Take Me Out to the Ballgame

Spring is here and opening night for the Kannapolis Intimidators is next Thursday! The team is entering its 16th season at Fieldcrest Cannon Stadium. Last year the Intimidators won the first half season title and qualified for the post-season playoffs.

The team arrives in Kannapolis Thursday evening, April 1st and already has scrimmages scheduled against another Chicago White Sox single-A affiliate, the Winston-Salem Dash, Saturday April 3rd and Monday, April 5th at 1:00 pm.

Here are a few upcoming promotions and special events to entice you to come out and enjoy an evening.

• Friday, April 9 –  “Talkin’ Business in the Ballpark” event with area chambers of commerce to do some networking. Call the stadium at 704- 932-FANS to reserve your tickets.
• Wed, April 28 and other Wednesdays in following months – Nine Innings of Networking – $19 for a reserve seat ticket, all-you-can-eat picnic in the BB&T Picnic Shelter AND unlimited business networking opportunities. Call the stadium at 704- 932-FANS to reserve your tickets.
• Fireworks at every Friday and Saturday home game!
• In addition to the popular Thirsty Thursdays, this year there will also be Wet Your Whistle Wednesdays for great deals on food and beverages.

View all of the many promotions/special events here and this season’s schedule here.

Arts Council Annual Breakfast

Last Friday, I, along with several City Council members and City staff, attended the annual fundraiser breakfast for the Cabarrus Arts Council. We were treated to several short performances to highlight the variety of arts that we have in our community and sometimes take for granted. The Arts Council is the primary organization here that has taken on the role of ensuring that quality cultural arts programs are available to citizens in our community.

The Arts Council supports public performances, ranging from acts at the Davis Theatre to the Summer Entertainment Series in Kannapolis, as well as provides grants to arts groups to advance their work. One the of more important, but perhaps lesser known aspects of the Arts Council is that they run an Arts in Education program that exposes children to the arts. Among other elements, the program brings performances to schools throughout the county, reaching 30,000 school children and teachers each year. Without this program, and given the budget constraints our school systems are experiencing, many children would not have the chance to benefit from learning through the arts.

At a time when finances are so tight, it is easy to dismiss the arts as being non-essential. We need to remember though that arts and culture help create the community fabric that binds us together and makes us proud to be part of.  Music, theatre, literature, dance, and visual art – all of these are elements that enhance our everyday lives.

Cultural Resources Continue to Grow in the Region

When it comes to marketing Kannapolis, the NCRC and our region, one very important area is highlighting cultural opportunities. For Kannapolis, this often takes a regional tone and includes many amenities in Charlotte in addition to programs in Cabarrus and Rowan Counties.

City center to city center is only a 30 minute drive between Kannapolis and Charlotte, and most residents living along the Kannapolis Parkway can get to downtown Charlotte in less than 20 minutes.

So, when I saw this article in the NY Times about the new Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, I was pleased. The article mentions the emerging Wells Fargo Cultural Campus, which will become a great asset to our area. I’ve personally visited the Gantt Center and the Bechtler, and look forward to the new Mint downtown as well.

Downtown Water Project Update and Photos

As you may have noticed, the downtown water project took a turn into the main part of town this week after spending the first portion of the project on Vance. As of today, Oak Avenue is almost done, and you can see the progress in the asphalt patches along the streets.

For those of you wondering why the asphalt patches are low, check out information from an email sent from Mark McGregor with the City Engineering office last month:

Also, we had a good question this week about the asphalt being low in the ditch line. We will be leaving the asphalt a little low in the ditch to help us when we install the final surface of asphalt.  We do this for a couple of reasons, one, the asphalt needs to be as deep as we can get it to keep it from  popping up and two, we may need to dig back down to the pipe in case we have a leak. We want the finish coat of asphalt to be as smooth as possible when we are done. In other words, we don’t want a patch in a patch.  We will monitor the patch as we progress through the project and keep it maintained to minimize the inconvenience to everyone.

Here are some pictures of the project that were taken when workers were outside city offices. Also, weekly updates on road closures related to the project can be found on the project blog here.

A view of the new and old lines. Once again, the new line is closest to the ladder

 

City Leaders in DC This Week

City Manager Mike Legg is with several Council members in D.C. this week as part of the National League of Cities Congressional City Conference. It is their (and many, many other cities’) annual pilgrimage to our nation’s capital – the main value of the trip is not so much the conference, but the meetings they set up with our Congressional delegation.

Every year, the City prepares a list of federal legislative priorities that we try to get in front of our senators and representatives. That list doesn’t change too much from year to year. They largely consist of major infrastructure investments that are beyond the capacity of the City to address on its own, or they are tied to federal programs that have local relevance (i.e. homeland security). Last year, the City and its partners were able to secure a $1 million earmark for a USDA Human Nutrition Center at the NC Research Campus.

People tend to have strong opinions about the whole earmark process. Unfortunately, until the rules of the game are changed, this is what we have to go through to try to get funds for needed projects in Kannapolis. So good luck to Mike and Council for trying to get our needs on the federal radar screen.

Community Garden Project

Sunday evening, March 7, was a very exciting time for the City’s Environmental Stewardship Commission.  Pastor James Matchette of First Wesleyan Church, located at 301 Bethpage Road, announced the joint effort of his congregation and the ESC to establish a community garden in the City of Kannapolis.

Members from First Wesleyan canvassed the church’s neighborhood on Saturday, March 13, to invite area residents to rent a plot for the growing season at a minimal charge.

From left to right, ESC Members Jeremy Ford and Lisa Canada present a shovel and hose to First Wesleyan Pastor James Matchette to kick off their community garden project. The garden will be located on church property behind the church.

The “groundbreaking” for the garden will be on April 24, as part of the Commission’s Earth Day observances. Commission Member Brad Hinckley, who is also an incubator farmer at the Elma C. Lomax Farm Park, will till the soil for the plants. In the winter, Brad began growing plants from seed to donate for the community garden.

ESC Member and incubator farmer Brad Hinckley explains plans for the garden to the members of First Wesleyan Church.

Commission member Lisa Canada has plans for classes featuring different kinds of food preparation and preservation for those participating in the garden.

The garden provides an opportunity to build relationships within the congregation and with the church’s neighbors as it provides healthier food that is locally grown. Produce from the garden will also be donated to local food pantries throughout the year.

Fighting homelessness takes multiple groups

It felt good to read this article in yesterday’s Neighbors section of the Observer. It’s about how the Dale Jr. Foundation is donating $5,000 to Family Promise to purchase a trailer to transport homeless families’ possessions. Family Promise of Cabarrus County partners with local churches to provide temporary shelter for homeless families while also helping these families to find jobs and stable housing. The City of Kannapolis provided some of its community development funding to Family Promise for the 2009-10 fiscal year.

Where did the trailer come from that Family Promise is getting? Golden Gait Trailers, the Kannapolis business that I recently blogged about. They provided the trailer at a deeply discounted price. So it takes multiple groups – foundations, government, businesses, and churches (or should we say a whole community?) – to support local efforts to fight homelessness, especially in these tough times.

So thanks to all the participating groups, Family Promise is able to better meet its mission. If you are interested in supporting Family Promise, their wishlist describes some of their needs.

NCRC Staffer Featured on Charlotte Talks

The topic on this morning’s Charlotte Talks radio program on WFAE was about food safety – in restaurants as well as on the farm. Diane Ducharme, the Extension Associate with NCSU at the NC Research Campus and the NC MarketReady (a program of NC Cooperative Extension), was featured on the radio program. She discusses food safety of tomatoes and other products, some of the risks, and what kind of improvements are being made to produce handling to increase safety. Click here to listen to the program.

The Vision of the NCRC and a Call for Patience

I have been a native of the Charlotte region for most of my 40-something years.  During this time I have watched with interest the development (and oftentimes redevelopment) of uptown Charlotte. Or downtown. Or Center City.

This weekend, while reading an article about the residential development in downtown Charlotte, I was struck that while only 8 of the 20 announced developments since the mid-2000s have been built, that downtown economic developers and promoters would have likely been thrilled by the knowledge in 1999 that, by 2010, there would be 8 new significant downtown residential developments.  It’s easy to look back now and focus on the 12 projects that didn’t happen (yet) and lose sight of the 8 that did happen and how they helped transform Charlotte’s urban core.

The parallels to the development landscape in downtown Charlotte and some of the recent talk about the slowdown of development on the North Carolina Research Campus are amazingly close. Can you imagine how excited in July 2003 we in Kannapolis and Cabarrus County would have been to know that by 2009 we would be witness to the removal of more than 6 million square feet of rapidly decaying and obsolete textile manufacturing space (with no public funds expended to do it); the construction of three huge buildings including a one of a kind, state-of-the-art laboratory facility and space to support eight public and private universities doing groundbreaking life science research; nearly $300 million in private investment; and more than 200 people in the biotech industry working in downtown Kannapolis?

The Great Recession has changed our real estate market and it has impacted development projects across the country, from downtown Charlotte to New York City’s World Trade Center site to yes, Kannapolis and the North Carolina Research Campus.

What hasn’t changed in Kannapolis is the vision. Over the past several years we have spent a lot of time talking about buildings, and rightfully so. But we’re moving into a phase of the maturity of the Campus where the science is starting to take flight. Scientific papers are being published. Scientists are being recruited on a daily basis.  Real scientific discoveries are starting to develop and emerge.  This growth in the business of the Campus (more so than the development of the Campus) is what will sustain the project over time.  It is the science and the discoveries that will lead to more buildings, more private investment and more jobs.  The transformation of our local economy is indeed occurring – just not in the five years we had originally hoped.

Even if we never witnessed another brick being laid on the North Carolina Research Campus, we as a community and a region are incredibly fortunate to have seen what has occurred to date.  We are already incredibly far ahead of the game.

The satisfying part of all this is that the North Carolina Research Campus is still in its infancy and there are no plans to stop (or even slow) its continued development once our national and global economy recovers.  There will certainly be plenty more bricks to be laid on the Campus and lots more jobs to be created; but more importantly, there will be real scientific breakthroughs in the areas of nutrition, food productivity and disease research.  We must remain patient and do our part to continue to support this great vision.

Be Counted in the 2010 Census!

I moved here from Atlanta and still get email updates from the local newspaper. There was an article from this morning that talks about how DeKalb County missed out on $41 million in federal funding because more than a quarter of their residents weren’t counted in the 2000 Census. That is a huge number that pays for things like schools, social services, and health care!! Let’s not let that happen in Kannapolis, Cabarrus, and Rowan Counties!! (Yes, we are affected by the overall county counts as well.)

I wrote a previous post about what the 2010 Census is about, and there is some additional information on our website. Our local outreach efforts have included:

• Contacting churches and asking them to include information about the Census in their bulletins and messages.
• Making Census information available at the local library and to large local employers.
• Presenting Census information to Cabarrus Smart Start and their partners, the Kannapolis City Schools (including their ESL teachers), Cabarrus Health Alliance, the Employment Security Commission/JobLink office, and CMC-Northeast.
• Encouraging the media and other non-profit partners to help get the word out about the Census.
• The Census is working directly with the Hispanic Learning Center, Cabarrus DSS, and Rowan-Cabarrus Community College.

Despite these efforts, I worry that Kannapolis and neighboring communities will still be undercounted. Those at risk of becoming homeless, immigrants, and many others are disconnected from typical media sources and probably aren’t aware that the Census is coming and how important it is to fill out the form. Another big barrier is trust and getting people to understand that the information provided is confidential and cannot be traced back to an individual.

How you can help with the 2010 Census:

1. Fill out the form and mail it back.
2. Encourage your friends, relatives, co-workers, church members, and other acquaintances to fill out the form.
3. Get your church, civic groups, and non-profits to put information about the Census in bulletins, make announcements, etc.

Let’s be counted and not miss out on any funding!