Who would’ve thought there’d be variants of a virus? Lol. But yes, how responsible of them to be so safe and call this off. Definitely not being called off because no one in Raleigh actually cares about their little campaign…
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Wait, are they saying the virus crossed the line and got involved in politics??
Like Nextdoor, I finally had to remove myself from their mailing list. Too depressing and no value seeing the “other side”.
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Sounds like a convenient way out of a failed campaign to me.
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I think there should be more at-large seats elected through proportional representation.
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Really curious to know how many signatures they were able to collect. But we will probably never know. Transparency is good but only for others!
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Not even close to enough, or they would not have called it off. 
I heard prior to the holidays that they were well short. But it wasn’t anything official.
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A post was merged into an existing topic: Zoning and Density
Does anyone have a list of registered candidates for the next City Council election?
Obviously a fake excuse but that 2 months was enough to justify the public expense? If I were giving them advice I’d say don’t even acknowledge the expense.
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Yesterday’s City Council meeting included a discussion on the feedback city staffers got about new districts and election timelines. Here’s a summary of how < 2000 people felt (majority bolded; city council abbreviated as “CC”):
| Statement evaluated | Agreed | Disagreed |
|---|---|---|
| CC should transition from two-year to four-year term | 27% | 73% |
| CC should adopt staggered terms | 41% | 59% |
| Increase compensation for the Mayor from $27,550 to $45,911 | 58% | 42% |
| Increase total compensation for CC members from $19,725 to $37,248 | 57% | 43% |
| CC should increase its size to nine by adding one district seat | 76% | 24% |
| CC should increase its size to nine by adding an At-Large member | 33% | 67% |
The slide deck noted there were 118 attendees to listening sessions, 1281 online survey responders, and others who may have written directly to the city. It’s not clear if the voices heard in the surveys reflect the demographics of Raleigh, though, so I’d be worried about these results being skewed towards older, affluent NIMBY voices.
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As with with midterm elections, it’s easy to imagine that participation in the survey was weighted toward opposition.
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Assuming the percentage results are from the online survey responders only, that means 935 people don’t want 4 year terms. This is ~0.2% of the city’s population. I hope the City Council sees this response for what it is: a tiny group of opinionated people, and doesn’t change their minds on 4 year terms.
Putting out surveys like this is a no-win scenario. If you don’t do it, people complain about lack of public engagement. If you do, but only a few people respond, then you’re criticized for ignoring the results if they run counter to what you’re trying to do. You’re ignoring the “will of the people,” even if 99.8% of the city didn’t say to keep 2 year terms in this polling.
I was surprised to see that my answers matched the “majority” on all questions except the term length.
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I agree, 100%, and it sucks to have to make decisions over such unreliable data. That’s exactly why I wrote about the number of people who took those surveys (when it’s easy to just gloss over them).
City Council also just talked about creating better structures to ask citizens these sorts of questions. It’ll be too late for this council formation question, but maybe we’ll be able to do better than holding these sorts of asinine surveys in the near future?
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I saw on WRAL that the mayor said the City Council is planning to vote on the mask mandate on Tuesday, and they are leaning towards removing it. It didn’t say when that would go into effect, but I doubt they’d wait 2 more weeks until the governor’s March 7 date.
I know everyone has a lot of thoughts and feelings about this issue, and I’m not trying to stir that all up again. But I think this is pretty big news for our city. Hopefully things can start seeming more normal again, and people can have one less thing to be divided about.
Edit: Raleigh has decided to end the mandate next Friday (2/25).
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Per the case maps, Wake’s aren’t that low actually. Hopefully after another week-ish, the cases will continue to go down. Trends would suggest that by the 7th, the state should be in much better shape.
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CC Buffkin not running in the next election, it seems.
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Maybe David Cox can do the same.
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The City Council voted to select Scenario 2 prepared by City Staff in the redistricting of our 5 districts. David Cox was the only one to vote in opposition. These will be the 5 districts that candidates will run in this November.
Link to map in DRA
Link to map on Raleigh’s website
Commentary from City Staff of Scenario 2:
“Scenario 2 starts with Scenario 1 and offers additional changes. More future growth area in the northeast is assigned from District C to District B. District B also takes in more area north of 540 while the Brentwood neighborhood transitions to District A. District C gains neighborhoods between Capital Boulevard and New Hope Road such as Starmount. Neighborhoods north of Wade Avenue are consolidated into District E rather than being split. These and other changes balance population but leave room for growth in District B. This alternative has the lowest deviation from ideal population, with no district more than 2.2 percent away from ideal.”
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Whatever happened to expanding the number of districts, raises for city council, and longer terms?
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Think this is still in discussion. Don’t remember if it was referred to a committee or a work session, but they got the report from the commission they set up. It was mentioned last night by Cox about the possible addition of the new district. I think it’s presumably something that they will do after the election, and run on it.
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