Rebecca Clark Gazebo

Yesterday many members of the community gathered to remember Rebecca Clark and to dedicate the gazebo in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery to her memory. Speakers included former Town Council member Jim Merritt, Mayor Pro Tem Jim Ward, and me. I was asked to speak in my role as chair of the Council naming committee--to talk a little about that process. Here are my remarks.

The Town Council does indeed have a process for naming public structures and facilities after people. To have something named after you by the town is a great honor; it’s not something we do lightly. The first requirement is that the person be no longer living. There are good reasons for that policy, but there’s also a downside: Rebecca Clark is not here with us today to see this honor bestowed upon her.

I think of that old song by the Carter Family,

Give me the roses while I live
Trying to cheer me on.
Useless are flowers that you give
After the soul is gone.

It’s a chilling song, and there's truth in the lyrics. So I’m sorry Ms. Clark is not here to see this day. But I hope I’m not wrong to think that she was appreciated, especially in later years, like on her great community 90th birthday. And I hope I’m not wrong to think that she did recognize that the work she had done for so long, especially in the arena of political organizing and getting people to the polls, did really make a difference.

And certainly her presence is still felt and will be felt for a long time to come, through the memory established here with this gazebo but also in the hearts and minds of so many of us who can still remember vividly long phone conversations with her, in which she had something important to explain, something complicated with deep roots, going way back, are you with me? She wanted to be sure you know how some seemingly intractable problem had gotten to be that way in the first place, are you with me? Something was going on, going wrong, and it needed to be fixed.

We’re still trying to fix it all, Ms. Clark. We’re with you—and we’re grateful that you were with us and that you stuck with us and worked with us for so long.

HOPE Gardens

Yesterday it was my pleasure to speak at the dedication of the HOPE Gardens, a community garden on town-owned land sponsored by the Homeless Outreach Poverty Education arm of the UNC Campus Y. The bountiful garden serves as a transitional employment center for homeless people. At the dedication event were workshops on sustainable agriculture, a garden art project, tours and lunch with salad fresh from the garden. Here are my remarks.

Greetings on behalf of the Chapel Hill Town Council, and thanks to everyone involved, including Butch Kisiah and his Parks and Recreation staff, as well as our partners at Active Living By Design, who worked closely with the HOPE group to make this happen. Congratulations to David Baron and the whole HOPE team.

I also bring thanks and greetings from the Orange County Partnership to End Homelessness, for which I serve on the executive team. HOPE is one of our most important and active partners. We are grateful for all the work they do, including their publication of Talking Sidewalks, which puts a face on homelessness in our community, and the Community Empowerment Fund, which makes the crucial connection between the economic realities of the homeless and the importance of community support.

And then this fabulous community garden. As a council member and a community member I could not be more pleased.

The state of being homeless is such an unsettling, unnerving state that we don't even have a consistent word for it. “Homelessness,” the word we now use, describes a lack—it’s a description for something you don’t have. Generations ago, it was called other things: vagabond, gypsy, tramp, hobo. Sometimes it was just said that you had been put “outdoors.” A character in Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye, Cholly Breedlove, does that to his whole family: he throws them out of the house, puts them “outdoors.” On this unhappy state Morrison reflects,

Outdoors . . . was the real terror of life. . . . If somebody ate too much, he could end up outdoors. If somebody used too much coal, he could end up outdoors. People could gamble themselves outdoors, drink themselves outdoors. . . .

Outdoors was the end of something, an irrevocable, physical fact, defining and complementing our metaphysical condition. [The difference between being put out and being put outdoors was] like the difference between the concept of death and being, in fact, dead. Death doesn’t change, and outdoors is here to stay.

So for me at least the very thought of even this beautiful outdoor garden space is tinged by the knowledge that for a few of those among us, the outdoors is all that is, all that is theirs.

But thankfully there are other ways to think about gardens and the outdoors and bodies in need. Wendell Berry has perhaps said it best:

One of the most important resources that a garden makes available for use, is the gardener's own body. A garden gives the body the dignity of working in its own support. It is a way of rejoining the human race.

In an essay called “The Body and the Earth,” he observes that “no matter how urban our life, our bodies live by farming; we come from the earth and return to it. . . . While we live our bodies are moving particles of the earth, joined inextricably both to the soil and to the bodies of those other living creatures.”

What Berry beautifully describes is the connectedness of body and earth: The word “health” itself, he notes, is related to the words heal, whole, wholesome, hale, hallow, and holy. “And so it is possible to give a definition to health that is positive and far more elaborate than that given to it by most medical doctors.”

And he links health and community: “Persons cannot be whole alone. . . . Healing is impossible in loneliness; it is the opposite of loneliness. Conviviality is healing.” Connection, too, is healing: “Connection is health.”

“In gardening, “ Berry continues, “one works with the body to feed the body. The work, if it is knowledgeable, makes for excellent food. And it makes one hungry. The work thus keeps the eater from getting fat and weak. This is health, wholeness, a source of delight.”

And so this cycle of work and exercise, community and conviviality, wholeness and health and happy eating—the nourishment of the body and the earth—this is what HOPE Gardens is all about. Please join with me in thanking everyone involved in this great project and wishing them lasting success, season after season.

Why I am enthusiastically supporting Mark Kleinschmidt for mayor

It has been my pleasure to serve on the Town Council for six years with Mark Kleinschmidt, and now I want to add my voice to those urging you to vote for him for mayor. Mark has been in leadership positions on important initiatives, helping to create the conditions that have led Chapel Hill—just this year—to being named both America’s Most Livable City and Best Place in the Country to Start a Business. Such honors are regularly earned by Chapel Hill, in large part because of progressive policy decisions that have led to our phenomenally successful fare-free transit system (7 million rides a year), the purchase and maintenance of open space and parklands, and other environmentally important initiatives including a strong stormwater management program and land use ordinances that protect the natural environment. With Mark’s leadership, we have achieved these goals and more, all the while maintaining a AAA bond rating (a rarity for small cities).

As chair of the Council’s economic development committee, Mark oversaw the town’s hiring of its first economic development officer, and he continues to take a leadership position in working to bring new business to town. Mark is also a strong advocate for the Downtown Partnership, which has been working to improve the life of the downtown through creating open wireless network; revitalizing the street life by hiring musicians to perform on the sidewalks; championing a new lighting system; and more.

In our successful negotiations with UNC over the development agreement for Carolina North, I witnessed Mark’s persuasive leadership on important issues such as fiscal equity and the permanent conservation of open space.

In the current climate—when many of us are faced with at least a double hit, from the recession generally and last year’s property reevaluations in particular—the economy, and taxes, are important issues. Mark is committed to maintaining a lean, efficient town government. But I am proud of him for what he hasn’t said: he has not uttered the words “No new taxes.” Why not? Because one Council member alone—even if he is the mayor—does not have the power to make that decision. And further, because such a pledge is bad policy. It puts too much at risk—including the planned expansion of the public library that the voters have overwhelmingly supported in a bond referendum.

As a community we have worked diligently and prudently to establish several long-range community goals. In recent years we've established a debt management fund that makes it less likely that we will have to raise taxes in order to achieve these goals, but adopting the mantra of no new taxes promises only to replicate the failed fiscal policies that endangered public services for our nation in the early 90s and for our state earlier this decade. We knew what a great town Chapel Hill was even before the National Conference of Mayors named us the Most Livable City in America, but in order to continue to live up to that recognition we need to remain true to the community process and the priorities we have set for ourselves. We must not give in to feel-good rhetoric that has the potential to put even basic services on the chopping block. Mark trusts our community to work through issues carefully, through broad and open public deliberations, as the best way of deciding what we value enough to fund and what we can live without.

Mark is a leader, a listener, and a proven team-builder. I’ve seen these qualities demonstrated consistently for my six years on the Council. He will be a great mayor. I urge you to join me in casting your vote for him on Tuesday.