Steve Mensing, Editor
♦ In Tuesday’s Salisbury’s City Council the two “big” stories were City Council’s voted to hire Developmental Associates of Chapel Hill North Carolina as the search firm they will employ in their hunt for a new city manager. The other story was that Police Chief Rory Collins and the police department reached a compromise with DJ’s Restaurant owner Elias Mourouzidis that the noise level will not exceed 70 decibels and that after 11 p.m. the sounds emanating from the restaurant, on the 1500 block of West Innes, must be at or below 60 decibels. Also bands must quit playing at 11:30 p.m. Simple enough. The neighbors can rest easy.
In regards to the choice of hiring Developmental Associates of Chapel Hill as the search firm in their hunt for a new city manager, council seemed to universally approve that their new city manager “headhunters” employed personality and behavioral testing. That is a testing choice that might’ve triggered alarms about a former “mutually terminated” employee had it been in place.
Still some question if city council’s need to hide city hall’s numerous cadavers in its closet will trump the power of personality and behavioral testing. City hall shows no signs at present of airing anything with the slightest hint pointing to challenges in the way they conduct business or the alleged success of their “projects”. Basically city hall is not fulfilling public information requests, a sure sign at least of a non transparent government and at the worst government corruption.
Developmental Associates is said to be priced between $17,500 and $20,000 for their services. City Council voted 4 to 0 to hire the firm. Councilman Brian Miller was not in attendance.
Besides finding a new city manager the citizens of Salisbury should start searching out viable city council candidates not wedded to city hall’s usual practices and the tentacles of real estate and banking families stunting Salisbury’s growth if the city is to survive and maybe years in the future begin to thrive again as it once did years ago.
Back to the city’s “decibel” challenges with D.J.’s noise level. Some residents negatively experienced with the outdoor patio lounge music when bands play there. The owner Mourouzidis was apparently arrested three times in the last two months for violating what many perceive as a very unclear noise ordinance. Our police department, with its rapidly diminishing roster of officers, possesses equipment to measure decibels. The city’s ordinance seems exceedingly vague in its wording. The ordinance states: “The playing of any “television, radio, phonograph or other musical instrument in such a manner or with such a volume so as to annoy or disturb the quiet, comfort or repose of any person in any dwelling, hotel or other type of residence, shall be deemed to be unlawful.”
What? There is a wide variance in what persons perceive as loud or in what annoys or disturbs them. Some folks have high sensitivity to sound due to their brain architecture and chemistry. Other folks suffer from “low frustration tolerance” or “no frustration tolerance” in regards to the sounds and events going on around them. Heaven forbid you open a music venue anywhere near highly sensitive people or sound a train warning horn in their neighborhood. Position one of these individuals near any sound source and they’ll bare their teeth while others will quickly adapt to the sound. Me–I enjoy the sound of distant train horns. I’m not easily annoyed or disturbed by sounds unless it involves nagging (especially machine gun nagging) and then my spear slams into the ground. Loud music would only bother me if it was louder than my internal voice when I’m trying to write or read or I desire to connect with a movie without it being drowned out.
The city’s existing ordinance best be changed to a specific decibel range and make a clear statement about times of day when the decibel range needs lowering. Hopefully that ordinance is based on existing independent studies of decibel tolerance and times when folks are hitting the sack.
