Public Hearing on Chapel Hill Public Campaign Financing

The town of Chapel Hill will hold a public hearing on their proposed Voter-Owned Elections program for local elections this Wednesday, May 14 at 7pm.
The meeting will be held at the Chapel Hill Town Hall, located 405 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. (Note: The Voter-Owned Elections section starts right at 7pm, so try and get there by 6:45).
Under the proposal, candidates running for town council and mayor would be able to receive a publicly-funded campaign financing grant if they collected a threshold of small dollar contributions and agreed to strict spending and fundraising limits.
If you are a resident of Chapel Hill or Orange County, please come to the public hearing and show your support of the program! We're also looking for citizens to speak out in support of the Voter-Owned Elections initiative. We will have talking points available.

For more information about the meeting, if you'd like to speak, or if you have comments or suggestions on the proposal, please call Chase Foster, Coordinator for the North Carolina Voters for Clean Elections coalition, at (919) 521-4121 or contact him by email at chase@ncvce.org.
More about Voter Owned Elections: The proposed Chapel Hill program would allow community-supported candidates without access to wealth to competitively run for town office. It would invigorate small dollar participation by encouraging candidates to run solely with contributions between $5 and $20. It would provide a check on the campaign money chase and the escalating cost of elections by allowing candidates to spend more time listening to voters and less time fundraising from big donors. And it would reduce the influence of money and special interest groups, by giving candidates a meaningful way to run without these groups' support. Finally, it would allow the public to have more ownership of the process, by turning campaigns and campaign financing into a public good.