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I am offended deeply by the politics of lack and the prejudice talk and the destructive sentiments that have been spoken here by some from the County. I come to Chapel Hill all the time, and there seem to be an awfully lot of really good people down here, and I don't think you hate us at all. I don't think you want to do anything against us. don't want to hear about what we didn't get and what we wanted. We could have gotten those things. I don't want to hear that we didn't get the chance that we never voted on a district tax because it is a bad solution. The reason we never voted on a district tax in Orange County ladies and gentlemen is because we never got the chance. The group that stands before you tonight and talks about prejudice is run by the people who have taken that opportunity for us to vote on the district tax last year. Thank you very much. Mr. Keith Cook, I'd like to echo him as well. We don't need to match Chapel Hill dollar for dollar, we need what we need. We know what we need. We've put that on the table for you and we do each and every year. If we could have some way to equalize the funding, I'd get behind it. I think it's a good thing to do. We wish we'd had the opportunity to vote on a district tax last year, but we didn't get the chance. I wonder if when the friends of the people who actually robbed us of the chance to vote on the district tax say that recent attempts at the district tax for County are disingenuous, ill- conceived, and impractical, that they really mean that about the very people that came with them here tonight. Thank you. Georgia Gamcsik: I don't think I can really express any better things that have already been said except that I'll just give you my perspective. Seven years ago I relocated to North Carolina and landed in Durham. I happened to come during a time when Durham was going through their merger, and also at the same time, Wake County was going through a fair amount of upheaval. And when we decided that we were going to stay in North Carolina when my children became school aged, we decided we'd better start looking at schools. I think everybody makes a choice where they live -some people want rural living, some people want more urbanized living. I think it's inexcusable that some children don't have textbooks or whatever; the basic needs are not being met. don't think merger is necessarily the answer, and I think that you really should seriously take a look at what happened in Durham. Did they really achieve what they wanted to achieve with their merger? Their issues are probably different than ours are. But in the final analysis, did they get out of their merger what they wanted, or take retrospectively any of the mergers that have occurred in some of the other counties that may have been sited. It doesn't really matter what the issues are. You have to look at the before, and what was wanting to be accomplished, did that happen, and decide whether something that's going to be so expensive, time consuming, possibly divisive in the community is going to be worth it in the long run. That's all I had to say. Anne Lindsey: Hi, I'm Anne Lindsey, I'm a parent of an Orange County student, a senior at Cedar Ridge. I'm very proud of his progress through the school system and the school system. But I do know that we have many shortages. What I want to say tonight is really better said by Stacy Lee, and Dana Thompson, and Elizabeth Brown, and Susan Houck, and others. But I want to reiterate it. I want you to rise above the fear mongering that I've heard tonight -fear on both sides of the district line -the anti- tax folks in the County, the worries about bussing because we don't really understand