a public process, so everyone gets a say on what the greatest needs are and what projects best meet those needs. Here’s a list of what other counties have gotten from this initiative as a starting point.

Stemming the tides of annexation

After blogging about legislation filed by Jim Harrell III and Don East, posting about the activity of the third member in Surry’s delegation in the NC General Assembly, Rep. George Holmes, is a bit tougher.

The Republican from Yadkin County is retiring this year, and for this session he hasn’t been the primary sponsor of any legislation. But he does represent eastern Surry County, so it’s worth noting that one of the bills he co-sponsored is among the most hot button topics in Raleigh right now — involuntary annexation.

A special committee charged with looking at the issue recommended a one year moratorium on such land grabs while the state examines its annexation laws. The bill Holmes co-sponsored would put that moratorium on the books, and it has already passed a first reading in the House. But it still has a stiff fight ahead, with the NC League of Municipalities arguing that restricting annexations leads to a downward spiral in the quality of urban areas as residents flee to nearby suburbs where they don’t pay city taxes but still tap into many city services. Municipal officials will descend on Raleigh this week for Town Hall Day, and this figures to be a key point of their lobbying efforts.

With Mount Airy’s forced annexations already going into effect, this proposed moratorium doesn’t have any immediate impact locally. But it’s on an issue and debate many locals are very familiar with from experience.