Special Town Board Meeting August 17 11:00

The Town of Oriental has scheduled a Special Workshop Meeting August 17, 2010 at 11:00 am with Mr. Hartwell Wright of North Carolina League of Municipalities to discuss Human Resources.

Warning! This could be a stealth effort to change the form of government the Town of Oriental has enjoyed for nearly 40 years, without alerting the citizenry to the issues.

To set the stage, I quote from a recent letter of Mayor Bill Sage to the Local Government Commission (back)dated April 1, 2010:

"The prior Town Administrator, Wyatt Cutler, had served for nearly a decade when he announced his retirement in late 2008, effective January 31, 2009. The Town began a search process for his replacement and hired the current Administrator, Randall K. Cahoon, in March 2009."

"Pay no attention," the letter seems to say, "to the contract between the Town of Oriental and the same Randall K. Cahoon, made the 9th of March, 2009." The contract was addressed to "Randall K. Cahoon, Town Manager" and signed for the Town of Oriental by "William R. Sage, Mayor." Pay no attention, likewise, to nearly 40 years of minutes describing the "Town Manager's Report," correspondence addressed to and signed by "Town Manager," and the fact that during his "nearly a decade" of service, Wyatt Cutler was styled as and performed the functions of the Town Manager.

With no notice to the public, someone working out of Town Hall seems to have decided to expunge the term "town manager" from our lexicon and replace it with "administrator."

Isn't this a distinction without a difference? Not exactly.

What is at stake is how the town is governed.

The Council/Manager plan of government promotes the separation of the Town Board's responsibility for political judgments and policy direction from the manager's responsibility for administration in accordance with the council's overall policy guidance and his or her own politically neutral expertise.

I think this is a fair description of how the Town has been governed for many years.

The Mayor/Council form of government assigns decision making responsibility to the Town Board as a group, with no clear executive authority.

Advocates of the Mayor/Council model contend that the Town's 1899 Charter provides for a Mayor/Council form of government.

Maybe.

Maybe not.

More to come.

Town Board Impressions

Watching the proceedings at last week's Town Board reminded me of a film clip I once saw at the Will Rogers Memorial in Claremore, Oklahoma. Will had his foot on the running board of a car, relaxed grin on his face, talking to the occupant.

"From the newspapers, Mr. Coolidge," he said,"I see you haven't done much of anything this year."

"Yep," President Coolidge said.

"But," Will observed, "It seems that's just what the public wanted done."

Oriental Town Board of Commissioners August 3

I attended the August 3 meeting of the Oriental Town Board of Commissioners. I learned a lot. Much of what I learned was from what wasn't said, and some from how things were said. Some of what I learned was just from observation. I'll share some of these observations over the next few days.

One of the first observations is that previous problems with minutes haven't been resolved. The Board spent the first thirty minutes of the meeting wrestling over minutes. In fact, they did not approve the minutes for June 1. What I thought I heard was that those minutes would be approved at the next agenda meeting. I must have been mistaken, because now I see that minutes for June 1 have been posted on the Town's web site. Surely that wouldn't have been done without revisiting them at a public meeting of the Board. August 13 update: just checked the town's web site - the June 1 minutes have been removed.

Surely there is some way to make sure the minutes are done right the first time. On second thought, maybe not. We still haven't solved a similar problem at the County Board of Elections.

More later.

Political Expectations

"A man that would expect to train lobsters to fly in a year is called a lunatic; but a man that thinks men can be turned into angels by an election is a reformer and remains at large."

Mr. Dooley (Finley Peter Dunne)

Time

"There's never time to do it right, but always time to do it over."

-Staff Officers' Lament

Physical Changes

I saw my doctor last week for my annual physical. Everything was great. Only one piece of bad news: I'm an inch and a half shorter than I was when I was 21.

That's unfair.

The problem isn't that I want to tower over other people - it is that now I have to lose more weight. The weight charts are calibrated by height. As long as I thought I was taller, my weight didn't look that bad.

When you think about it, using overall height as the benchmark discriminates in another way. My legs are short. They should be a couple of inches longer. That wouldn't add much weight, but would make a difference on the weight chart.

Guess I just have to start eating less and exercising more.

South Avenue Update

Pamlico County Superior Court Judge Kenneth Crow signed the final judgment granting ownership of the end of South Avenue to the Town of Oriental last February 5th.

Six months have passed, and the fence is still up. I am told that last Wednesday Lacy Henry agreed for the Town to remove the fence he put up in the Town's Right of Way about eighteen years ago.

Care to place bets on how long it will take for the fence to come down?

Voting Rights

Forty-five years ago, August 6, 1965, President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, effectively ending the deal struck almost ninety years earlier that let southern states deprive a large number of their citizens of rights enjoyed by the white majority.

The Voting Rights Act is often seen as a measure primarily benefiting African Americans. I see it as a victory for all Americans. It took another four decades, but the events set in motion that long-ago August eventually led to the National Voter Registration Act, the Help America Vote Act, the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act and countless court decisions establishing the right of every American to vote. No poll tax (that hindered all poor people from voting), no literacy test (first used in the Northeast to prevent Irish immigrants from voting), no competency test, easier procedures for servicemen and overseas Americans to vote, removal of administrative barriers.

The bottom line: now every citizen has the right to vote somewhere unless that right has been taken away by a court of law.

We can best honor the memory of the courageous Americans who gave their lives so this could happen by taking the time to register and vote.