Matthews-Mint Hill - Carolina Weekly Newspapers

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1421-C Orchard Lake Drive Charlotte, NC 28270 Phone: 704-849-2261 • Fax: 704-849-2504 www.matthewsminthillweekly.com News Managing Editor Frank DeLoache Editor Kara Lopp Sports Editor C. Jemal Horton Assistant Sports Editor Aaron Garcia Sports Writers Chris Hunt Denny Seitz Book Club Editor Alison Woo Education Reporter Sarah Gilbert Contributing Writers Kim Gibson Alan Hodge Tim Ross Josh Whitener Layout Director Michael Kerr Production Manager Debbie Archer Fin d us on Fa c e b o o k Matthews-Mint Hill Weekly is published by the Carolina Weekly Newspaper Group, 1421-C Orchard Lake Drive, Charlotte, NC 28270. All rights reserved. Reproduction without permission is strictly prohibited. Advertising: adsales@carolinaweeklynewspapers.com CEO Alain Lillie ADVERTISING Account Executives Cathy Kowalski Franchesca Lamkin Suzanne Walters Accounting Kelly Wright Classifieds and Service Directory Monica Goldston GRAPHICS Graphics Director Steve Pigg Graphics Artist Julie Austin DISTRIBUTION Manager Gary Boneno Assistant Manager Harry Parlier News Briefs Police need help solving Matthews break-in Matthews Police are asking for residents’ help to find a man they say kicked in the front door of a Fairfax Woods house while the homeowner was inside. According to Matthews Police, an about 5-foot-9-inch African American man in his late 20s or early 30s broke down the door at about noon Monday, Oct. 18, after he knocked and rang the doorbell but no one answered. When the man entered the house and saw the homeowner, he left in a dark blue Chrysler Pacifica which was being driven by someone else. The man is described as weighing about 200 pounds with a stocky build and short black hair. He was wearing a brown T-shirt and blue jeans, police said. There is no description of the driver. The homeowner wasn’t injured during the break-in, police said. Officer Stason Tyrrell, community resource officer for the department, said residents should always acknowledge their presence when someone comes to the door. That doesn’t have to mean opening the door, he said, but at least speak through a closed door or window. Anyone with information about this crime should call the Matthews Police Criminal Investigation Division at 704- 847-7755. q New downtown parking rules hit Matthews Signs are up in downtown Matthews where new parking rules have been implemented. The new regulations, which mainly Kara Lopp/MMHW photo Some parking rules in downtown Matthews have changed. Generosity on-the-go The Idlewild Volunteer Fire Department raised about $3,100 for the Muscular Dystrophy Association Saturday, Oct. 16 during its annual Fill the Boot campaign. Passing motorists were asked to drop cash into a firefighter’s boot. All the money raised will stay in the Charlotte region to help local families. Matthews held its Fill the Boot campaign Oct. 2 and raised $6,600. Mint Hill firefighters will host their own Fill the Boot Nov. 6 from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the intersection of Matthews-Mint Hill and Lawyers roads. For more information about muscular dystrophy, visit www.mdausa.org. q (Clockwise from top, left) Idlewild volunteer EMT Lynn Aydlett, volunteer Capt. Mike Conger and volunteer firefighter Jeremy Miller collect cash from drivers. Michael Porowski/MMHW photos affect the Matthews Station Street area, include designating 70 parking spaces as 2-hour, 32 spaces as 30-minute and more than 150 spaces as 24-hour parking. Forty-five 24-hour parking spaces are located in the public parking lot off North Trade Street along the railroad tracks. “With several new businesses in the downtown area and Wingate University’s increased student enrollment we want to ensure that people who are visiting our downtown understand where our shortterm and long-term parking is located,” Town Manager Hazen Blodgett said. To see a map of the parking changes, visit www.matthewsnc.com, click the “Residents” tab at the top of the page, then “Downtown Parking.” q Matthews-Pineville bus service? Matthews Mayor Jim Taylor wants the Charlotte Area Transit System to consider adding a new east-west line linking Matthews, and possibly Mint Hill, with Pineville. At the Oct. 11 Board of Commissioners meeting, Taylor got the consent of other members to have Matthews staff members ask transit system officials to study the new route. The transit system has traditionally operated bus lines on a spokeand-hub system connecting the towns with uptown Charlotte, Taylor said, and transit officials have said any route linking the towns was too expensive. But the mayor said he hopes transit officials will reconsider that system now and create more east-west routes. A new bus line should connect strong commercial destinations like Sycamore Commons in Matthews and Carolina Place Mall in Pineville, Taylor said, adding that any study should also include Mint Hill. q Mint Hill cat kennel coming Area felines will soon be in fine fettle thanks to the unanimous approval Oct.14 by the Mint Hill Board of Commissioners to grant a special permit for a cats-only kennel at 10039 Idlewild Road. The petition for the permit was brought to the commissioners by cat advocates Suzy Abbot and Ann Phillips. The kennel, called the Cat’s Cradle, will be located in an area zoned residential, which is why the residents needed a Special Use Permit. Abbot and Phillips, who will live in a house next door, applied for the permit Aug.19, and the issue had come before the Mint Hill Planning Board on September 20. At first the petition was given an unfavorable recommendation by planning staff due to several waivers that were needed. These included the facility’s minimum distance from the street property line, minimum driveway width, street trees and parking requirements. The Planning Board saw several adjustments made to the application Sept. 20, such as the number of parking spaces and type of driveway surface. Discussion prior to Thursday’s vote included remarks from Planning Director Lee Bailey. Commissioner Brenda McRae asked about the future use of the cat kennel for other animals. “It will be cats only,” Bailey said. “No dogs or horses.” q (see News Briefs on page 17) Page 6 • Oct. 22-28, 2010 • Matthews-Mint Hill Weekly www.matthewsminthillweekly.com
Their mission: Reinvent library for the future by Frank DeLoache frank@matthewsminthillweekly.com Early in their inaugural meeting, members of a Mecklenburg County library task force said they want to hear from comparable library systems that have weathered the historically bad recession well – and find out how they did it. They got two answers from staff and consultants, neither of them particularly encouraging. First, libraries across the country are struggling to survive and looking for solutions, just like Mecklenburg. Two, nobody really has a lot of information about what libraries look like two years after the bottom fell out of the economy. “You’re going to be reinventing the library, the library of the future,” local consultant Cyndee Patterson told the 16-member task force. “The world is very different right now, and unfortunately, most of the data (about libraries) is more than two years old.” The recession hammered Mecklenburg County, and the library system has seen its budget cut in half in the past three years, forcing library trustees to cut the staff from 600 to 312. That’s why library trustees and county commissioners created the Future of the Library Task Force, which met for the first time Wednesday, Oct. 20, at the Charlotte Convention Center. But the task force is doing more than trying to figure out a stable financing method for keeping the libraries open. Members also have the challenge of how the library system should change in the next three to five years – what services it should offer and what services it should cut. Jim Woodward, former chancellor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, is leading the task force, and he told his fellow members they have a lot of work to do if they hope to bring a recommendation to Mecklenburg County commissioners and the library system’s board of trustees by February. The task force has a tentative budget of $225,000, which includes $65,000 for Patterson’s Lee Institute and $70,000 for California-based La Piana Consulting, the companies who will do most of the research for the special panel. La Piana’s Vance Yoshida told panel members they must think about the library in different ways. “Think about competition,” he said. “You always face competition – for volunteers, for funding. You’re competing with Amazon.com. … “What is going to be your competitive edge? Why are folks going to come to you? Why are people going to volunteer to help you? Why is the county going to give you money versus, say, the parks and recreation department?” Of those services now offered by the library system, “all of them are good things,” Ed Williams, retired editorial page Community editor for the Charlotte Observer, said. “But we are not going to be able to do all of them any more. “Our challenge is to pare the library down from what it is now.” That, said Davidson Commissioner Connie Wessner, means the task force needs to know what local residents really want from their libraries. That prompted retired television broadcaster Bernie Simmons to caution against building the library of the future based on the whims of a survey. She described herself as a “fierce” defender of the library as “a great repository of information” that people may not know they need until they need it. q Want to go? All meetings of the Future of the Library Task Force are open to the public. For now, the task force will meet every other Tuesday in the afternoon at the Morrison Regional Library, 7015 Morrison Blvd., near SouthPark Mall. Find more information, including initial reports to the task force, at www.charmeck.org/libraryfuture. Utility addressing too-long billing cycles, poorly worded bills Utility also offers one-time adjustments in some unresolved cases by Frank DeLoache frank@matthewsminthillweekly.com Since 2009, Sam Goldberg, a resident of the Meadows of Mint Hill, has been reading his water meter weekly to protect himself against any surprises when his bill from Charlotte-Mecklenburg Utilities arrives each month. Earlier this year, he got a “particularly high bill” and, after studying the bill, noticed the bill covered 45 days of water service. Because the utility increases the rate it charges for water with the more water a customer uses, “this almost doubled what the bill should have been,” Goldberg said this week. Goldberg found himself in the same fix that several hundred utility customers experience every month – an extra-long billing cycle. In August, for instance, 349 customers received bills covering 34 or more days of service, Utilities Communications Manager Vic Simpson said this week. Utility officials acknowledge the continuing problem, and they want to improve the efficiency of meter reading-and-billing cycles. They also want to clarify confusing information on the bill regarding the rate charged people caught in a too-long billing cycle, Simpson said. Here’s how it works: The utility aims to bill customers for anywhere from 28 to 33 days, “with 30 days being the ideal,” Simpson said. But in a recent presentation to Charlotte City Council, utility Director Barry Gullet said billing became inefficient and more vulnerable to the extra-long billing cycles as the system grew rapidly. Over time, the utility has placed all its customers in one of 19 billing groups, or cycles. The utility’s meter trucks have to drive through neighborhoods in each group each month and download the meter readings for each group before driving to neighborhoods in the next group to collect their meter readings. One of the problems, Simpson said, is the customer groupings vary widely in size, from as small as 5,000 to as large as 25,000. Also, the customer groups are not always located next to each other so meter-reading trucks can go from one group of customers to the next adjacent group. Instead, the groups may be scattered in various parts of the county, Simpson said. Utility officials established different groups as different parts of the county developed. So if bad weather prevents utility employees from reading one group on time, or a computer glitch causes problems in the system, the utility may delay billing for other groups of customers – who may then see their bills cover more days use. The extended bills can happen anywhere in the county, Simpson said. But they are more often in newly developed parts of the county, such as Mint Hill or Davidson, he added. The biggest problem is communicating with customers when they suddenly see a higher bill covering more than 33 days of water use. Like Goldberg, many customers have complained that the extra-long billing cycles kick them into a higher rate for water. But that’s not true, Simpson said. The utility has a computer program made especially for billing periods exceeding 33 days, which maintains the normal rate the customer would expect to pay. The customer’s bill will still be higher – because of the extra days of use – but their subsequent bill should come down. Watching the bill go up and then down again can confuse customers, Simpson said. But on top of seeing their bills rise and fall, rate information on the front of a bill with any billing cycle exceeding 33 days is inaccurate, telling customers they are paying a higher rate than they really are, Simpson said. “You can imagine the frustration a customer can feel, and we’re trying to correct that information” on the bill, Simpson said. Fixing the billing cycles is much more complicated and will likely affect many utility customers when utility officials make a change, Simpson said. For that reason, administrators don’t expect to attack that problem until the winter of 2011. But the utility is making other changes and working on solutions. They include: Adjusting disputed bills Utility officials have quietly implemented a new policy allowing a one-time adjustment in some cases of disputed water bills. City Manager Curt Walton approved new guidelines for “adjusting disputed water bills” in March, Simpson said, and the new policy does not apply to every high bill. That’s one reason officials have not trumpeted the change loudly. Utility officials may apply the one-time adjustment after taking a series of steps: • An initial check by an inspector, who will examine the utility’s equipment and also attempt to check for apparent leaks on the customer’s side of the meter. • If the inspector doesn’t find an obvious cause for the higher bill, a supervisor will make a second visit to the home, check maintenance history of the utility’s equipment and also review the customer’s history of water use. • Still lacking an explanation for the higher bill, the utility then will defer the excessive part of the bill for two months to make sure the customer’s water use returns to lower historical trends. If higher water use continues, the customer remains liable for all the charges. If the customer’s water bill returns to the lower historical average, however, utility officials will waive the excess part of the earlier bill, Simpson said. The utility is exercising the one-time bill adjustment in about 20 to 30 cases a month, out of 250,000 monthly bills, Simpson said. “It is a tool that has helped resolved some of the unexplained uses,” Simpson said. Clarifying bills Utility officials hope to make two changes to customer bills in coming months. First, for customers getting billed for 34 to 39 days of service, the bill will change to accurately reflect the rate the customer is paying. Utility officials also expect to soon change wording on bills going to customers who have asked the utility for an investigation. Right now, if a customer disputes a bill, utility officials open an investigation and agree to set aside the disputed part of the bill, Simpson said. The utility does require the customer to continue paying the average amount he or she would expect to be billed – and subsequent monthly bills they get during the investigation. But the bills those customers get – as the utility investigation is under way – adds language saying the customer is “delinquent,” when they aren’t, Simpson said. When customers see “delinquent,” however, they feel the utility has broken its promise. In some cases, they stop paying altogether, and that can lead to the utility cutting off water service. Utility officials plan to eliminate the “delinquent” language on the bill during a high-bill investigation, and Simpson advised customers to continue paying subsequent bills until the utility completes its investigation. Simpson said the utility will not cut off any customer’s service during a high-bill investigation as long as the customer continues to pay their bill as arranged. “It’s very, very important that they call 3-1-1 and let us know their concerns,” Simpson said. “People have to have water. We understand that. We’re going to work with our customers, but it’s very important to talk to us.” q www.matthewsminthillweekly.com Matthews-Mint Hill Weekly • Oct. 22-28, 2010 • Page 7
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