Closed Minutes Again

I hate to keep bringing this up.

Last week Oriental's Town Board Meeting Agenda included an item to consider opening previously closed minutes relating to legal considerations about the Town's South Avenue lawsuit. The board decided to postpone action until the next agenda meeting.

Say what?

Last year the outgoing Town Board reviewed the closed minutes and decided that once the South Avenue lawsuit was over, the minutes would be released to the public. The case is over. The Town won. I didn't make a big stink about it, but I believed at the time, after reviewing the minutes, that the condition established in North Carolina's Open Meetings Law for their release already existed last December. The law is summarized here.

I decided not to wait any longer. I have submitted a written request for copies of the South Avenue minutes. I think the public has a right to know what went on in those closed sessions.

Effluent Issues

Whenever cruising sailors get together, the conversation eventually touches on holding tanks and pumpouts.

Last week an old friend and his wife stopped by on the way north from cruising in Florida. They were accompanied by two other couples and their boats returning to the Patuxent River. The inevitable subject came up. They complained that there are very few pumpout stations available for transient vessels in North Carolina waters.

This is a serious problem for cruising sailors.

It may also represent an opportunity.

Our friends were confident that cruising boats would drop into Oriental if they knew there was a readily available municipal pumpout facility.

17,000 boats go up and down the ICW every year.

A lot of potential visitors to Oriental and customers for our businesses.

Voter Registration Challenges

Under North Carolina General Statutes, any registered voter in a county can challenge the right of any other registered voter in the same county to remain on the voter registration rolls.

The county board of elections is obligated to process all such challenges prior to the next election. Hearing the challenge is a two step process: 1) a preliminary hearing to determine whether probable cause exists that the challenged voter should not be registered; 2) a formal hearing by the board of elections sitting as a quasi-judicial body and providing all of the protections of due process normally provided by a court.

The county board will require the advice of an attorney representing the county during the hearings, and will also require the services of a court reporter. Should there be an appeal from the Board's decision(s), the appeal will go to Superior Court and will require a transcript of the proceedings.

This is uncharted territory for Pamlico County.

The most recent comparable experience in North Carolina is Brunswick County. Following last year's municipal elections, the defeated candidate for mayor of Bald Head Island filed 39 challenges against the town's registered voters.

Of the 39 challenged voters, the Brunswick County Board of Elections failed to find probable cause in eight cases. The challenger appealed to Superior Court, but after discussion, agreed to drop five of the eight challenges. Superior Court returned two cases to the County Board and the Board found in favor of the challenged voters. Superior Court has ordered the Board of Elections to hear the one remaining case.

We have to anticipate and budget for a similar process.

Eristic Observations

"If you want to beat a dog, any stick will do."

Robert Louis Stevenson

South Avenue Fence

I have been asked several times lately, "when is the fence coming down?"

I modestly point out that I have no inside knowledge anymore. But I have recently learned that the Town of Oriental has given Mr. Lacy Henry a deadline for him to remove the fence.

As some of you may recall, Judge Kenneth Crow signed the Judgment that "the Town of Oriental is the owner of the South Avenue Terminus" on February 5th, 2010. The Superior Court Judgment completed action on a decision by the North Carolina Court of Appeals issued July 7, 2009.

Most of the delay resulted from unsuccessful efforts by Mr. Henry to persuade the Court of Appeals and the North Carolina Supreme Court to review the unanimous decision of a Court of Appeals panel.

Now the Town needs to get moving. The street end leading down to the water needs to be cleaned up and made presentable.

More urgently, we need a plan on how best to use this public asset.

I have some ideas, which I will be sharing with my readers.

Second Primaries and Instant Runoff

Here's a topic to make your eyes glaze over. The sort of detail only a policy wonk enjoys.

In last Tuesday's Democratic Party primary election, there were six candidates seeking nomination as the party's candidate for U.S. Senate. The leading vote getter was Elaine Marshall, with 153,953 votes (36.6% of the 423,453 votes cast). Second was Cal Cunningham with 115,590 votes (27.3%).

So Elaine Marshall won, right?

Not exactly.

Under North Carolina Law, a candidate has to win 40% of the vote to win. Elaine Marshall came up 3.4% short.

What now?

We have to hold a second primary (also called a runoff) between the top two candidates to determine the winner.

In Pamlico County, the second primary will require us to hold one-stop voting for a couple of weeks, followed by the election on June 22. We are required by state law to open all ten precinct polling places for election day, no matter how light we think the turnout will be. Some other counties have runoff primaries for local elections, but U.S. Senate is the only race here in Pamlico County.

Who can vote?

Any registered Democrat can vote, whether or not he or she voted in the first primary.

No registered Republican can vote.

Anyone registered as unaffiliated who did not vote in the May 4th Republican Party primary can also vote.

Is there a better system? Probably. Some options:

1. Just pick the leading vote getter at the first primary. Most states do that. Runoff primaries are only prevalent in the South. The origin of primaries, including the runoff system, is often attributed to the populist or progressive movement. The true origin may be less benign, as recent research seems to show.

2. Use "instant runoff," where voters rank their choices. This needs computers to determine the outcome. Some US municipalities have tried it.

For real policy wonks, there are at least a dozen different variations of instant runoff.

Chimpanzees, Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens

I've always wondered if some of my family members weren't descended from Neanderthals. Now we know for sure.

It turns out that 1 to 4 percent of the genes carried by non-African people come from interbreeding between Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals about 80,000 years ago. Why non-African? Because the human beings left behind in Africa never interbred with Neanderthals. For more details, read the article in today's Washington Post.

But wait - there's more. It turns out the Neanderthals carried about 73 genes of the more ancient chimpanzee version rather than the modern human version. The interesting thing is that northern Europeans, the Chinese and Papua New Guineans carry traces of Neanderthal ancestry, including the chimpanzee genes, but Africans do not.

That stands a lot of nineteenth century assumptions on their head.

Town Bored?

I wasn't able to attend Tuesday night's Oriental Town Board meeting, as I was tied up with Pamlico County's primary election. But I did take a look at the agenda ahead of time. I had hopes that on the occasion of the sixth regular meeting of the current board, they might actually take some action. No such luck.

I'm thinking, though, that the Tuesday meeting might mark a significant milestone. To verify the milestone would require a thorough search of the town's minutes over the last 111 years, but I think we may be approaching a new record for dithering.