I lived in Charlotte for a good long while… so here is a small list of my recommendations for businesses I’d come to know and trust. If you think I’ve forgotten to include you please let me know.

• If you need a real estate agent for personal or investment property talk to Brenny Thompson

• For help finding contractors I preferred Hocoa I always had good experiences from their suggestions.

• For lawn care around downtown I liked Kevin at magnolialandscape.com

The local news talk radio station is having a contest where the winner gets to host their own weekly show. It’s only two hours a week on sunday night.. but it sounded like something that might be fun. So this is my entry. It was recorded and mixed with the open source Ardour digital workstation and the Jack audio sub system under OSX.

US Cities Face Half a Trillion Dollars of Pension Deficits

As I mentioned back in March…

So our illustrious Charlotte city council last night voted to take 25 million of federal money to start a new uptown street car boondoggle.. er I mean transit system.  To avoid confusion with the multitude of pet rail projects around here they decided to end service on the uptown trolley that has been in operation for the last two years.. and which we spent a whopping 40-60 million to create and operate.  The real numbers there are a little hard to come by but we know it was at least 40.. and 60 is more likely.  This “free” federal money for the new street car will be paired with at least 12 million of local money that is going to come not from the ¹⁄₂ cent transit sales tax.. but from the general fund.. aka property tax which they promised never to do by the way. A little more history… back in 2007 there was a voter referendum to repeal the ¹⁄₂ cent sales tax in order to de-fund the light rail and put an end to all this train madness.  One of the big reasons the repeal failed was because the powers-that-be made a promise to the black leadership that they would give them a transit project of their own.. aka the street car in exchange for supporting the funding for light rail… which will not run in the more ‘diverse’ parts of town.  A few months after that vote.. the city leadership pushed the street car project to the back burner with a best case delay of about 10 years.  Last night at the meeting this was referenced as being one of those ‘empty promises’ that the black leadership was none too happy about.

It was 62 days ago that I ask the city of Charlotte to take back their RFID tagged recycling bin. I’m not going to play their game… which if you didn’t know involves tracking your participation in their money losing recycling program… and eventually fines.. and re-education about how to be eco friendly. No thanks little brother. Back when I first posted about this on May 6th (and scooped Taras army of research interns) I also filled out the form on the city web site to take the bin back.

Ok.. so maybe Charlotte isn’t Rome.. and while it’s not exactly burning it’s certainly not good out there.  Locally we still have a 12% unemployment rate and according to Civitas NC state government has grown over 12% while private employment has contracted by 1.6% between 01 and 09. Ouch. Tara talked about this during drive time today.. and there was a lot of anger coming her way by people who work for the city. It seems some city employees think they are entitled to yearly raises regardless of what’s going on in the real world and how dare we lowly citizens question that.

Continuing on yesterdays posting about RFID recycling bins. It seems our own city council wasn’t aware of the tags either until after the Tara Servatius show where she covered the story (after I scooped her army of research interns). Reading a little more about these.. it seems to be a world wide phenomenon as these chipped cans are showing up in cities and many countries around the world.. with much the same negative reception.

A couple months ago the city left what I thought was a second garbage bin in front of my house. It took me a week or so to figure out it was actually supposed to be for me.. as I’d not heard about it or expected it. Turns out it’s a big ‘recycling cart’ which is the same size as the usual rolling garbage cans. I have absolutely no use for it.

I was able to take in the final Charlotte Checkers game tonight and while they didn’t win they made a good showing for the playoffs. Nice job.. looking forward to the new team next season.