Officials use summer break to relax, recharge

Local politicians spend all year dealing with zoning regulations and permit reviews that aren't particularly exhilarating.

But in the summer, when students depart en masse, the Chapel Hill Town Council and Board of Alderman ease up.

Governing bodies don’t meet for weeks and advisory boards slow down.

For a few months every summer, local political figures, busy all year debating in gory detail the merits of finely differentiated points of local regulation, have a little room to breathe.

The meetings don’t stop altogether, but if a council member or alderman wants a little vacation, that can be arranged.

For Alderman Jacquelyn Gist, the summer was an uneventful chance to come to terms with her changing life and prepare for the year to come.

“This summer I turned 50, and I spent the rest of the summer getting over it,” she said. “And I also spent the summer in the office getting ready for the students to come back.

“I had this really boring, middle-aged summer.”

Town Council member Mark Kleinschmidt spent his time attending Harvard’s prestigious Kennedy School of Government to attend the Senior Executives in State and Local Government program.

He gave the program a rave review, saying it helped him think about issues in new ways.

“I think I will be even more effective than I ever was in the past.”

For the program, participants met in a classroom setting to discuss ways to approach public policy problems.

He said that the schedule was intense, but that the program was well worth the effort.

“Our days were just slam-packed for three weeks,” he said.

But he added, “We’ve almost to a person mentioned it was something that’s just incomparable to anything else any of us had ever done.”

Kleinschmidt said he hopes to get other local officials involved in the program in coming years. He also plans to take a vacation when this year’s election season winds down.

Carrboro Mayor Mike Nelson was unable to get away from town.

“I didn’t have a vacation,” he said. “I didn’t go anywhere. I didn’t do anything. I worked in June; I worked in July; I worked in August.”

In contrast, Town Council member Ed Harrison, journeyed west.

He started by traveling to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, a place he had long wanted to visit.

“I hadn’t been to the (park) since 1979, so I was due back,” he said.

There he joined in a protest against the North Shore Road, a road called for by a 1940’s development agreement that some say would damage a contiguous forest.

He said the Smokies were beautiful, but that even there, the vacation wasn’t total.

“Even at 6,600 feet it was warm and even at 6,600 feet I ran into a UNC faculty member.”

Harrison then journeyed on to Louisville where he visited his college roommate.

He and his family then went to his mother-in-law’s farm in Ohio.

There, picking blueberries, not development plans, was the order of the day.

 

Contact the City Editor at citydesk@unc.edu.