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(1) Replacing aging city water lines before the frequent ruptures and leaks become even more common and so severe as well as costly that these in themselves would cause water shortages in addition to droughts caused by future climate changes.

(2) Capping unneccessary growth until infratructure is in place (and built properly) and with at least a 10% reserve in excess to help ward off any unforeseen future problems. Neccessary grow should include tying up loose ends which will make it so that existing development projects can be fit into the larger picture more smoothly so that fewer developers would be left with dead projects half completed, or buildings that remain unoccupied. Sometimes a change in used may resolve some of these dilemmas.

(3) Find solutions to the growing homeless people's problems, maybe allowing those who are fit and able to be paid for collecting roadside litter in locations deemed safe enough to do so. This may help distinquish the truly homeless from those posing as homeless but in reality are actually panhandlers. As for those homeless people who are disabled or otherwise not fit to work there needs to be more rehabilitation facilities in place to shelter and retrain these folks with new vocations in ways which can lead them into become productive citizens again and thereby allowing these people to once again find homes.

(4) Setting aside plenty of green space before attempting to develop lands around them and to protect the quality of the watersheds in North Carolina - in other words there is much need for better long range planning. This also includes unbiased studies to reveal what natural resources such as water supplies, etc should be in place before development can proceed and to not exceed these limits. These limits should be sited as approximately 10% below the actual limits to allow a buffer zone against any unforeseen problems as well.

(5) With all development, schools and other neccessary public services should be planned and built at the same time and with impact fees collected so this can be accomplished in a timely manner without placing the burden upon the people who have moved into these areas later. Roads and highways could be in part included with these impact fees as well.

(6) Bring back neighborhood schools but have all schools up to equal par regardless of the incomes and ethnic diversity within each neighborhood involved. This will save large sums of transportation costs as well as allow for greater parent involvement in their childrens educations.

(7) A much greater emphasis needs to be in place for historic preservation especially in and near rapidly expanding regions where development is occuring at such a break-neck speed that a lot of historic sites are being lost before anyone even knews they were at risk. Once they are gone, they cannot be replaced. In my opinion, any society that does not value the history of the area they live in enough to protect and preserve it will in turn find their own history erased by future generations.

This article touches on many issues but like many fails to sound a strong enough alarm bell to warrant the immediate attention deserved. Speaking strictly of power supply and efficiency Americans must accept the fact that with 6-7% of the population we consume 26-27% of the energy and resources produced world-wide. Unfortunately, foreign countries see us as "rich" and our following our model of growth. This is entirely unsustainable and fortells obvious problems for us all.

The Green Bible is a book called Natural Capitalism and should be read by anyone interested in Green. To solve these problems we have to challenge many of the myths that pervade our society and begin to change a "use and toss" mentality. As much of folks like me tend to sound the "energy" problem this issue as the author mentions has implications with landfills, true cost of production, water usage/management, and many many others.

My personal pet peeve is the energy industry and the mind blowing reluctance of our elected leaders to see the gathering storm. One only has to look at the state of Maryland to see back to back huge increases in their power bills to see that rampant inefficient use of power eventually provides. Rather than immediately encourage efficiency (by whatever means necessary) Maryland is considering suing the utilities to force re-regulation--again blaming the power companies, utilities, and RTO (transmission organizations) for their piggish use of energy. Of course the root of the problem in most places is no one seemed to asks "can we afford all the buildings we're building if our energy cost increases X%.

The candidates we should be supporting would foster noble ideals like a 24-36 month plan to cut electrical usage nationwide by 30-50%. Any plan to save 10-15% is statistically insignificant and does not get us where we need to be. Rather than dumping $ 160 billion in useless spending to buy or appease voters why not spend $ 150 billion replacing every light fixture in America, replace all toilers and showers with low-flow devices, invest $ 25 billion to create efifcient solar, hybrid cars, or any of the next wave of technologies that are going to let us solve many of these vexing problems. Heaven forbid an American company develops any of these Green Technologies rather than waiting for the Europeans to do so and then clamoring for "protection" against these bad businesses to save American jobs

So once again we have zero leadership from the President, Congress, or any of our elected State officials. Anyone speaking from a production side rather than an efficiency side clearly has clue where the real problem lies. You would think rather than spend $ 1-2 trillion dollars fighting a war in some far away land that by cutting the US power consumption 30% we could become a NET EXPORTER OF OIL. How would that shake up the current geo-political new world order the Bush' seem so high on.

We are being leader by "leaders" that don't understand the problem, choose not to get involved until the problems are past crisis stages, and then we get what we get. Unless they can blame it on someone then their not interested in talking about it

The obvious example of how big business and govenment with their combined lousy leadership guarantees our own demise is the US car industry. When Reagan was elected one of the first things done was to gut laws designed to dramatically increase fuel efficiency in cars. At the time the major US car makers had the dominant market share and re-tooling. redesigning, etc was something they could have afforded and would have cemented their market position. Neither Honda, Toyota, or any foreign car manufacturer could have keep up with a forward thinking Big-3 (proded by a US Govenment bent on efficiency improvements) Instead our government bows to the political pressure of the Big 3, guts the laws, and the Big 3 overtime are killed by companies they could have buried.

I only hope it doesn't take a 75% increase in utility rates (like happened in Maryland) or brown outs like happened in Ca for people to suddenly see energy is in as critical a stage as water.

always fun to tell this story because nobody believes it...

i lived in Silicon Valley from '78 to '05 before moving to Raleigh.  when we moved here, one of my first comments was, "this is just like Silicon Valley was 27 years or so ago... smooth roads, nice, friendly people, not crowded... a great place to live."   27 years later, i was more than ready to move out.  roads were jammed, people on the roads were crude and rude, and most roads had fallen into disrepair.

silicon valley had, over the years, done many things to limit growth.  lots of green space where homes couldn't be built.   opposition to widening highways.  opposition to home building outside of many constrained areas.

but the climate hadn't changed... it was and is still one of the best in the US, if not the world... a Mediterranean climate:  14" of rain a year, on average, almost always in the winter months.  summer temperatures rarely above 90 oF and humidity in the summer rarely higher than 40%.   ever think of playing a fast volleyball game at 104 degrees?  i did the first summer i was there.  "gee, it's hot," i remember thinking... yep.  104 that afternoon.

so, including the growth of companies and the huge job market in good years, tons of people wanted to move there.

and found an extremely limited supply of housing.  plenty of money to be made with startups AND some successful established companies, too, but finding "new land" for a home was either impossible, or a litany of "keep driving until you can afford the house, then buy it and suffer the long commute."   many newcomers commuted in from Los Banos or Tracy, an hour or more each way.  horrible, but the tradeoff was one they were willing to make.

so, the extremely expensive house i bought in 1979, twice the price of my 1200 square feet on 1/4 acre of woods in NJ, was 1600 square feet, but no attic, no basement and one of the two garages was dedicated to storage.  oh, and it was on a 0.1 acre lot, and the fence was six feet from the side walls of my house, and the neighbors' houses were another six feet further away.

something to dream of owning, right?   well, we sold just before the peak of the market, in late summer of 2005.   i got 8.9 times my original purchase price for the same speck of land.   it bought my home here with a lot of money left over for upgrades and fun.   and we went from 0.1 to 0.77 acres, 1700 squares [we'd managed to add 100 square feet to the house over those years] to 3200 before adding another 325 square feet to our new house here, and went from virtually a one-car garage to 3.

so, if you want to limit growth while companies and people want to move here for jobs, smooth, open roads and friendly people, you can expect that in 25 or so years, virtually all homes in Raleigh will have a price range of $1.6 to maybe $10 million and people will be complaining that the commute is terrible because the roads are still as narrow as they were 25 years ago, but there are ten times as many cars on them.

and, of course, the water.   with a land-locked area like silicon valley, you don't just add another million people and have to feed and water them.  they have to buy in surrounding areas.   not so here.   i've asked about dredging Falls Lake to increase its capacity, and been laughed at by virtually all local and state officials i've asked.  

in Santa Clara County, comprising most all of silicon valley, a lot of the water comes from pumps that raise water that is deliberately leached into the sandy soil by settling ponds fed by Lexinton Reservoir in Los Gatos.   During one bad drought a dozen or two years ago, i could go watch dozens of trucks, tractors and bulldozers plowing up the exposed bottom of the reservoir and carting the dirt away.  maybe to sod farms, maybe to farmers, or who knows where?   and that was in one of the most "eco-friendly" states in the country!

here, it takes a few million dollars and several years to STUDY the issue????

here's the thought..... government and utilities can either be about control and rationing or they can be about solutions to add capacity.

from what i've seen here, there is NO willingness [or is it capacity] to make any hard decisions, fund what needs to be done to expand the SUPPLIES of things we need for growth, whether they're roads, water, electric or gas supplies, schools, or whatever.  

as i've written before, if there's a drought and you have to cut your water use 40%, what happens when there are 30% more people tapping the same reservoir a few years later?!   cut back by 60%?   and cut back 80%  another five or ten years down the road?

nah, don't listen to me..... a "government control" and "rationing" solution is obviously more welcome here than any kind of supply-enhancing engineering solution.

i'll be over 90 in 30 years, so if i'm lucky enough to live that long, i will probably have sold my house for about $4 million and retired to an assisted-living place.

don't build more roads, don't dredge the reservoirs, don't pump water from water-rich areas to drought-prone areas, oppose ugly windmills for electric generation, let homeowners' associations outlaw "ugly" solar panels on roofs.....  then reap what ye sow.

plusaf
Northwest Raleigh
27613