durham county

Changing behavior is costly but necessary:

Authorities in Wake County pressured the legislature for the lake's cleanup, because the lake provides drinking water for 450,000 Wake residents. But the pollutants reach the lake from streams running through Durham, Granville, Person and Orange counties, whose taxpayers would bear the greatest financial burden for cleaning up Raleigh's reservoir.

It will probably do little good to repeat this, but it needs to be said: Techniques for ameliorating the negative effects of stormwater runoff have been available to county/city governments for decades, and they (for the most part) chose to ignore them. During that time, land development in the Triangle/Triad regions propagated like rabbits, and the combination of those two factors produced an inevitable result. A result that must be dealt with, now.

If the referendum on the transfer tax here in Durham County had been held among speakers at the Commissioners meeting, it would have been a rout. The Realtors showed up, but transfer tax supporters were here in much, much bigger numbers.

Barry Saunders shows why he has a paying gig as a columnist for the N&O and I don't by covering in his column today pretty much the ground that I covered here yesterday, and doing a much better job of it. It's a good column in substance and tone, and confirms what I thought—that Monks and Cheek have nothing going for them but the fact that they're not Mike Nifong.

I do have one tiny (very tiny) quibble with the column, though. Saunders wrote:

It's old news that Mike Nifong's handling of the Duke lacrosse case has ensured that he'll have challengers in November. You probably also know that the Republican candidate-to-probably-be, Steve Monks, has no experience as a prosecutor and hasn't ever run for elected office. (I don't know much about the other Democrat, who is planning to run as a write-in). What you probably don't know—what I think that nobody knows—is what problem Monks has with Nifong outside of the lacrosse case.