Raleigh Public Record

Demonstrators for and against gay marriage rallied downtown Tuesday.

Fresh fruits and vegetables are in season and Raleigh is awash in diverse, local offerings, but it wasn’t always this way. The recent locavore and slow food movements have stimulated demand, but our local climate, terrain and the 2004 tobacco buyout allowed many former Wake County tobacco farmers to transition to other crops.

Nancy Petty is the senior pastor at Pullen Memorial Baptist Church. She was arrested earlier this week for disrupting a Wake County School Board meeting. Petty sat down with Raleigh Public Record to talk about why she decided to participate in civil disobedience. Photo courtesy Pullen Memorial Baptist Church.

Between 2007 and 2008 the city council set three goals to make Raleigh a more sustainable city.The city’s sustainability office gave councilors an update on those efforts recently. Those goals include reducing fossil fuel consumption by city vehicles by 20 percent, setting efficiency standards for new buildings and endorsing the U.S. Mayors’ Climate Protection Agreement.

RPR’s Chrystal Barlett talks with state and local leaders about what the census means for Raleigh.

Eleven members of North Carolina’s congressional delegation sent a letter to President Barack Obama requesting a change in how the Census counts temporarily deployed service personnel based in North Carolina. Read the full letter to the president.

Check out the latest update to RPR’s Stimulus Tracking project on Department of Transportation stimulus spending in the Raleigh/Wake County area.

Homeless people talk about their experiences with county services. This is the second part in a two-part series on gauging Wake County’s efforts to help people facing homelessness.

The recession continues and the news is rife with stories of struggles from board rooms to homeless shelters. Corporate cutbacks, unemployment extension and insurance losses abound, but how’s the recession impacting those who never had much to start with?

Tension is rife these days between Raleigh and Durham about Falls Lake water quality. Raleigh contends “its” water source – whose headwaters are located in Durham County – is dirty, getting dirtier and Durham allowed it to get that way.

Dirty water is neither cheap nor easy to clean. Raleigh may have to pay $450M to boost its water treatment plant’s cleaning capacity if Falls get dirtier. Durham likely would pay considerably more to clean Falls Lake. Finger pointing is all very fine, but everybody lives downstream.