The Town Council's troubling approval of Monday night's resolution beginning the final phase of negotiations on their expensive and off-track downtown project capped off my fifth year of local activism.

Five years. Wow.

At first I was just a guy trying to preserve our constitutional rights as I understood them. I had let others shoulder the burden of community service for too long and wanted to use my experience changing a problematic public policy to help others in our community promote broader change.

It was my turn. Somewhere along the way, folks started calling me an activist.

Years on the now defunct technology board. Member of the quieted Horace Williams Citizens' Committee. Time spent working with the Downtown Parking Task Force. At times, it seems I've participated in a lifetime's worth of council, commission, board and community group meetings.

Branching out, I've fought for electoral reforms: voter-owned elections, a campus super-precinct, non-partisan commissioners, cumulative voting, stronger campaign disclosure rules, no divisive districting.

Morphing from a longtime observer of UNC development activities, I'm now one of Chancellor James Moeser's pesky "freelance dissenters" -- a "watchdog" over Carolina North. Chancellor, I'm just a guy, a UNC supporter, a Chapel Hill resident, a North Carolina taxpayer who expects our grand university to create a world-class vision and an example for the ages.

Vision and precedent. Common themes of my 2005 Town Council candidacy.

I've been a loyal supporter of our Town Council members on the negotiating team, Cam Hill, Sally Greene and Bill Strom, since working to elect them in 2003. I found Sally's criticism of the strangled time limits in OI-4 zoning, Cam's obvious love of Chapel Hill, Bill's work addressing transit needs 30 years ahead of time, quite appealing.

Over the years my admiration has grown for Sally, as she has taken on homelessness; Cam, who has made a forte of fixing common annoyances; and Bill, who works on traffic problems yet to be.

Strange, then, at the end of 2006, I find myself so much at odds with all three.

I certainly haven't agreed with everything they've laid out over the years: Sally on taxes, Cam on lawn mowers, Bill's approach to town-gown relations. But at least, I thought, we shared a common vision of our town's future.

A gap began to open with the dissolution of the town's technology advisory board. At that time, the council acknowledged our town's lagging ability to effectively use technology to drive costs down, provide superior service, efficiently integrate community counsel and broaden participation in governance. Their unmet commitment to reconstitute the functions of this citizen-led board lingers.

Spring found momentum building for a community-owned Internet.

Communities throughout the world are implementing this cost-effective infrastructure to bridge the Òdigital divide,Ó to attract economic development and to add and streamline government services.

Following the enthusiastic citizen response after a town-sponsored forum on networking, the council quashed fellow member Laurin Easthom's efforts to form a task force composed of nonprofits, business owners, UNC and community technologists to move our town forward. The majority was not interested in deploying the "must have" infrastructure of the 21st century,

UNC's Carolina North Leadership Advisory Committee (LAC) started out with a few hiccups. But by taking the town's 2005 Horace Williams Citizens' Committee's principles as a guideline for Carolina North, the LAC poised itself for success.

The citizen committee prepared itself to be a vital sounding board. Well into creating a framework for environmental, fiscal and transit guidelines, the mayor, with no warning and the nearly full concurrence of the council, pulled the plug. This citizen input, council said, is "not needed."

And now the passage of the Lot 5 development project resolution.

Responding to council calls to hold UNC to the highest environmental and energy standards, council member Jim Ward nailed it when he said, "I think we lose our credibility when we pass that [Lot 5] and say, "You guys have to do better than us' but our project is fine. ... We lost that argument when we passed parking Lot 5 as designed."

Precedent and vision. Walking the talk.

My vision of a trend-setting town, socially responsible, liv-ing within its means, business savvy, leveraging new environ-mental opportunities, broadening democracy, committed to the future but not sacrificing the past -- well, that vision doesn't quite align with the council's 2006 precedent.

Feb. 12, 2007, when negotiations are complete, we'll see what precedents the council sets for the decades to come.