Macintosh Chapel Hill

Replacement named for Charlotte city attorney

CHARLOTTE — Current Senior Deputy City Attorney Bob Hagemann has been named the new city attorney and will take his post following current City Attorney Mac McCarley’s departure at the end of December.

Hagemann, who holds a J.D. from UNC-Chapel Hill, has worked with the Charlotte City Attorney’s office for a total of 17 years, including more than three years as senior deputy city attorney and seven years as senior assistant city attorney.

In his previous work with the city, Hagemann has served as legal counsel to various city departments and boards. In particular, he has represented the city on First Amendment matters including a lawsuit filed against the city by anti-gay street preacher Flip Benham . That suit was later dismissed by a U.S. District Court judge.

The city attorney, appointed by the mayor and city council, is the chief legal counsel to the mayor, city council, city manager and other city officials. As attorney, Hagemann will oversee the representation of the city in litigation filed by or against it. The city attorney also helps to draft or review all city ordinances and resolutions.

Hagemann will come into his position following years of work by his supervisor and soon-to-be predecessor Mac McCarley, whose legal opinions have often been the source of frustration for LGBT community members.

In 2009, the  city was sued by a fired, transgender employee. At the time, McCarley said the city would not take responsibility in the case.

“Transgendered individuals do not have any rights under the federal employment discrimination laws,” he said.

The City of Charlotte does not have employment ordinances prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender-identity, though City Manager Curt Walton instituted an administrative policy last year prohibiting discrimination on sexual orientation.

McCarley has insisted the city council lacks the authority to pass an employment non-discrimination ordinance or policy inclusive of “sexual orientation.”

In a Feb. 23, 2010, memo from McCarley to Walton, McCarley said federal law in Title VII does not prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation. The city charter, he said, also limits the city’s non-discrimination statement to those characteristics already listed (race, religion, color, sex, national origin, age, disability, and political affilation).

In the memo, McCarley said Walton’s 2010 administrative policy change is the “most legally defensible way to include sexual orientation in the City’s equal employment language without first requesting a Charter amendment from the legislature.

The Mac Tries to be a PC (March 11) - Chapel Hill-Carrboro City ...

*WRITTEN LIVE FROM BERLIN, GERMANY*

This week I continued with the reimaging of the iBook laptops, and managed to finish updating the last of the units on Thursday morning before departing for spring break. The project, while on the whole quite menial, helped me learn a number of troubleshooting solutions for computers, including alternative ways to reboot the computer if the device is behaving in a peculiar way that a normal reboot will not solve. I also learned a number of powersaving techniques to preserve baterry life, including things as simple as reducing the time of inactivity before a computer goes to sleep. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the project, however, was the reimaging process itself. Essentially, each computer was wired into the school system’s central network and re-configured to have an identical, pre-designed set of applications and settings that allowed the school system to maintain standardization across the system. Thus, despite the wonderous new opportunities technology brings to teaching, school systems still limit the creative license of teachers by standardizing computer operation systems even as they are standardizing curricula.

The more intriguing aspect of the last two weeks, however, was working with laptops and kindergartners. Mind you, it is hard to imagine initially what use a kindergartner could possibly have for a laptop, but in this instance, technology has managed to digitize one of the most basic of children’s activities: coloring. Using a freely downloadable program called Tux Paint, which is quite similar to the Paint application on a standard PC, the kindergartners could draw pictures using different colored “paintbrushes” and include text to describe the scence (the teachers seemed to have disregarded the fact that most of these children could not yet read or write). Rather than teach the children how to operate the program, in which most of them were already fairly well versed, I was tasked with fixing the program on such occasions when, for no apparent reason, the software wouldn’t work. Given that the program was obtained freely from the Internet, it should perhaps come as no surprise that the software failed. The curiosity, rather, is why it failed only about 50% of the time on devices that were, in all practical ways, identical. As a proud Mac user myself (and yes, probably a snooty one at that) I attributed the problem to Apple trying to be too much like Microsoft with a primitive painting software. But the eccentricities of technology aside, I truly found this development in early elementary education intriguing. Already children are learning reading, writing, history, mathematics, science, and all other subjects in a manner completely different from my generation, chiefly through the use of SmartBoards and the exponentially increasing use of personal computers. And now, not only the pencil and paper but also the crayon have been replaced with digital representations that, while innovative, interesting, and convenient, hardly seem a substitute for the crude drawing hanging over the teachers desk.

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