Visitor on Dix Park delay: 'Shame on you'

Former Pittsburgh Mayor Tom Murphy had some strong words Wednesday about the lack of progress in turning the Dorothea Dix Hospital campus into a showcase urban park.

Murphy was in Raleigh to speak at an innovation summit attended by 175 business people, tech professionals, marketers and government officials.

A signature park would help Raleigh become known as hip and forward-looking, Murphy said. He was discussing qualities needed to attract entrepreneurs.

Murphy is familiar with the Dix property. In 2006, he was part of a group from the nonprofit Urban Land Institute that studied how to turn the psychiatric hospital campus near downtown into a park. "Nothing's happened," he said. "Shame on you."

Murphy may have been speaking to the wrong audience. Raleigh government and business leaders strongly support plans for the park, but the final decision belongs to state officials who control the land. The state has not yet agreed on an asking price or timeline.

Chilton: Pick up waste debate

Hand Carrboro Mayor Mark Chilton the oven mitts.

Chilton is asking Orange County leaders to consider building a solid waste transfer station - two years after the county voted to send future trash to a Durham transfer station. Why pick up the political hot potato now? Chilton says trucking garbage to Durham - to be loaded onto bigger trucks for disposal at a distant landfill - will cost his town and Chapel Hill an extra $750,000 a year.

Keeping the transfer station closer to home would save enough money to provide sewer connections to residents near the current landfill, the chief compensation they're seeking for putting up with the trash since the 1970s.

But it would take a couple of years to build the station, and it's still not clear where the trash would be sent from there. And the proposal means keeping the landfill open past the county's pledged 2013 closing.

That has landfill neighbors and their advocates, who helped defeat previous attempts to site a station in Orange County, bracing for a fight.

"We've been there, done this, didn't work," said Bonnie Hauser, president of Orange County Voice.

Elected officials are scheduled to talk about solid waste issues Thursday night in Chapel Hill.

Group blasts mediation choice

The new Democratic majority on the Wake County school board is facing public criticism from supporters over the decision to reject mediation with 30 protesters who were arrested at school board meetings in 2010.

The Rev. Earl Johnson, pastor of Raleigh's Martin Street Baptist Church and president of the Raleigh-Wake Citizens Association, the city's oldest African American civil-rights group, will hold a press conference Tuesday so that local clergy can "voice our displeasure and disappointment of the (school board's) decision." He will ask the board to back mediation.

Democratic board members have said the decision to reject mediation doesn't mean they wanted trials. But Wake County District Attorney Colon Willoughby said the board's decision means he's going forward with prosecution. "I am asking all clergy who see the immorality and injustice in the board's decision to stand with me and others in this important matter," Johnson said in an email Friday.

Political trails

Johnnie McLean, deputy director of the State Board of Elections, will speak about redistricting and other election law changes at a brown bag lunch of the League of Women Voters of Wake County on Friday. The meeting will be held at the YWCA, 554 E. Hargett St. in Raleigh starting at noon and is open to the public. For more information, call the League at 919-783-5995.

Compiled by staff writers Matt Garfield, Mark Schultz and

T. Keung Hui.