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of precious time they could use to study, to play, and to have a few minutes of more sleep. Show me your analysis and convince me that merger is good for us. If you can't, don't do it. Dear Commissioners, in my humble view, it is bad enough that a bad law has put you all in this awful position to decide the future of more than 17,000 kids' education. But it would be far mare worse and even disastrous if this decision would be made in a hasty and not well thought out matter, as I'm afraid this merger process is apparently heading to. I urge you all to abstain from executing your authority on this issue. Let the parents, teachers, school boards, and this community decides what's best for our kids. Thank you. Christopher Lyu: Thank you everyone for hanging in here. It's late. My name is Christopher Lyu. I experienced firsthand about the disaster of merger. Ten years ago I lived in Durham, and I experienced the same things. There were so many discussions and public hearings, and I went to a couple of those. And the result was a disaster. I moved my family to Chapel Hill six years ago. And now here I am, I'm in public hearings again talking about merger. I'm really concerned about this. I want to admit that I was not aware of the funding issue between the City and County schools until recently. And I can understand same County school parents' frustration about not getting enough funding when even the County schools is among the top five best funded. Now we all wanted more. However, I am very concerned about the proposed merger. I think that the whole process, it's just that, not giving the people enough time. And there are a lot of people like me; we don't understand the whole issues here. I don't even know that there's this disparity, and they really have my sympathy for this issue. And I think it's a big issue and we should try and resolve it. But this is too complicated. There is no doubt that it would cause so much impact on the lives of so many people in Orange County. It would involve raising big taxes, redistricting, changing property values, and many other real issues, not just fear, let me tell you. It will affect real people. It's going to cause a lot of problems for many people. We were talking about taxes, some people will have to pay more than $200 on their property taxes, it will eliminate neighborhood schools, long bus rides, all of these are real, it's not just fear. And I am really concerned about all of this. Now I think that the citizens of Orange County should have the right to know the impact of merger on their lives. The cost benefit analysis should be done to evaluate the benefits of merger and its cost and the citizens should be educated about the results. Do the benefits of merger outweigh the costs? Are there any better solutions? And after that, an informed decision can be made. But this should be a decision made by the general public, not by the Commissioners alone, because we are the ones that are going to have to get all of this impact, and it's going to affect all of us. You've been asked to do the right thing, Commissioners, and I think the right thing is to listen to the majority of the voices here. It's overwhelming. And you know what people have been saying here tonight and the last public hearing. So I urge you to listen and listen carefully. Marc ter Horst: I'm Marc ter Horst. I'm a little nervous, so bear with me. This merger issue, well by the way, I'm in Chapel Hill in one of the northern communities. The whole issue concerns me, and it also concerns me that Orange County's got the funding problem that it does, although I admit I don't completely understand it. Anyway, I'll try to