Cheerful faces of speedwells are a sure sign of spring. Photo by Ken Moore

At the base of the utility pole on the Weaver Street Market corner of Weaver and Greensboro streets is a beautiful little garden of speedwells and dandelions and other close-to-the-ground, early-spring flowering weeds. There are several of these miniature gardens scattered beneath the big post oaks at the corner.

Signaling spring’s arrival, those blue speedwells are flowering now in many yards throughout our neighborhoods. You may even spot patches of blue in the medians as you drive around our towns on Fordham Boulevard.

You may also have them in your yard, but you may move too quickly to enjoy them and the diversity of other flowers scattered there. But if you have one of those turf-grass lawns, regularly maintained with fertilizers and herbicides, you won’t have a spring-flowering yard.

To have such a yard, you must set about to cultivate a “freedom lawn.” Such a lawn is not really too much of a challenge to create and maintain. To succeed, all you have to do is nothing. Your yard will become filled with all sorts of volunteer plants. In flower now is an assortment of winter annuals that begin growing in the late fall and burst forth with flowers close to the ground in early February. Flowering close down on the ground seems to be an advantage during cold weather.

You may have to get down on hands and knees for some “belly-button botany” observations to appreciate the floral display. My truly favorite of all the many early-spring yard flowers is the beautiful little speedwell, Veronica persica. Hundreds of blue flowers greeted my downward glances as I was hanging out the laundry in my yard a couple of days ago. I never cease to be humbled by the clean beauty of this quarter-inch broad, four-petal flower when examined at close range.

Chickweed flower petals resemble rabbit ears. Photo by Ken Moore

Rather than curse the lowly chickweed, being a lazy, carefree gardener, I simply let this early-spring annual romp around on the yard and through garden beds. The tender foliage makes a tasty addition to salads and it is a special treat relished by parakeets. By late spring, it’s gone, out of sight, until the next winter.

Another lawn weed is the purple dead nettle, Lamium purpureum. Sometimes in my yard, low clumps of these plants seem to join together and move like waves of pinkish flowers across the wild landscape. Upon close observation, each flower makes me think of a turtle head reaching out from beneath those leafy bracts to sniff the warming air.

Speedwell, chickweed and dead nettle accompanied the Europeans to North America long ago. I enjoy having them romp around the yard early in the spring ahead of the larger garden flowers.

At its meeting at Town Hall, the council reviewed a proposed inclusionary-zoning ordinance aimed at expanding the range of housing stock and making more of it available to low- and moderate-income families.

For more than a decade, the council has required developers seeking zoning changes or special-use permits to make 15 percent of a project’s housing units affordable. The current system relies mainly on the Community Home Trust to manage the affordable units created under the town’s current system.

Critics of the system in place say it doesn’t produce enough multi-bedroom units and does not offer enough flexibility in accepting payments in lieu to cover the rising maintenance costs the trust faces as the affordable-housing stock grows.

Affordable housing has been a long-running concern in Chapel Hill as rising housing costs have pushed lower- and moderate-income families — including teachers, police and service and trade workers — farther from town.

In an overview of the new ordinance and the need for it, former town planning director Roger Waldon, a consultant to the town on the rules, emphasized the need for a more comprehensive way to achieve affordable-housing goals.

“A large category of the workforce here in Chapel Hill can’t afford to live here,” Waldon said, “and it has been a community goal to maintain a diverse community and to have people who work here be able to live in the community.”

Waldon pointed to a study conducted last year by Spencer Cowan of UNC’s Center for Urban and Regional Studies that looked at the housing needs for trade and service workers and others generated by new residential construction.

“The conclusion of that report and many others is that the market is not providing housing for the full range of people who work in Chapel Hill and would like to live here,” Walden said.

The new rules, he said, would be more thoroughly spelled out for developers and give them more incentive to build to a greater density if more affordable units are included. That would allow them to recoup some of the costs of adding affordable units.

“Developers are able to get some significant density bonuses to help offset those costs,” Waldon said.

Although many states use similar rules, only two jurisdictions in North Carolina, Davidson and Manteo, have inclusionary zoning. In Chapel Hill, it is not a new concept. The council formed an Inclusionary Zoning Task Force, led by council member Sally Greene, in September 2005.

One significant change in the new rules would be to provide units that are affordable to people making 65 percent of the median income of Chapel Hill. The current system sets the affordability threshold at 80 percent of the median income, which this year is $57,050 for a family of four.

Greene and others have argued that in order to include the types of households the town wants to assist, the threshold has to be lowered.

At Monday’s meeting, Greene said one problem left to be solved is how to guarantee that the lower-priced units don’t end up as one-bedroom units, as they often do now.

Council member Jim Ward said he also wanted to see the types of units expanded, saying too many units are smaller, one-bedroom ones. The council, he said, needs greater flexibility.

“Maybe it should be 15 percent of bedrooms,” Ward said, “or 15 percent of bathrooms or 15 percent of value. Fifteen percent of units is not getting us where we need to go.”

Ward said he was in general support of the plan, but wanted to make sure the units would be kept affordable in the long run.

Greene said that the town likely would have to do more oversight of the units to make sure that deed restrictions on pricing would be adhered to with each sale.

The new rules also try to maintain affordability over time through design, such as providing for wider doorways and other features that would allow people to retain their homes longer.

Richard Duncan of NC State’s Center for Universal Design, who encouraged the task force to look at design issues, said lower-income earners can have trouble staying in the same home because of the cost of upfitting it as it grows older.

The council is expected to take up the ordinance again as early as next month and will continue to take public comment on the plan, which is on the town’s website at townofchapelhill.org/index.aspx?page=1298

In other action Monday night, the council reviewed a special-use permit for Murray Hill, a 15-unit development on a 1-acre lot on Meadowmont Lane near the Meadowmont Wellness Center. The development includes two affordable-housing units and a $21,250 payment in lieu.

The council also reviewed a concept plan by the university foundation for a 90,000-square-foot expansion of the Kenan-Flagler School of Business Rizzo Conference Center on Dubose Lane at Meadowmont. The expansion would add space for the school’s executive-development, continuing-education program, along with 80 additional guest rooms and 168 parking places.

Ashley Osment at home Photo by Ava Barlow

But Bernie Siegel, author of the 1986 bestseller Love, Medicine & Miracles and coiner of such mass-consumed aphorisms as “The simple truth is that happy people generally don’t get sick,” makes Osment want to undo it all. After reading one of his books, she says, “I just wanted to have a book burning, of Bernie Siegel’s positive thinking.”

Not that she ever would. But that she would even consider book burning is testament to the anger Osment sometimes feels, unapologetically, at the twisted victimization to which people with cancer are routinely subjected: The suggestion that if you aren’t getting better, it’s your own fault, and the attendant commercialization, the commoditization, of her cancer.

“There are just all these demeaning, very gender-based symbols,” Osment says of all the pink ribbons and cuddly bears. “‘Hold this and think positively, because, damn it, you caused your own cancer by not being positive.’ That really [ticks] me off.”

“I think that you can be miserable,” she says, “and it’s a mistake to let your misery define your last experience on Earth.”

There are ways, Osment believes, to express the pain and fear, the despair in contemplating the very real possibility of your 13-year-old daughter growing into womanhood without you along to witness and guide – to carry all those things and allow them to comingle with, and better inform, the joy and wonder and vast awareness of yourself that has emerged from this experience. There’s room for it all.

And while Osment – 46 years old and two years, eight months now with cancer – can appreciate the good intentions behind the admonitions she receives most every day to “keep fighting,” she would like to make it known that despite how she may verbalize it, she is fighting – that six rounds of conventional cancer therapies, chemotherapy and radiation; and the alternative treatments, the high-dose intravenous vitamin C, massive ingestions of nutritional supplements, the fermented soy and repeated fasting – that these should be pretty clear indications that she’s fighting like hell.

She’ll smile when she can and when she pleases. She smiles quite often. But she’ll grimace when the pain in her hip, where the cancer has now spread, overwhelms her, as it has persistently for months now. Sometimes positively, at others pessimistically, she ponders her reality, and here’s how she’s come to see it:

“You can take two identical cancer patients, with the identical cancer, have them do identically the same thing, and their outcomes will be really different,” Osment said in a video produced by the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, where she’s received much of her care. “The most positive person in the world could kick over in two months and a curmudgeon lives for 20 years.

“So this whole thing about mind over matter, I think, misses the mark in terms of the complexity of the enemy here.”

“I’m furious.”

Cancer fights dirty. On July 2, 2007, when Osment was first diagnosed with carcinosarcoma, a rare and aggressive form of ovarian cancer, she was told her chances of recovery were nine in 10. On July 30, 2008, her CT scan revealed a metastasis to her lungs. “The summary is that the news of my cancer recurrence brings a statistically bad prognosis and an indefinite future of cancer treatment,” she wrote to friends at the time. “I have too many tumors for surgery, so chemotherapy – carboplatin, taxol and avastin – are the conventional things I’m throwing at this.”

“The news was unexpected,” she said recently, in the Chapel Hill home she shares with her husband, civil-rights attorney Al McSurely, and daughter Sunny. She’s propped gingerly on the living room couch, an unsuccessful attempt at alleviating the incessant pain in her hip. Her eyes burn – the fire of Ashley Osment that everyone who’s known her knows well, now refined. “They had told me I had a better than 90 percent chance of no recurrence, because my cancer was caught very early.”

In the Lineberger video, Osment spoke of the occasion of learning she had cancer as a “discrete” event.

That was the lawyer in Osment speaking. “In the law,” she explains, “a discrete fact is an isolated thing.” Being the practical, purposeful person that she is, that would be the way she would view it – as a thing to be dealt with and discarded.

But it would pretty much change everything.

“I basically don’t even remember life before cancer,” she says. In fact, she’s no longer even certain who that woman in the Lineberger video is, the Ashley Osment of several treatments ago.

Is she angry? “I’m furious.” How so? “You name it. I mean, it’s stolen everything. It’s going to steal me from my daughter.”

Sunny is fully aware of what her mother is living. There’s no hiding it. She knows how many milligrams of Oxycontin her mom takes. She and her mom are very connected. Osment couldn’t deceive her if she wanted to.

“I used to be a little more confident that it was just making her stronger,” Osment says of Sunny’s experience with her mother’s cancer, “and now I’m worried that it’s getting traumatic. It’s gone on too long, and I’m just getting beat up. And I worry. It’s not like a household with domestic violence, but it’s traumatizing.”

But Osment wants her daughter to learn from this that she can survive cancer – she doesn’t want her to think everybody with cancer dies – a complicated message to convey. The everyday, concrete things are salvation. There are bookshelves, built by a friend’s husband, soon to be lined with books that influenced Osment and her friends between the ages of 13 and 23. And anticipation over whether Sunny will make the McDougle Middle School soccer team; no easy feat.

Exploring options

Cancer arrived in Osment’s life just as she was coming into her own in her work.

“I had figured out how to be a lawyer at McSurely & Osment, and had really reached my stride when I moved over to the law school.”

In 2005, she took a position at the UNC Center for Civil Rights, where “my marching orders at the Center for Civil Rights were general and massive.” Osment was charged with building the center into a regional hub for advocacy, litigation and research in addressing school desegregation in the 21st century. “So there was just so much work to be done, and I was just one person, so you have to get really skilled at prioritizing what you do and who you do it with, and I was just starting to figure all that out. So that got stolen from me. It was a job I was born to do.”

Perhaps she’ll yet recover. But Osment equates the probability of being cured by the modalities currently being used as roughly “equivalent to spontaneous combustion. I hate to say that. But I don’t believe my saying it makes it so.”

Osment’s assessment of her prognosis doesn’t keep her from volunteering for clinical trials. She’s open to the possibility that some new therapy will be discovered that will save her life or lead to treatment that saves lives in the next generation, “And I’ll be all over that like a dog on a bone.”

And there are places she sometimes goes to explore her own healing potential.

“A friend of mine brought over an anatomy book full of beautiful drawings by this Japanese artist of body parts. And I’ve looked at the body parts where my cancer is.… And so when I meditate, I think about those places getting well, and not hurting.”

She acknowledges there are contradictions to her approach. On the one hand, she says she doesn’t believe we yet understand the relationship between the brain and healing. “There are plenty of people who are very skilled meditators who die of cancer. I guess what I’d like to do is not be hampered in any way in my exploration of meditation practices, and at the same time not be asked to give up my utter disdain for any blame being put on a cancer patient for their condition. I think everything is dumb luck. Even if maybe you figure out some meditation technique or connection that heals you, it’s dumb luck.

“There’s just so much opportunity to blame the victim, and there’s no more vulnerable population than people who have cancer and are suffering….

“The idea that you would be flat on your back and then be blamed for it at the same time is just unconscionable.”

And the notion of going gently? “You read, ‘Emma Grace died of cancer … and not once in five years did she ever complain.’ How is that possible? I just don’t get it. I cannot imagine not complaining about all the insults and injuries of cancer. What would lead you to not complain?”

In the Lineberger interview, Osment said: “My personal style is not to repress the anger or the depression or the fear, but to not let it become the defining quality of how I live my life as a person with cancer. I really do my very best to acknowledge those feelings, but then do what I can do, right now. So that’s different. Because it used to be I think I would indulge my emotional extremes, before cancer, more than I indulge them now. Now I don’t have time; I don’t have time and I also don’t have the space for the emotional hit of living in the bad moments. They do happen. They’ve got to happen. I let them happen.”

‘What is the fight?’

Awhile back, Osment wrote to friends, “I will do anything and everything I know to do to stay alive for as long as I can. But I also want to prepare for a peaceful death, whether it’s this year, next year, or years far in the future.”

“Once you have cancer, you have a full-time job,” the Ashley Osment of seven months ago told her Lineberger interviewer. “But on top of that, you’ve got the reason you were put on this Earth. I wasn’t put on this Earth to fight cancer.”

“What is the fight?” Osment asks today. “I think the presumption is that if I don’t have a strong will, it’s going to get me; but if I do have a strong will, it slows the cancer down. I don’t know that there’s any evidence to support that. At some point, you’re just being kept alive to be bullied around some more with another medical procedure.”

For now though, bullying it will be; the treatments continue. There will be days of rage at what’s been taken, and days of elation for what life yet holds: Sunny made the soccer team.

In its meeting at Town Hall, the board heard from engineers working with Chapel Hill and Carrboro on the expanded greenway project. Construction is under way for expansion of the greenway from Merritt’s Pasture west, paralleling N.C. 54.

New phases under consideration aim to connect three schools — Frank Porter Graham Elementary, Culbreth Middle and Carrboro High — and more than a dozen neighborhoods. The trail would be paved and Americans with Disabilities Act compliant, with natural surface spurs.

In his presentation to the town, engineer Dan Jewell with Durham-based Coulter Jewell Thames said topography concerns would make a direct connection to Carrboro High difficult, and an alternate route is being explored. Steep slopes also will make work from the elementary school west more difficult.

Also on Tuesday night, the board opted to extend the town’s contract for banking services with Bank of America for six months in order to give the town staff and the board more time to review the impact of a proposed switch to a more local bank.

In other action, the board:

• received an update on transportation planning for Carolina North;

• adopted a resolution in support of the effort to stop coal use at the university’s Cameron Avenue co-generation plant;

• approved a modification for the Claremont subdivision to build three single-family homes on a site intended for six townhome units;

• approved a rezoning request on 500 N. Greensboro St. to allow for its use by Balance Studios;

• approved a sidewalk construction project in conjunction with the N.C. Department of Transportation on Elm Street;

• appointed Mayor Mark Chilton to the greenways commission and reduced the size of the board from 15 to 12 members. The slots eliminated include two of the four slots designated for representatives of the Chapel Hill-Carrboro school system and three alternate members, all of which are unfilled. The move changes the quorum on the committee from eight to six members.

Commission chair George Daniel objected on procedural grounds. “We’re not restructuring the process to suit the concerns of one member,” he said. Commission member Dave Otto pointed out that the concerns Benedict wanted to bring up already had been published in the newspaper.

But Alderman Randee Haven-O’Donnell, board liaison to the commission, emphasized that the parts of the greenways proposal that included creekside paving had been taken off the table by the board of alderman and that it was important that Benedict be allowed to share her concerns. Others supported that view, and Benedict was allowed to read her response.

Benedict’s concerns, which are also those of the advocacy group Save Bolin Creek, include the report’s lack of consideration for alternative path routing, especially given Carolina North’s commitment to building bike lanes to connect the Carolina North campus with central campus. She said the report underestimates the disturbance to wildlife, vegetation and water quality that would result from the heavy machinery required for pavement construction. And she questioned whether as a community Carrboro should ask for an exception from the Jordan Lake Rules, which prohibit disturbance within 30 feet of a stream bank, in order to build a paved bike path.

Commission member Robert Kirchner motioned to include Benedict’s written response in the minutes and table the Greenways discussion until the next meeting. — Staff Reports

Students at Frank Porter Graham Elementary School took advantage of an extra hour of daylight Monday by attending the school’s Readathon night. The Readathon has been an annual event at FPG for 12 years, but this was the first time a family night was included in the two-week fundraiser.

This year’s Readathon theme was “Reading Adventures in Your Backyard,” and, fittingly, the school media center became an outdoor adventure-land filled with tents, canoes, kayaks and even an indoor campfire. The sound of crickets filled the air and the walls were decorated with scenes of mountains.

“What better way to infuse the library than to transform it?” said school librarian Kathryn Cole. “Kids who do not like to read are begging to come down so they can read in the tents and canoes.”

Certainly the media center was a popular place Monday night. In every corner, students paired up with parents or friends to read books by flashlight or lantern. Second-grader Leah Hurwitz climbed into the stern of a canoe while her mother took the bow.

“I like to read over there,” Leah said, pointing toward a cluster of tents and canoes on the far side of the media center. “But I usually don’t get to because I’m slow at picking books.”

Family night also included storytelling by local children’s authors Amy Odom and Rosemarie Gulla, show-and-tell with rehabilitated wild animals by the Piedmont Wildlife Center and a bake sale. Parents were offered ideas on how to support reading at home through BookFlix, an online reading program available to FPG students. The Chapel Hill Public Library also was on hand to sign families up for library cards.

Second-grader Rachel Grau attended family night with her mother and sister. “So far I’ve read about four hours,” she said of Readathon. “My favorite part of tonight was getting to see the animals in the science area.”

Readathon is consistently the school’s most successful fundraiser, raising approximately $10,000 last year. The funds were used to support a variety of school programs including upgrades to the science lab and media center and money for fieldtrips and purchasing classroom supplies. To participate, students set individual goals of the number of minutes they plan to read and ask parents, friends and neighbors to support them with monetary donations.

The student body as a whole is trying to read a grand total of 500,000 minutes. If the students reach the half-million mark, Cole and the school’s science teacher, Liz Stabenow, have agreed to participate in the FPG Challenge: Cole will hold a snake and Stabenow will touch a tarantula while hundreds of excited – and well-read – students look on.

Obesity may limit the body’s ability to develop immunity to influenza viruses, particularly secondary infections, by inhibiting the immune system’s ability to “remember” how it fought off previous similar bouts of illness, according to new research from UNC.

The results, published in the March 15 issue of The Journal of Immunology, support recent suggestions by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that obesity is as much a risk factor for H1N1 pandemic strains of flu as age (very young and very old) and compromised immunity.

Nutrition researchers in the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health have shown that obese mice are not able to develop protective influenza-specific memory T cells. These cells are generated by the body during an initial influenza infection. They help protect against a second infection by targeting internal proteins common among most strains of influenza viruses. Leaner mice were able to develop the infection-fighting T cells and ward off a second bout of influenza.

“Our work suggests that obese people should be considered at high risk for infection,” said Erik Karlsson, doctoral candidate in nutrition and lead author of the study.

The researchers infected lean and obese mice with a mild influenza virus. The lean mice had been fed a low-fat diet and obese mice had been fed a high-fat diet. When the mice recovered from the first bout of flu, they were infected a second time, with a larger dose of a more lethal influenza strain.

“We lost none of the lean mice, but 25 percent of obese mice died,” Karlsson said.

This research builds on a study published in The Journal of Nutrition in 2007. Melinda Beck, UNC professor of nutrition, is the senior author of both studies.

“In the first study, we compared the response of obese and lean mice to a primary influenza infection,” Beck said. “We found that obese mice had a significantly higher mortality rate than lean mice. In fact, 42 percent of obese mice died, while only 5.5 percent of lean mice died.”

During flu seasons, health-care practitioners often see obese patients struggling more with influenza viruses than leaner patients. Some researchers and doctors have speculated that excess adipose tissue, or fat, constricts lung volume, or that obesity causes chronic inflammation, which influences the immune response.

However, Beck and her colleagues hypothesize that the illness’ increased severity may be due to lower memory T cell defenses in obese patients.

“In a healthy individual, memory T cells would be produced during the initial influenza infection,” she said. “Those cells help protect the individual from a second infection. The response is different from a vaccine, which produces antibodies against a specific strain. The memory T cells target internal proteins common to all strains of the virus. But if the body can’t produce these T cells during a primary infection, then the individual has decreased protection from a second infection if the antibody response is not targeted towards the infecting strain.”

The new study, by Karlsson, Beck and Patricia Sheridan, UNC research assistant professor of nutrition, shows strong evidence that obesity restricts memory T cell function.

“This kind of novel research could influence public health by changing our views of what the risks factors of obesity are,” Karlsson said. “The risks are potentially much more complicated than we’ve thought.”

The next step in Beck’s research on obesity effects on influenza is to examine vaccination. In collaboration with researchers in the UNC School of Medicine, Beck’s laboratory is running a large National Institutes of Health-sponsored human clinical trial to test the efficacy of influenza vaccination in obese adults

A couple weeks ago, U.S. senators John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) introduced the “Start-up Visa Act” to promote job creation in businesses owned by non-U.S. citizens. The proposal suggests a two-year visa for immigrant entrepreneurs who can attract at least $250,000 in angel or venture capital financing. If the firm adds at least five non-family employees, attracts $1 million in financing or earns $1 million in revenue, the owner’s visa becomes permanent. According to research from the Kauffman Foundation, immigrants have founded about 25 percent of the technology companies in the United States, employing tens of thousands of Americans.

The proposed bill could be a boon to people here on H-1B visas – a non-immigrant visa that lasts up to six years and is awarded to highly skilled workers in “specialty” fields such as technology, biotech, architecture, science and engineering. It’s a sweet deal, including vacation, sick and maternity/paternity leave. Recipients can even bring their spouses and kids in. About 65,000 of these visas are granted annually.

Unfortunately, the Kerry-Lugar proposal won’t do anything at all for immigrants who are here on other types of visas. That’s why Kauffman Foundation economist Robert Litan is advocating for a temporary “job-creators’ visa” for immigrants already legally in the U.S. Like the original bill, Litan’s proposed visa would be extended when the firm hires at least one American non-family member, and would become permanent once the enterprise crosses a certain job threshold.

The bills are both nice ideas, but they’re unlikely to have an enormous impact on job creation. Unemployment is still incredibly high (14.9 million people, or 9.7 percent of the U.S. population), and it seems unlikely that even the most enterprising entrepreneurs will be able to create enough jobs to make a dent in that startling figure.

What would help, according to Chapel Hill immigration attorney Adrián Halpern, is another approach entirely.

“Thanks to the extra layer of lawyering required to comply with federal and state securities regulations, the Start-up Visa Act will help relatively few immigrants, and whether any of them will turn into the next Andy Grove or Sergey Brin is quite speculative,” Halpern notes. “Far more helpful to our nation’s job creation would be Congress’ passage of comprehensive immigration reform and a path to legal status for most of the estimated 12 million people in the U.S. illegally.”

Comprehensive immigration reform would help the economy, Halpern suggests, because many adult immigrants who are here illegally have held off buying homes because of their highly uncertain futures. While that’s good news for rental-property landlords, it doesn’t do much for the local or national economy.

“If their concerns over their U.S. futures were lifted, many of the 12 million ‘illegals’ here would likely buy homes, providing a huge boost to our nation’s economy,” Halpern says.

“Yes, the Start-up Visa Act will help some, but its benefits pale compared to those of comprehensive reform. Now, more than ever, comprehensive immigration reform is in our nation’s economic self-interest.”

Uniquities expands

All the economic news isn’t bad. Following the wisdom that a downturn is a great time to expand (and yes, that is a prevailing thought among big-brained business people), Julie Jennings opened another Uniquities store in Durham across from Bright Leaf Square at 1000 West Main Street.

“Because of the recession, we reanalyzed everything, every line, every dollar we spend,” Jennings explains. “And we have more negotiating power. When things are great and when people want space, you’re not getting a deal. But with things the way they are, we got in for a great price and can be ready for the turnaround.”

It wasn’t just the timing that prompted the expansion, Jennings says.

“We’ve been looking in Durham off and on for 10 years, so when the space came up, we had to take it.”

This is Jennings’ fourth location. In addition to the West Franklin Street and Main Street locations, she has stores in Raleigh’s Cameron Village and North Hills shopping centers.

Local pharma tests drug compounds

Chapel Hill’s Cempra Pharmaceuticals completed Phase 1 studies for CEM-101, a next-generation macrolide that is a potential oral treatment for bacterial pneumonia. The next step is Phase 2 studies in patients with moderate to moderately severe community-acquired bacterial pneumonia, which will begin in the second quarter. The company also has filed an initial new drug application with the FDA for a Phase 1 study of the compound’s intravenous formula. New therapies for bacterial pneumonia are important because of rising drug resistance and issues of patient tolerance with current treatments. More than five million people get pneumonia each year.

Soeters named ESC chair

Bill Soeters, owner of the UPS Store at Carrboro Plaza, was elected chairman of the Carrboro Economic Sustainability Commission (ESC) last week. He replaced Peter Lee, who will remain on the commission. The eight-member ESC evaluates commercial growth, development and redevelopment against the town’s sustainability goals and triple bottom-line sustainability principles. It also promotes job growth and economic opportunity and administers the Revolving Loan Fund. (Disclosure: The Citizen received a loan from that fund in 2009.) One of Soeters’ first tasks will be reviewing the Local Living Economy Task Force’s recommendation to undertake a Think Local First campaign. Other task force recommendations are under consideration by the Town’s Economic Development Office.

County assesses housing options

Orange County is preparing a five-year Consolidated Housing Plan for 2010-15. As a part of that process, it contracted with consultant W. Frank Newton Inc. to survey the public about housing needs and issues. Orange County residents can complete the form at surveymonkey.com/s/3KCSQSN or contact the Office of Human Rights and Relations at 245-2488 for a paper copy. Those who complete the survey will be eligible to win a $100 gift card. Survey data will help the county develop strategies, policies and programs that address the community’s fair housing needs.

KFC MIA

You may have noticed the abrupt departure of the Carrboro Kentucky Fried Chicken store. Practically a local landmark, the business had operated at the location for about half a century before losing its lease last month. Town Economic Develop Director James Harris is working with the owners who “would love to find a new location that would accommodate a dining room. It would be even better if they could have a drive-through window.

You may have noticed it already, but you’ll be starting to see a certain byline a little more frequently — mine.

Usually I reserve the Letter from the Editor marking the beginning of another year at The Citizen (we began publishing in March 2007) for some thoughts — lofty, snarky and in between — about the state of the news business. Mind you, there’s still plenty to be curmudgeonly about. This year, though, I’d like to offer a more personal note about some changes we are working on to take this paper to the next level.

One of the major changes is that Taylor Sisk has moved into the managing editor role and up to full-time. He’s taking on the bulk of the operations side of the newsroom and will also be writing more stories.

The purpose of that move is to get me doing more reporting and a little less desk work. I’m the first to admit that the day-to-day (or week-to-week, if you will) was burning me out. There’s a lot of stress in putting out a quality weekly paper and keeping up with a really swell website. (More about that change next week.)

For me, the biggest stress was not being able to do what I enjoy and perhaps what I do best. For most of the 25 years I’ve lived here, I’ve been involved in newspapers. The times I felt most alive and the job meant the most was when I had the opportunity to be the eyes and ears of the community.

It’s often been less than exotic work, involving lots of budget meetings and planning and zoning issues. (Yeah, I know; I get goose bumps when I think about those things too.) But when you stick around a place, you get to know people, and with that you become part of the community. You start caring what happens. In some circles in the journalism world, this is unfortunately viewed with disdain, and local knowledge is devalued. In my book, that detachment explains why the profession lost its way.

When Jock Lauterer’s community journalism class visits each semester, I try to talk to the students about human-scale journalism and ground-level reporting. These days, most of what passes for reporting takes place at least a few hundred feet above the action. But since most humans I know don’t live up there, much of what passes for writing misses the mark. Too many reporters write for their editors and not their readers, trying to explain a story from a small place such as ours to a much broader audience. I’m thankful for not having to define Carrboro, Chapel Hill, Chatham and Hillsborough for the rest of the Triangle or state or nation in each story.

You may not notice the changes at The Citizen right at first. But they’ll be in the substance of the paper — the choice of stories, their depth and the way they’re reported.

This is your newspaper — written, edited, composed and argued over in your community. Our success depends solely on whether we do a good enough job to be relevant to our readers and offer a good deal for our advertisers.

I look forward to our new year and spending a little more time at ground level with y’all. Feel free to drop me a line or call.

After three pretty exhausting years, I can finally say with some confidence, “Yeah, I got a minute.” Maybe even two or three.

I have under my care two community newspapers. The Citizen is one of them, and the other is The News-Journal, which tells the story of Raeford and Hoke County in southeastern North Carolina, where my sister Anne and I were raised to become the third generation of our family to run the local paper.

By coincidence, The Citizen and The News-Journal have the same birthday, in the second week of March. The News-Journal just happens to have been at it for a few more years. A hundred and one more, to be exact.

Down in Raeford, we might not make a big deal of our birthday after all these years. Here at The Citizen, though, we’ve got a real feeling of accomplishment, having finished our third year amid uncertain economic times and almost-daily pronouncements of the death of newspapers.

Community newspapers are doing pretty well, thank you. No, I mean that. Thank you, to our readers and advertisers, who have proven they understand the value of a locally owned and operated newspaper.

And a really big thank-you to all our contributors who help bring this weekly ode to our community, and who do it for little or nothing. These include Val, Ken, Phil, Jock, Margot, Ava, Michelle, Don, Rich, Steve, Kate, Charlie, Mike, Lucy, Martin, Mark and someone I’ve forgotten who I really wish I hadn’t. Thanks, y’all. You’re the best.

We’ve recently made a few changes that Kirk will tell you about elsewhere on this page. It’s all about continuing to look for ways to bring you a better newspaper with the resources available to us.

One change we made over the past year was to increase our distribution by 20 percent. We now distribute 6,000 newspapers to more than 150 locations without throwing unwanted copies in anyone’s driveway. Readership has grown along with circulation: This past February, not the most pleasant of months weather-wise, readers picked up more than 86 percent of the Citizens that were distributed. As the year goes on, expect all these numbers to rise.

Another change we’ve made is posting the electronic version of The Citizen, the complete paper in PDF format, to our website every Thursday morning. You can read a fair number of back issues in this format, as well as Mill and the Carrboro Resource Guide. More than 500 of you read our newspaper this way every week, and that number is growing too.

One of our goals when we started The Citizen was to ensure that anyone could afford to read our newspaper. That’s why we don’t charge for the papers or the content on our websites, and why we’ll continue to make them available at no cost.

Readers of The News-Journal, though, purchase copies either at the newsstand or by subscription. It’s been that way for 104 years, and newspaper sales have enabled the paper to weather tough economic times, when advertising hasn’t been plentiful enough to cover all the costs of producing the quality news coverage our readers expect.

The newspaper you’re reading now, print or web, also has a cost. And even with our success at convincing advertisers that The Citizen is a great way to convey their message, ad sales have not been sufficient to sustain the quality journalism you tell us you want. And since our goal is to expand our coverage and our distribution, to make even more of a difference in our community, we do need to find another source of revenue.

Over the last three years, many of you have asked us what you can do to help. Soon we’ll offer you a way to do just that, to pay for something you’ve told us repeatedly you really like and appreciate. We’re going to ask you to subscribe to the newspaper and website. Not in the traditional sense, like The News-Journal, but with a virtual subscription, which will be completely voluntary. We’ll continue to distribute the paper at no charge, but with the hope that those of you who value The Citizen and want to keep it around for 104 years will buy a subscription to help sustain it. So watch this space.

Bringing you this newspaper the last three years has been an amazing journey. I’ve been involved in startup publications before, but your reaction to The Citizen has been nothing short of extraordinary, and nothing my experience could have prepared me for.

So thanks for reading The Citizen and for making us feel welcome in your lives. The pleasure is all ours.