[Durham INC] Protest Petition Update

[Tom Miller]

Dear neighbors:

 

Action on Senate Bill 493, the bill which contains the repeal of zoning
protest petitions, has been delayed until next week.  This gives us the
weekend to e-mail and call our senators and representatives to ask them to
save the protest petition right.  It is important to contact everyone in
your area's delegation in both houses.  Even if the measure passes in the
house, it must return to the Senate for approval.  It was the Senate that
stopped the repeal last year.

 

In addition to the arguments I laid out in my e-mails to you over the last
few days you might add that it is not appropriate to change every citizen's
time honored right to file a protest petition simply because an attorney in
Greensboro is unhappy because his client's proposal to build a shopping
center there was defeated when the neighbors got organized and filed a valid
protest petition.  The protest petition right has always been a part of
North Carolina's zoning laws.  We have never had zoning without it.  It
exists in most other states, too, because it was part of the model zoning
legislation promulgated by the Commerce Department of the federal government
in the 1920s.  Herbert Hoover was the Secretary of Commerce then.  The
federal government got involved then because the country was urbanizing and
the administration saw the need for orderly development in the country's
growing cities.  Zoning is about our urban areas healthy and safety and the
protest petition right was added to make sure that the regulatory
environment created by zoning is reliable and not subject to whim and
caprice.

 

Friends, if the right to file a protest petition is to be preserved, then it
is up to us to protect it.  We can do it.  Please write to you're the state
senators and representatives who serve your area some time this weekend.
Your e-mail should be short, polite, and unequivocal.  These folks receive a
lot of e-mails on a lot of subjects.  Your first sentence should make it
clear that you oppose the repeal of zoning protest petitions.

 

You can find the e-mail addresses of your senators and representatives by
visiting  <http://www.ncleg> www.ncleg .  On the home page of that site, in
the upper right-hand corner there is a block to aid you in searching the
site.  In that block is a button that says "View member info"  it has a
down-arrow button that will list all the members in both houses.  Your
messages to your representatives really matter.

 

Thank you for your patience as I send you these e-mails.

 

Tom Miller

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