Official 'charity' isn't new [Understanding Durham dysfunction: a rather lengthy history]
Author: Jim Wise; Staff Writer, N&O, May 7, 2005
You gotta hand it to former Durham City Manager Marcia Conner. Out of the job almost a year now, and still costing Bull citizens money.
A veritable executive's executive. Even by Durham standards.
Last month a jury awarded Ava Hinton $1.59 million for her unfair dismissal from the city payroll on Conner's watch. Durham's lawyers wheedled Hinton down to settling for $390,000, but then our City Council agreed to pay Conner's former assistant, Sharon Laisure --- who signed off on Hinton's firing --- $30,736 in severance and unused-vacation pay, even though she has another job in Norfolk, Va.
According to news reports, Laisure had the Norfolk job in hand before she went off Durham's payroll, but apparently thought she had grounds for a lawsuit, thanks to the severance clause put into her contract by Conner, who left office in August under fire but with a reported $164,991.25 of your money and mine to keep her cool.
Marcia the formerly Great and Powerful took a lot of heat during her three years as Durham's CEO, but in these latest cases a charitable soul might cut her a little slack. For there were precedents.
Remember James Tabron, the administrator who made the Durham Housing Authority what it is today? He resigned under fire too, in 2003. He got no severance package, just a few months' consulting work for DHA at $2,576.50 a week.
Talk about "worker's" compensation --- Trevor Hampton had no severance deal either when he left as police chief in 1992. He was under fire too, and left with $20,000 --- three months' pay; however, he was subsequently cleared of allegations a prostitution ring was running through his department.
Hampton was followed by the late Jackie McNeil, who took early retirement in 1997. McNeil had already given up his administrative duties in the wake of sexual-harassment accusations; officers filed two lawsuits against him (eventually dismissed) and the city settled a reported 19 officers' claims for work-related stress during his tenure; meantime, Durham had a record 43 murders in 1996. Since the city counted his military stint as time in Durham's service, McNeil pocketed full retirement benefits, plus $46,602 from a new, temporary city policy that rewarded early retirement.
That policy was devised by then-City Manager Orville Powell, who retired early at the end of 1996 with his own a going-away present of almost $70,000 plus a $30,000 consulting job with the city to help ease his transition.
Earlier, Powell arranged for fired Durham County Manager George Williams to perform an $11,000 survey of the city's cemetery needs. One of his recommendations was using telephone solicitors to hawk burial plots. Williams' brother-in-law is veteran City Council member Howard Clement.
Indeed, in Durham charity is a way of life. Depending, of course, on just whose life you're talking about. Marcia Conner wasn't with us very long, but she sure caught on that, in Du'm, public officials take care of their own.
One house that's long overdue
Jim Wise, Staff Writer, N&O, Nov 18, 2006
Durham County took another step this week toward a new courthouse, exercising its right of eminent domain (not, of course, to be confused with the right of prima nocte) to grab the requisite U-Haul property on Mangum Street.
Latest estimates seem to put the courthouse's price at around $122 million (about twice what was estimated just three years ago) and occupation around 2011. Start dates and completion dates are pretty fluid where our town's public works are concerned. Just think of your favorite pothole. But whenever Durham County's fourth place of doing its business gets finished it will already be 30-some years overdue.
That's because the current courthouse -- aka Judicial Building -- was out of date already when it opened, a year late, in 1978. Or so had said a local committee of the bar, which determined soon after construction was under way that the place wasn't going to be big enough.
So much for good intentions.
It was 119 years ago -- Nov. 17, 1887 -- when Durham began its first courthouse. The state's good Baptists were convening in town (the same town they would declare, less than five years later, was not a fit place for young women and so located their Meredith College in Raleigh), so there was a good crowd on hand when Durham's dignitaries paraded from the Claiborn Hotel (present site of a parking lot at Corcoran Street and the Loop) down Main Street for laying of the cornerstone with all due Masonic solemnity.
Great oratory, of course, was de rigeur, and attorney James S. Manning rose to the occasion thusly:
"We are assembled today to dedicate a temple of Justice. ... to regard as supreme, to revere as sacred, that law which is the protector of our lives, our liberties and our property."
Such sentiments, no doubt, are comforting to U-Haul. Citizens with a decent respect for property rights can only hope it does as well with its 2.3-acre plot by us taxpayers as the Scarborough & Hargett Funeral Home, which got $3.75 million for its 2.17 acres next door.
Property rights aside, the new courthouse can't get there a minute too soon. Not just because the price of steel goes up every time the Chinese build another skyscraper, but because a six-story building ought to help block the Durham Freeway's view of our other temple of Justice, the county jail.
Lawyer Manning spoke of "the majesty of the law." Somehow, when you have to explain why that Stalinesque monstrosity is our town's most prominent landmark, blind justice is a better idea.
http://www.thedurhamnews.com/109/story/13083.html