I tried not to say a thing recently, but just found it very hard again for some reasons. Regarding Don Frantz’s article: “My View: Downtown is worth investment” in The Cary News July 15. For whatever it’s worth, I want to say a few things and raise some questions again.

The first reason in his article seems to be that the downtown area has not been receiving its fair share of Cary’s investment — $12 million out of $312 million in the last 10 years. Not sure how he calculated this, if including all the great looking Town of Cary office and Community Center facilities, it should be much more than $12 million. And let’s look at how much Cary has spent on the west side of N.C. 55, where by far, the most housing units of all kinds have been built in the last 10 years and lot more are still under construction, near nothing to accommodate such huge population growth due to the unlimited number of building permits issued by the town in the last five to 10 years.

The most interesting part is when the Town of Cary did approve to build the West Cary Aquatic and Community Center last year after many years of research and location comparisons and a huge amount of money already spent on the consultants. Town of Cary staff did hard work for years, and numerous meetings were held with many Cary residents attending. This project received the highest scores from all the surveys and statistical analysis.

But when Don Frantz got elected to council late last year, he proposed to stop it all together and ordered Town of Cary staff to look for its new location all over again. Guess where: “somewhere near downtown” (in his own writing). Since then this West Cary Center project was on and off in the talks.

Instead, the $35 million investment in downtown has become the largest spending in one district of Cary in the 2009 budget. This investment amount is far more than the largest proposed budget for the West Cary Center, and he seems to be very comfortable with it now compared to the time when he was strongly against the budget proposed for the West Cary project.

It’s not hard to understand this if we know that Don Frantz is the town councilor for District B, which is covering mostly downtown area. Not that I’m totally against the ideas of beautifying Cary downtown like most people in Cary, but my questions are:

• When new councilmen get elected, can they just reverse the decision on such big projects like West Cary Center, which have been previously approved, because they are representing some different district?
• How much to invest in downtown Cary is debatable. Big part of $35 million will be spent on things like streetscapes among others. Is it the time to do it when the budget is so tight and many other areas of the town are lacking even the very basic community center services?
• Mr. Frantz mentioned Cary’s tax rate is set to be the lowest in Wake County as another reason to make it sound OK to set up huge spending just for downtown. But don’t get too excited yet, because the debt that the town has gotten itself into is anything but trivia — as I read, debt service is close to 15 percent of total Cary budget.
• I sent emails to Frantz and copied many council members months ago asking questions about what is the process for the new council members to be able to halt the previous council-approved projects. There was no reply. I don’t know any government that can operate this way and still want to convince its people that their work is efficient and transparent.

“When everyone thinks alike, someone is not thinking.” It’s good to know that [Erv] Portman is sticking to his convictions in regard to his dissenting vote on this issue of the 2009 budget, and also ordinary citizens like Kent Misegades in his article: “My View: Cary’s Spending Habits,” expressing deep concerns about the 2009 budget and other things around the town.

Can anything be changed quickly enough? Most likely not unless a lot more people start to want to get involved, and formal decision-making procedures for major projects have been established to prevent council members playing localism.