The full story
In February 1979 Chapel Hill's Board of Aldermen voted to call itself the Town Council, a name that took effect on July 1. On August 29 Joe Herzenberg, a UNC history graduate student who chaired the Historic District Commission and had opposed the UNC Press Building, became the first candidate for the four council seats to be filled in November, saying he would campaign for student votes. On September 4 the council put a $2.6 million bond for downtown parking, including a deck on Municipal Lot No. 1 on Rosemary Street, and a $450,000 bond for a fire station at Weaver Dairy Road and N.C. 86 on the November 6 ballot; after two hours of heated debate it voted 5 to 4 to rescind its July 9 open space resolution and voted down a $300,000 open space bond. On a third vote, on September 20, it put that bond on the ballot after all, to buy about 70 acres in the Ridgefield area near Bolin and Booker creeks; opponents on the council and the Chapel Hill Board of Realtors said it was meant to stop a subdivision already approved on 10 of the acres.
On September 7 Mayor James C. Wallace said he would not seek a second term and would run for the council instead, so he could return to teaching at N.C. State University. With Wallace and Jonathan Howes staying out, council member Gerry Cohen, a General Assembly staff attorney, announced for mayor on September 19, naming energy, housing and transportation as the main issues and backing a merger of Chapel Hill and Carrboro. He pledged to resign from the council if he lost, and on October 8 the council accepted his resignation, effective December 3; the Daily Tar Heel called him the first student to serve on the town's governing body when he was elected in 1973. Harold Foster, secretary-treasurer of the Northside precinct, who had been active in the campus civil rights movement from 1960 to 1963, filed for mayor on September 20, saying that as a Black, poor student he could best represent the poor, minorities and students. David Hinds, chairman of the South Orange Black Caucus, stayed out of the council race so as not to split the Black vote, since he expected R. D. Smith to run again.
Orange County put a $20.4 million bond package before its voters, the largest in its history, the Daily Tar Heel said. On October 31 Howard Jarvis, leader of California's Proposition 13 campaign, told a news conference at the courthouse in Hillsborough that the county's bond issues were unnecessary, then spoke to the Orange Farm and Landowners Association, whose president had invited him. On November 6 the voters turned down every part. The $17.8 million for schools, which Superintendents Michael Simmons of the Orange County schools and Robert Hanes of Chapel Hill-Carrboro had backed as needed for growing enrollment, lost 7,447 to 4,517; also defeated were $2.06 million for public buildings including jail renovation, $400,000 for health care facilities and $135,000 for electronic voting equipment.
In Chapel Hill architect Joe Nassif, a former alderman and former chairman of the county Democratic Party and Board of Elections, was elected mayor with 2,076 votes to 1,813 for council member Robert Epting, 1,495 for Cohen and 173 for Foster. Wallace led the council race, followed by R. D. Smith, a council member for 14 years, Howes and physics professor Joe Straley, a newcomer; Herzenberg finished fifth. Voters approved the fire station bond, 3,295 to 2,069, but defeated the parking bond, 2,969 to 2,439, and the open space bond, 3,311 to 2,014. Carrboro Mayor Robert Drakeford, who had announced in September that he would run again, won a second term 997 to 199, on a turnout he put at about 1,300 against about 2,000 in 1977. Newcomer Steve Rose led the Carrboro aldermen's race, incumbents Ernie Patterson and John Boone kept their seats and Miles Crenshaw lost; Boone, who did not have the Carrboro Community Coalition's endorsement, credited the South Orange Black Caucus endorsement and the light student vote. In Hillsborough former Mayor Fred Cates, first elected in 1967, won the office back 511 to 429 from Paul Williams, who had finished the term Cates left in the middle of his sixth, and voters re-elected commissioners Allen Lloyd and Paul Martin and added Rachel Stevens, an instructor in public health nursing at North Carolina Central University. Board chairman Phyllis Sockwell and vice chairman Ed Caldwell led the nine-candidate Chapel Hill-Carrboro school board race; Barbara Thornton and Edith Elliott won first terms, Jim Riddle took the two years left in William Strickland's term, and appointed member Marge Hill lost.
On December 3 Nassif took the oath of office from Wallace and swore in Straley, Wallace, Howes and Smith. The council chose Howes as mayor pro tem, and the departing members Cohen, Epting and Ed Vickery each received a key to the town. In its first action the new council voted unanimously to appoint Herzenberg, who had finished fifth, to Cohen's seat for the two years left in his term.
In the summer of 1981 a new group, the Association for a Better Carrboro (ABC), organized to contest the town election against the governing Carrboro Community Coalition. It ran Roger Messer, who had left the Coalition in July, for mayor and Hilliard Caldwell and Joyce Garrett for aldermen, charging high taxes, heavy legal costs and closed government, while Coalition candidates said its leaders had opposed the 1980 bus tax referendum. At its candidate forum on October 5 the Coalition endorsed Mayor Robert Drakeford and aldermen Doug Sharer, Nancy White and Braxton Foushee for re-election; the ABC candidates refused to attend, calling a forum run by a partisan group unfair and asking the League of Women Voters to hold one, and Alderman Steve Rose said they had cheated the public of information. By late October the South Orange Black Caucus had endorsed Joe Herzenberg, Bill Thorpe and Lightning Brown for the Chapel Hill council; Drakeford and aldermen candidates Caldwell, Foushee, Sharer and Nancy White in Carrboro; and Ted Parrish, Wallace Hill and Ron Strom for the school board.
On November 3, 1981 Carrboro re-elected Drakeford to a third term, 912 votes to 667 for Messer and 296 for Bill Pressley, but unseated three Coalition aldermen: the ABC-backed Caldwell (1,090), Garrett (1,007) and Jim White (879) defeated Sharer (854), Foushee (841) and Nancy White (782) on a 37 percent turnout. Foushee blamed the Black Caucus's backing of Caldwell, which gave it four candidates for three seats, for the Coalition's losses. Caldwell, who had advised the students of the 1960 Colonial Drug sit-in in Chapel Hill, served four terms on the board, through 1997. In Chapel Hill, where only 31.6 percent of registered voters cast ballots, council incumbents Marilyn Boulton (2,602) and Bev Kawalec (2,327) were returned and newcomers David Pasquini (2,213) and Winston Broadfoot (2,180) took the other two seats, defeating incumbents Thorpe (2,012) and Herzenberg (1,770); the winners read the result as a call for tighter town spending. Verla Insko (3,487), Ann Wileman (3,334) and Parrish (2,921) won the three school board seats, ahead of Wallace Hill, Ron Strom, Julio George, Harold Black and Louis Serotkin. In Hillsborough Lucius Cheshire beat Ralph Neighbours for mayor, 565 to 277, and Remus Smith and Lynwood Brown won the two town board seats over Horace Johnson. In referendums held with the town elections, voters in the Kings Mill area near Chapel Hill approved a fire district, 184 to 50, and voters in the Dogwood area approved one, 14 to 3.
In September 1983 Drakeford announced that he would not run again after three terms, and Alderman Jim White, endorsed by the ABC, entered the race to succeed him. When filing closed on October 7, 30 people were seeking 17 offices: Mayor Joe Nassif of Chapel Hill was unopposed, Jim Porto and White sought the Carrboro mayor's office, and Hillsborough Mayor Lucius M. Cheshire Jr. faced Frank M. Sheffield, with eight candidates for three Hillsborough board seats. The Carrboro Community Coalition, the liberal group that had shaped Carrboro elections since 1975, said falling membership and a lack of agreement on issues and candidates would keep it from endorsing anyone, though it meant to be active in 1984 and 1985. For the November 8 elections the county elections board began one-stop absentee voting, letting registered voters of Chapel Hill, Carrboro and Hillsborough who would be away on election day mark their ballots at Carrboro Town Hall through November 3, in place of the former process of several mailings.
On November 8 Porto, an independent who chaired the town Appearance Commission, beat White for mayor of Carrboro, 733 to 660, while all three ABC-endorsed candidates, incumbent John Boone (811), Doug Anderson (712) and Zona Norwood (667), won aldermen's seats, so that the board would be made up entirely of ABC members; turnout was 25.5 percent. In Chapel Hill, on a 27.8 percent turnout, Nassif was re-elected without opposition, and newcomer Nancy Preston (3,500), incumbents Jonathan Howes (3,049) and R. D. Smith (2,665) and former member Thorpe (2,336) won the four council seats; Katherine Wright finished fifth and incumbent Joe Straley last, 73 votes behind Thorpe. The Daily Tar Heel reported that it was the first time two Black candidates, Smith and Thorpe, had been elected to the council in the same election. Dorothy Sue Baker (4,653 votes), president of the PTA council, former Chapel Hill High math teacher Carolyn Horn, incumbent Edith Elliott Wiggins and Phyllis Lotchin were elected to the school board, with Fred Battle fifth; chairman Edwin Caldwell Jr. and two other members had not run, and only 24.5 percent of registered voters took part. In Hillsborough, where turnout of 54.2 percent was the highest in the county's municipal races, Planning Board chairman Frank M. Sheffield defeated Cheshire, 478 to 386, and the Daily Tar Heel reported incumbents Allen A. Lloyd and Rachel S. Stevens and Horace Johnson as winners of the town board seats. On November 14 Cheshire, due to leave office on December 1, resigned at a town board meeting, saying a lame duck could not address the town's problems; he quit after the board turned down a motion on a 1979 board measure that, he said, kept the mayor from opening his mail or signing town checks. On December 5, after farewell speeches by departing members Straley and Jim Wallace, N.C. Court of Appeals Judge Willis Whichard swore in Preston, Thorpe, Smith and Howes, Nassif took the oath again as mayor, and the council elected Bev Kawalec mayor pro tem and re-elected David Roberts town clerk.
Council member Winston Broadfoot died at his home on January 22, 1985, at 64. On February 25 a proposal by Bev Kawalec and Marilyn Boulton to shrink the council from nine members to seven rather than fill his seat failed when a motion to hold a public hearing on it was defeated, with Thorpe, Pasquini and Howes speaking against it. On April 1 the council voted 5 to 0 to name David Godschalk, a UNC city and regional planning professor and former chairman of the town's Task Force on Growth Management, to the seven months left in Broadfoot's term. When filing closed in September, six candidates were running for mayor of Chapel Hill, among them David C. Nash, Kawalec and Wes Hare, the largest field ever to run for mayor in the town, the Daily Tar Heel said; in Carrboro the Board of Elections cut the precincts to four, which Mayor Jim Porto laid mainly to long lines at North Carrboro. At a League of Women Voters forum on October 23 Kawalec and Nash supported the Rosemary Square project and Jim Wallace and Hare opposed it.
On November 5 Wallace, mayor from 1975 to 1979, beat Kawalec by 455 votes, 48 percent to 41, with Hare at 8 percent; Wallace said the race had become a quasi-referendum on the Rosemary Square hotel, shops and parking project, which he opposed and she supported. Julie Andresen led the ten-candidate council race with 4,272 votes, followed by Pasquini, Godschalk and Arthur Werner, first president of the Chapel Hill Alliance of Neighborhoods; the Daily Tar Heel reported that candidates endorsed by the Alliance, which had circulated a growth moratorium petition, took three of the four seats, and Herzenberg finished fifth. In Carrboro, where Porto ran unopposed, Caldwell won a second term with 20 percent of the 3,189 aldermen's votes cast, UNC law professor Judith Wegner took 19 percent and Tom Gurganus 16 percent, and incumbent Jim White lost with 11 percent.
On September 8, 1986 the Chapel Hill council put five bond issues totaling $11.8 million on the November 4 ballot, the library bond drawing the most debate at the hearing. Voters approved all five: $4 million for a new public library, $2.5 million to widen N.C. 15-501 and improve other roads, $2.5 million for parks and recreation, $2 million to enlarge the town meeting room and $800,000 for a fire station and training center in the south of town. The meeting room question was the closest, and the council expected the bonds to raise town taxes about 11.8 percent over three or four years from 1987-88.
On July 22, 1987 Mayor Wallace announced that he would run for a council seat rather than a new term as mayor, leaving the mayor's race to council members Andresen and Howes and retired automobile dealer David Lineberger; ten candidates, two UNC students among them, filed for the four council seats. On November 3 Howes, director of UNC's Center for Urban and Regional Studies, was elected mayor with 53 percent of the vote. With about a quarter of registered voters casting ballots, Nancy Preston led the council race with 4,399 votes, followed by Roosevelt Wilkerson, pastor of St. Joseph's Methodist Church, with 3,632, Herzenberg with 3,535 and Wallace with 3,151; Thorpe lost with 2,807, and the two students finished seventh and last. Herzenberg said he was the first openly gay elected official in the history of North Carolina. In Carrboro Eleanor Kinnaird beat Porto, who sought a third term, 793 votes to 646, in a race the Daily Tar Heel said turned on the Amberly subdivision in the University Lake watershed, which she opposed and he supported; Jay Bryan (1,003), Frances Shetley (804) and appointed incumbent Randy Marshall (748) won the three aldermen's seats over Carol Drinkard and Steve Oglesbee. Kinnaird took the oath of office at the aldermen's meeting of December 1, where Porto and the departing aldermen Zona Norwood and John Boone made their parting remarks, and Herzenberg was sworn in at the council's organizational meeting on December 7, his neighbor Lightning Brown giving the oath.
On November 8, 1988 Orange County voters approved a $30 million bond package: $22 million for repairs and additions to school buildings (25,047 to 9,486), $7 million for county public works (18,720 to 14,537) and $1 million to buy land for a future reservoir to serve central Orange and Hillsborough (20,950 to 12,476). The reservoir bond, expected to meet opposition in southern Orange, carried in all but six of the county's 41 precincts.
On July 7, 1989 Mayor Howes, a council member since 1975, filed for a second term as the first candidate in the mayor's race, naming downtown, housing and the homeless, transportation, recycling, and drugs and crime as the main issues; no one had filed against him when filing closed. Incumbents Art Werner, Andresen and Pasquini ran for the four council seats with Alan Rimer, Joyce Brown, Helen Urquhart and former member Thorpe, while Godschalk stepped down. In Hillsborough town board member Horace Johnson, in his third term and a frequent opponent of Mayor Fred Cates Jr., filed against Cates, then in his eighth term, and the Daily Tar Heel called Johnson apparently the first Black candidate for mayor in the town's history. By October 18 the Sierra Club chapter for Orange and Chatham counties had endorsed candidates for what its spokesman said was the first time, backing Joyce Brown and Werner for the Chapel Hill council and Mayor Kinnaird, Jacquelyn Gist and Michael Nelson in Carrboro.
On November 7 Howes won a second term without opposition. Werner (2,792 votes) and Andresen (2,612) led the council race, and Joyce Brown (2,383) and planning board chairman Alan Rimer took the other two seats, Rimer edging Mayor pro tem Pasquini; a recount on November 16 left Rimer ahead, 2,398 to 2,395. Kinnaird won her first re-election race over former mayor Porto, 670 votes to 366, and newcomer Gist led the Carrboro aldermen's race with 714 votes as incumbents Caldwell and Gurganus were returned; Nelson, in his first race for elected office, finished fourth. Hillsborough voters elected Johnson mayor over Cates, 576 votes to 547 in the unofficial count, and the Daily Tar Heel reported that the win made him the town's first Black mayor. In the Chapel Hill-Carrboro school board race incumbents Mary Bushnell and Ted Parrish kept their seats and Douglas Breeden won the third. On December 4 Chief District Court Judge Patricia Hunt swore in Howes, Andresen, Werner, Joyce Brown and Rimer as Pasquini and Godschalk left the council, and the council elected Preston mayor pro tem unanimously. In Carrboro on December 5 town clerk Sarah C. Williamson swore in Kinnaird for a second term and Caldwell and Gurganus after the aldermen approved the abstract of votes, and Gist was sworn in as an alderman at the same meeting.
