Councilmember Raymond will bring a fresh perspective and balance back to our Council.

The one reason you should vote for me in 2007: I “walk the talk”.

Over the last 4 years, my incumbent challengers have talked a good game have ignored their own advice – often to the detriment of our community, always to the detriment of their credibility. Walking in “lock step”, the four folks I’m running against represent a Council out-of-balance, out of fresh ideas.

We need balance, a fresh perspective and at least one new Council member that will, whether on environmental protections, fiscal responsibility or public accountability, drive to “practice what we preach”.

Over the last 5 years, I’ve been a member of the Town’s Technology Advisory Board, the Horace-Williams Citizens Committee (which drafted the principles under which UNC’s Carolina North project will be developed) and the Downtown Parking Task Force.

As a member of each of these advisory boards, I brought a reality-based, pragmatic and proactive approach to solving real problems. Bringing innovation to the table, I believe that there’s always room to improve.

Over the years, I’ve listened to our talented residents make thoughtful and impassioned pleas for practical, cost effective improvements – improvements that this “block of four” have been slow to move on – improvements I would embrace.

I understand, unlike my challengers, you have to sometimes get out of the Gulfstream jet flying 50,000 feet above Chapel Hill and stand firmly on the ground to get the best results.

I believe in setting goals, establishing metrics for measuring success or failure and following up as policies are implemented to make sure our goals are being met. My challengers are afraid to measure results, as demonstrated by their continued resistance to give an accurate accounting of the Downtown Development Lot #5 project. Six times I have been before Council asking for an accurate accounting of this project which has grown 17 times its original cost – $500,000 to $8.5 million tax dollars.

This is just one example of many.

What would I do differently?

Fiscal Policy

• Recognize we can’t triple our debt load, take on 4 bond funds, have an open-ended Lot #5 liability and borrow imprudently from our reserves in an economy with a housing downturn, escalating credit risk and other negative macro-economic effects without adding to our community’s tax burden.
• Restore “rainy day” fund balances by reducing Mayor’s discretionary budget, increasing service efficiencies and eliminating known waste.
• Hold public hearings now on how the Town plans to borrow $7.5M of the $8.5M commitment for Lot #5.
• Reconstitute the Citizens Budget Advisory Board. During the last budget crisis, citizens led the way on budget improvements, let’s tap into their creativity and talent once again.
• Quarterly reports on expenditures, revenues and whether we’re meeting our projected goals.

Economic Development

• Economic development strategy that incorporates increasing our commercial tax base and our local jobs portfolio. The current Council has just hired the economic development officer I lobbied for over three years ago. With the coming fiscal crisis, we need to make up for that lost time and make developing our economic base a top priority.
• Identify key areas – Conner Drive, University Mall, Eastgate, Village Plaza and Ram’s Plaza – that could accommodate increased, though environmentally appropriate, commercial development. Solicit business growth in those key areas.

Carolina North

• Deal honestly and openly with UNC on the Carolina North project – no last minute suggestions, for instance, to move the project to Finley Golf Course.
• Build on UNC’s Leadership Advisory process and create a sustained framework between the Town, the University and other stakeholders on Carolina North’s development.
• Insist on a Master Plan for Carolina North’s development to make sure both the Town’s and the University’s goals and expectations are met.
• Finish the preparatory studies on environment, fiscal equity and transit before approval.
• Develop an open and transparent negotiating process that incorporates new zoning, development agreement and fixed goals that preserves open space, protects neighborhoods and our environment and makes Carolina North an asset for both our Town and our State.

Growth

• There are limits to growth based on social, fiscal, economic, tax revenue, environmental and other factors. Our current comprehensive plan controlling growth is too one-dimensional and over-estimates our community’s ability to grow.
• Our community is not obligated to grow as dense or as tall as the current incumbents have mandated. If we are to preserve Chapel Hill values, we must set policy that recognizes taxing moderate income families that have contributed decades of service to our community beyond their capability to pay or importing water from outside the county or dumping our waste in another community is no road to a sustainable future.
• Dense commercial growth should be concentrated in areas with existing infrastructure that can adequately support the usage envisioned by our comprehensive plan instead of areas requiring significant and costly upgrades.
• The Martin Luther King, Jr. (Airport Rd.) corridor needs to be treated as a contiguous whole from I-40 to Downtown. The omission of the Estes to Franklin St. strip in the Northern Area Task Force effort will encourage inappropriate – neighborhood damaging – density and height from Downtown to UNC’s Carolina North project. For instance, lining that stretch of MLK, Jr. with Wendy’s and Taco Bell’s will not serve our community well.

Environment

• “Walk the talk” on environmental protections.
  • Measurable energy efficiency standards for the Lot #5 project (underwritten with $8.5M taxpayer dollars, we should “do as we say”).
  • Carbon reduction. Commit to replacing %30 of the trees removed by the Southern Park, Lot #5 and new Town Operations Center projects.
  • Survey the remaining open spaces in Chapel Hill. Identify high priority candidates for acquisition. Focus on stream and natural corridor preservation.
• Targeted fuel reductions. I’ve called for %5 reduction in fuel use growth the last 4 years, it is time to implement this program before gas climbs to $4 per gallon.
• Work with Orange County on bio-fuel production. Become the first customer for bio-fuel and landfill natural gas products.

Revitalizing Downtown

• Policy should emphasize fixing a number of “smaller” issues – parking, sidewalk condition, lighting, cleanliness – over big concept projects like Lot #5. Almost all our Downtown revitalization “eggs” are in the troubled Lot #5 “basket”. For too long simple, practical remediations have been ignored.
• Family-friendly “pocket” park, decent bathroom, drinking fountains, commercial directories, repaired sidewalks and lighting first.
• Downtown parking policy should be fact-driven and not revenue-driven. The Downtown Partnership is doing the study I called for. We will know what resources are available, how they are utilized and what opportunities we have for improvement on its conclusion.
• Downtown parking needs to be easier to find, easier to use and as low or no cost as practicable.
• Troublemakers and aggressive louts Downtown will be aggressively policed.
• Development should be “human-scale” instead of the 10 story tall model our current incumbents have adopted.

Community

• Arts
  • Work to create a permanent home for hands-on arts at the Community Park – starting with Lincoln Center Arts program.
  • Reform the Arts Commission and change their charge from buying arts to supporting the arts – whether continuing with acquisition of art, mentor-ships or hands-on production.
  • Spread our arts resources around throughout our community instead of focusing on one or two ego driven big-ticket arts purchases.

Open Governance

• All significant agenda items complete and published 7 days prior to Council meetings. Key policy has been changed with last minute agenda additions that the public had no time to review.
• Council minutes published in a timely manner. Minutes are key tool for communicating, lagging months is disrespectful of our citizenry.
• Publishing Council emails, departmental status reports and other key documents on-line in a timely and transparent fashion.
• Video records of Planning Board and other key advisory boards. Audio records of all advisory boards. Require timely, accurate minutes from all committees and boards – published on the website prior to the board’s next meeting.
• Increase Clerk offices resources.

Other reasons to vote Raymond?

I do my homework. For the last two years, I’ve written extensively on these issues both on CitizenWill and in our local papers on environmental protections, the budget, Downtown Development, Carolina North, open governance and many others – providing detailed analysis and primary research materials to back my opinions.

I have a consistent track record advocating on behalf of all our citizens – young, elderly, rich or poor. Whether working to save the Lincoln Arts Center – our Town’s only hands-on arts program, a program that serves a wide cross-section of the community or calling on our Council to treat our neighbors on Rogers Road with respect – acknowledging the landfill burden they’ve borne on behalf of our community – I have done what I believe was right over what was politically beneficial.

I have advocated and worked many years on bringing sanity back to our fiscal policy.

The current policy, which is based on poor assumptions – %7 increase in housing valuations, low inflation, low credit risk, an addition $100 million in new property values each year – and which discounts the tripling of our Town’s debt service, the real possibility of recession, the open-ended liability of the Lot #5 project and many other foreseeable negative economic factors, has positioned our Town for steep and steady tax hikes.

Worse, our Council, ignoring advice from some of the most talented financial experts in the country, experts that live in Chapel Hill, borrowed extensively from our “rainy day” funds instead of implementing cost efficient improvements in the way our Town does business.

Pushing off until tomorrow what should’ve been done yesterday, filling the gap with funds needed to address our Town’s growing debt obligations, my incumbent challengers have adopted a policy that will drive long time residents out of Chapel Hill and slam the door on new residents making a moderate or low income.

For these reasons, a vote for Raymond this Nov. 6th is a vote for change.

Questionnaires:

• Chapel Hill News (ENDORSED)
• Neighborhoods for Responsible Growth
• Affordable Housing
• Chamber of Commerce

Hey folks. I’ve had a number of supporters contact me about the omission of my comments on Downtown in Sunday’s Chapel Hill News.

It was completely my fault.

Even though I was prepared, I submitted my answers too late for inclusion in the print edition. I did post the answers several days ago here (Chapel Hill News questionnaire).

Unlike the incumbents at the recent WCHL forum, I’m well aware of the mistakes I’ve made in my activism and campaigning over the years. As a Council member, I won’t downplay my responsibility for errors in policy. And, if elected, you won’t have to wait four years to hear me grope around trying to recall where I went astray.

Folks, I’ll make mistakes.

Unlike some of the incumbents, though, I’ll promise to work with our talented community to correct them instead of trying to dodge culpability.

Thanks for your concern.

A common theme of both my activism and my campaign is that if we don’t measure the results of our policies then we can’t tell if we’re achieving our goals. Worse, if we’re trying various strategies to solve an issue, without proper oversight, we can’t select the most effective – cost-wise and goal-wise – solution to run with.

I’ve asked the Council many times over the last few years for a proper accounting on a number of issues – how much the citizens have spent on Lot #5, costs over-runs for the Town’s new Operation Center, fuel usage, reducing our street light electricity bill, etc. – but those requests have been uniformly batted down by the majority – which, this year, is most of the incumbents I’m running against.

I’ve argued that to be good stewards of the publics money, we must accurately report our failures and successes.

And to bolster our credibility, we have to “walk the talk”.

Take energy efficiency. While all the incumbents pay lip service to the concept, Jim and I were the only two folks running this year that called for specific, measurable energy reduction goals for the Lot #5 project. Yes, the LEEDs certification process can be expensive and flawed, but relying on a developer that has already demonstrated a consistent pattern of failing to follow through on initial expectations (the promise to keep the citizens cost to $500K, for instance) to police themselves is foolhardy.

If not LEEDs, then some other objective standard was called for – a specific methodology that an independent consultant could verify.

How else do we bolster the credibility of our environmental stewardship?

As you can see from this video, Jim makes a good case for why not “walking the talk” in one sphere can directly diminish your leverage in another.

Just as I said many times prior to Jim’s statement, how can we call on UNC or any other developer to adhere to the highest standards if our Town practices “do as I say, not do as I do”?

Thank you for your contribution.

We will spend it wisely.

Thank you,

Will Raymond

Support Will Raymond’s campaign to Preserve Chapel Hill’s Charm because Our Past Informs Our Future

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Will Raymond for Town Council
209 Mt. Bolus Rd. Chapel Hill 27514

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Will Raymond
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Chapel Hill, NC 27514

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Two years ago I ran for Town Council on a platform emphasizing innovation, creativity, responsibility and community involvement ( Campaign 2005 ). In the two years since, I’ve continued to participate in local affairs – praising the good and working to prevent the bad in process and policy.

But today’s campaign platform, like that of two years ago, isn’t built on correcting our current Council’s mistakes but upon a foundation of specific, measurable, verifiable measures to enhance our residents future and preserve the charm that has made Chapel Hill a “Southern Part of Heaven”.

Why run? As a member of several Town advisory boards, a close observer of our governmental process and an activist interested in improving upon our Town’s successes, I have become more and more concerned as our leadership strayed from some bedrock principles of good governance.

As a member of Council, I will promote policies that speed the wheels of progress, that increase the level of citizen participation and that will set a new course for Chapel Hill’s Council.

What, specifically?

In the next four years I will work hard to make sure our Town’s fiscal policy doesn’t continue to be dictated by political expediency. Transparency, openness and inclusiveness will be first and foremost in developing our Town’s budget.

We can’t borrow from tomorrow’s seed corn to pay today’s debt. We can’t dip into our children’s college fund because we’re not willing to tighten our belts. We must build our financial foundations on sturdier grounds than the expectation that next year will always be better than this year – that housing values will forever escalate, that sales tax surprises are right around the corner.

We are entrusted with our citizen’s hard-won dollars, not “units” to be extracted as needed, and every action we take must reflect that recognition. When we negotiate and then take on a new burden on our citizens behalf we owe them a regular and accurate accounting. We should err on the side of caution and not become so obsessed with grand dreams so as to dispense with good sense and good policy.

Affordable housing should mean housing – square footage on the ground. We cannot continue our Town’s addiction to payments in lieu. We must be prepared to accept housing when it becomes available – to be nimble and flexible in adapting to current conditions.

And while affordable housing is important, affordable living must be our first and foremost goal.

Our town has adopted policies that are driving diversity from our community. In our rush to support gold-plated condos and a caviar lifestyle we’ve forgotten that our Town’s historical constitution and strength is born of a wide cross-section of interests and means.

Affordable living necessitates policies that encourage folks to stay awhile. We need a new attitude that supports our long term residents in keeping their homes and our newest residents in their desire to move from transitional housing to homes.

Leadership does not mean going it alone. Our community is blessed by many resources, our citizens being a source of strength and talent we cannot continue to ignore. We must not wait for them to come forth but nurture their involvement – and take their counsel even when it goes against our initial impetus.

Finally, when we call on others to do what’s best – environmentally, social justice, human services – we must lead by example and not resort to “do as I say, not as I do”.

Why boot the incumbents?

In the last 18 months, we’ve seen some of our Council become so enamored, even obsessed, with their Downtown development plans, that they’ve wavered from their obligation to maintain our Town’s sound fiscal foundations.

Delay is a matter of course for this Council. Just two weeks ago the Council received an independently conducted technology assessment that called for a number of innovative, cost reducing, improvements that I, other concerned citizens and our now disbanded citizen-led Technology Advisory Board had made more than 5 years ago.

And rather than make key structural and organizational changes in the way our Town functions, they pushed off to tomorrow what needs to be done today.

As we know, delay costs. In some cases, delay costs dearly.

Over the last few years, while the Council has maintained their policy of citizen comment on the issues before them, they have become partially deaf to critiques of their plans. Nothing sounds so sweet as the chorus of “yes, yes, yes” but paying attention to the “nayes” can strengthen any policy. Add to that recent examples of political gamesmanship and imprudent streamlining of public hearings to see how citizen discourse and debate has taken a backseat to winning their way. Public policy has suffered.

Though potentially ego bruising, integrating citizen feedback can only make our government work better.

Beyond ignoring professional assessments from the professors of UNC’s Kenan-Flagler business school on the Lot #5 development debacle, this Council has stood quietly by while the Mayor dispensed with the Horace-Williams Citizen Committee (HWCC). The HWCC, of which I was a member, stood poised to make additional, substantive, contributions, from am informed citizens perspective, on UNC’s Carolina North project.

Some Council members appeared worried, that they couldn’t control the outcome of this committee’s work.

Certainly an independent and non-political analysis might yield answers that this Council didn’t want to hear but, again, that leads to poor results. Results, for instance, like the Lot #5 money-pit, underwritten by our residents, carrying a quickly escalating citizen borne commitment of $20 million – a project whose primary beneficiary is a private development company.

Yes, the Council does sometime listen. Candidate Hill took my suggestion to make Lot #5’s affordable housing more family friendly and ran with it. And the Council, after years of lobbying by folks like myself, did decide to invest in community-owned networking infrastructure to meet the economic and social demands of a new century. Yet, in-spite of assurances to the contrary, they have yet to involve the community in this vital community serving project.

What of the Downtown Parking Task Force, on which I served? Trying to resolve some of the parking misery in our Downtown district, this committee did some of the best work I’ve ever seen any board perform over the 7 years I’ve closely participated in Town affairs. Members of this task force were eager to continue – to help with the implementation of a number of no-cost or low-cost improvements to make our Town center more inviting, more friendly.

While this groups practical advice was put aside (for now we hear), the committee’s recommendations to reduce the cost of parking became, perversely, a call to raise parking rates Downtown.

“What’s the matter with raising prices by ‘two units’?” as one Council member asked. “Units”, it appears, is how the current Council sees our citizens and visitors hard-earned dollars.

Again, political gamesmanship, closing ranks, trying to bolster this year’s incumbent candidates prospects, overrode good and fair public policy. At least the work of that committee hasn’t been added, as one long time resident and board participant commented, to the “stack of dusty reports” generated by our advisory boards that litter Townhall.

One incumbent Councilmember, Bill Strom, recently complained that he couldn’t work with the Orange County Board of Commissioners to set policy.

He has had eight years to work on that issue, and so many more, how would eight more years of Bill or four more of Cam and Sally, benefit our community? I expect a flurry of proposals this Summer from our incumbents and my question to them will be simply “Why are we just now hearing about this? Why wait?”

The trend is set. These few of many examples show a Council that has lost their way.

Over the next few months I look forward to, once again, meeting with our citizenry, to discuss how our Town can maintain its charm while becoming not only an even better place to live but a sustainable, growing, vital and creative community that will lead others by example.

Overview:

Attended East Carolina University in the ’80s where I graduated with a degree in Computer Science/Math.

Worked for

• Law Engineering – Soils & Materials Engineer, enviro-tech
• NorTel – Software Engineer. Project Manager. Chairman’s Award for Innovation. Two Presidential Awards.
• Blast Software – CIO/CTO
• Reged.com – CIO/CTO
• Tibco-Extensibility (downtown Chapel Hill) – Software Architect

Town Advisory Boards

• Technology Board
  - push to bridge digital divide
  - proposed significant technological improvements to drive cost of delivering Town services
  - proposed WIFI/municipal networking initiative
  - proposed use of F/OSS (free and open software) to replace costly proprietary software
  - proposed use of open standards for public records
  - proposed use of list-serves, email, ‘blogs, online video and other mechanisms to open up public participation
• Horace-Williams Citizen Committee
  - drafted response to Chancellor Moeser’s letter
  - worked with environmental sub-committee to establish environmental goals, methodologies and best-case strategies
• Downtown Parking Task Force
  - using my Downtown experience proposed low or no-cost Downtown parking improvements

Other recent activities

• Community Independent Expansion Committee

Here’s a quick narrative of the last 27 years of my professional life:

As a student in Greenville, I worked many different jobs to pay for school: cucumber picker, hammock weaver, assembly line worker, industrial painter, commercial construction inspector, printer, freelance software developer and a bit more.

Taking a break from school, I became a commercial construction inspector for Law Engineering. Most of my projects were “Down East” – east of I95. My largest projects were water treatment facilities, industrial, commercial, school and military sites. The “Little” Washington sewage treatment plant, which pioneered some new treatment techniques, was my first major project. The Tarboro Sara Lee/United Refrigeration Services facilities was one of my last.

The Tarboro URS site was quite incredible – it was a refrigerator the size of a warehouse kept unbelievably cold and dry.

I was also “borrowed” by the Charlotte office to do testing on the (then) new coliseum, various highways and other large-scale commercial/industrial developments in the western part of our State. I also did occasional assignments – drilling test wells, looking for soil contaminants – for Law Environmental.

I worked for Northern Telecom (NorTel) from the late ’80’s to the mid-’90’s.

While there, as a recognition of my accomplishments in promoting innovative uses of technology to streamline our business processes, I was the first IT worker to earn the Chairman’s Award for Innovation. During those years, I also was awarded two Presidential Awards for Excellence.

A NorTel director used to bring me in on “troubled” projects – introducing me as a “change agent” – because I had a way of looking at problems from a different angle, rallying the troops and moving forward to a solution.

I worked on quite a diverse portfolio of projects; simplifying telephone switch software to allow a front-line operator to setup phone service instead of a highly-trained technician, streamlining our labor-intensive “build-to-order” process for configuring telephone equipment, automating/monitoring our $3.5 billion manufacturing systems, eliminating costly “legacy”systems and business processes.

Leaving Nortel in the late ’90’s I became a bit of an entrepreneur taking a hand in building two successful DOT.COMs – Pittsboro’s Blast Software and Chapel Hill’s Reged.com.

As both Chief Information and Technical Officer (CIO/CTO) of Reged.com, I helped propel our company to multi-million dollar status. Anticipating the Internet revolution in education, I pioneered the use of on-line teaching and testing technology for securities broker/dealers and insurance agents – a business discriminator that made our operation stand above and beyond the competition.

Reged.com has since been acquired by FiServ.

For the last 6 1/2 years, I’ve worked in Chapel Hill as a software developer for Tibco-Extensibility, a company persistently located in our great Downtown.

Our company is a key player in the “enterprise application integration” and “business process management” marketplace.

Our integration software facilitates construction of seamless, enterprise-wide, business operations from already existing and newly developed information support systems. Our management software automates reproducible business events and processes.

I currently work on a variety of technologies – including software that decomposes and classifies XML – the new lifeblood of business-to-business communications.

Because of my expertise, I have participated as a member of international “open standards” committees.