#2 and A JoyFully Groovy July

👋 Good Morning, Apex! Today is Thursday, July 2, 2026 and this is the 78th weekly issue of The Peak Weekly.

Congratulations to the US Men’s National Team for advancing to the Round of 16, despite that atrocious red card. ⚽️ 

I remember last year - exactly one year ago today, in fact, when they beat Guatemala in the Concacaf Gold Cup Semifinal while the US Women’s Team, on the same day, put on a clinic against Canada, beating them 3-0.

That was a fun day. Fun trivia fact too!

I love “This Day in History” trivia almost as much as I love soccer.

Like… here’s one that’s not soccer related: On this day, July 2, in 1776 the Continental Congress voted to approve the Lee Resolution, legally severing ties with Great Britain. John Adams was so thrilled he wrote to his wife predicting that July 2nd would be celebrated by succeeding generations as "the great anniversary festival" with parades, and bonfires.

But he was wrong about two things. One… bonfires in July. That’s insane. And two… it took two days to actually certify the vote. So it wasn’t until two days later, July 4, when Congress literally approved the text of the Declaration of Independence.

Look at some of the other interesting July 2 events in history:

• 1937 - Amelia Earhart Vanishes

• 1947 - Suspicious debris is found near Roswell, NM

• 1962 - The very first Walmart Opens in Rogers, AR

• 1964 - The Civil Rights Act is signed into law

• 1988 - Michael Jackson’s “Dirty Diana” hits #1 on the Billboard Hot 100

• 2024 - Town of Apex discovers cybersecurity incident

That last one isn’t as fun. But, happy…. 2-year cybersecurity incident-aversary I guess 🤷‍♂️ 

Let me keep riffing on the number 2 because I’m on a roll…

Since that July 2 cybersecurity incident, which the Town says affected about 22,000 residents, I have personally discovered 2 additional data exposures. Of those 2 additional exposures, the Town has fixed all 2 of them. The Town has simultaneously denied all 2 of them.

But we’ll get to that in a couple of seconds.

First, we’ll dive into the fun stuff. But if you’re interested in an update about this data exposure, I’ve included it towards the end of the email under the civic updates section.

🇺🇸 Happy two-50th. Be safe!

Miscellaneous Info:

🇺🇸 Friday Holiday
Town offices will be closed tomorrow. Trash/Recycling routes are not affected. Any yard waste pickups scheduled for Friday will be delayed to next week. The Halle Cultural Arts Center will be closed Friday and Saturday.

🥂 Happy New (Fiscal) Year
Yesterday, July 1, was the official start of the new 2026-2027 Fiscal Year. This means that:

• The new adopted budget and CIP plan is now in place

• Increased utility rates are now in effect

• Your increased property tax rate is now in effect

• Standard billing procedures (late fees, disconnections) have resumed

• New guidelines for yard waste pickup have begun

• Parks & Rec room and shelter primetime rental fee increases begin

🏞️ National Parks and Recreation Month
Every July, the Town of Apex celebrates National Parks & Rec Month. Celebrations kick off with today’s Learning Lunch and continue throughout the month with events like Pickleball Palooza, Rhythm & Reels, Splash Bash and more. All events will, of course, be included in the newsletter throughout the month but you can also see details here.

🍂 Fall Program Registration
Quick reminder that the Fall Program Guides are online now. Registration begins the morning of July 20. Fall Program Guide | Fall Senior Program Guide

🎆 Independence Day Celebration

Here is everything you need to know to kick off your Fourth of July celebrations this weekend. The events will take place tomorrow, Friday, July 3 at Hunter Street Park. Here’s your schedule of events:

4:00pm - Parade of Wheels participants will begin lining up on Hunter Street

4:30pm - The Parade of Wheels begins. Apex Fire Department will host their Splashdown immediately following the parade.

5pm - Food trucks and inflatables fun

8:45pm - Drone light show begins

9:30pm - Fireworks show begins

Other things to know:

• Timing of all events is estimated and may change based on weather conditions

• A sensory-friendly space will be in the Salem Room in the Senior Center

• Beginning at Noon, Hunter Street Park will be closed, Mason Street from Hunter Street to Old Mill Village Drive will be closed, Ambergate Station and Hunter Street from Salem Street to Mason Street will be closed.

• Beginning at 4pm, North Salem Street from Hunter Street to Apex Peakway will be closed. All closures to re-open by 10:30pm.

• Beginning after 4:30pm, spectators can set up chairs at the Hunter Street Park soccer field and in the viewing area along N Salem St.

• New this year: around 200 parking spaces will be available along Apex Peakway, and a new designated viewing area will be on Salem Street between North Street and Abbey Oak Lane.

• Here’s the downtown parking map

• GoApex will be on a detour from Noon to 10pm. Route details here
  

Things to Do This Weekend in Apex:

Thursday, July 2

💡 Learning Lunch: A Peak into the Past
12pm - 1pm | Apex Senior Center

🏃 Southern Peak Brewery Run Club
6:30 PM | Southern Peak Brewery

🎬️ Teen - Movie Night!
6:30pm - 8:30pm | Eva Perry Regional Library

Friday, July 3

👱‍♀️ Ladies Night
All Day | Apex Racing Lab

🎆 Fireworks Frenzy + Parade of Wheels
4:30pm - 10pm | Hunter Street Park

🎶 Live Music w/Chris Bennett’s Acoustic Swing Trio
6pm | Peak of the Vine

Saturday, July 4

🧑‍🌾 Apex Farmers Market
8am - 12pm | The Depot

🏃‍♀️ Run Club Apex
Meet at 9am | Foxtail Coffee

Sunday, July 5

🏎️ Watch Party: Silverstone
9:45am - Noon | Apex Racing Lab

Local Business Updates

🫐 SoBoL Apex (Today Only)
Congratulations to SoBoL in Sweetwater who is celebrating their 1-year anniversary today. Stop in between Noon and 3PM, Thursday July 2, for a $5 Classic Bowl.

🆕 JoyFully House (Now Open)
Now open at 118 N Salem St, JoyFully House is described as a joyful gathering space for Turkish coffee, curated finds, meaningful moments, and inspiring experiences in the heart of Downtown Apex. Go check them out in person and follow them on Instagram here.

⌛ Groovy Duck Bakery (Next Week)
A week from today - Thursday, July 9 - Groovy Duck Bakery will be open for business in downtown Apex! The new bakery will feature chunky cookies, cupcakes, muffins, scones, pretzels, bars, a variety of bread loaves, decorated shortbread cookies, and custom cakes — all baked fresh daily.

They’ll be celebrating with a big cake that they’ll cut and serve as samples to all of the guests, and the first 100 visitors will get a Groovy Duck rubber duck! Plus, free drip coffee to all first responders during the opening week.

🚚 Frasketta Pizza Romana (Back Open)
After being closed for a few weeks due to a family bereavement, Frasketta is now back open. Go support the food truck and grab some amazing pizza!

🤝 LiveSwitch (Hiring)
The owners and primary occupants of the Highline building downtown Apex, LiveSwitch, plan to hire 100 people in the Triangle for business development representative positions. The company, which provides real-time video communication technology and an AI-powered platform for businesses, will consider individuals with a criminal history, a reflection of LiveSwitch founder’s nonprofit organization, Inmates to Entrepreneurs.

👩‍🌾 Simple Gifts Community Garden (Summer Schedule)
The garden is coming into all its glory as summer approaches. Warm weather crops are starting to come in and we'll be working in the cooler hours as much as possible. Tuesdays 6-8pm, Thursdays 9-11am, Saturdays 8am - Noon. Your whole family can join for just $20 and you can take home a little harvest any day you work. The majority of the harvest goes to local food banks. Summer is a great time to learn how your food is grown and teach your kids the power of service. For more information, simplegiftsgarden.org

🚜 The Peak Weekly Farm Series (Part 14/17)

🍯 Blue Truck Honey

This article was written by The Peak Weekly’s amazing content contributor, Susan McGrath

This week we’re spotlighting Blue Truck Honey, a small family farm producing raw artisanal honey in Apex. Blue Truck Honey is owned and operated by Scott Stilwell and Christine Culler.

Scott is a former mechanical engineer who transitioned into a full-time beekeeper one year ago after keeping bees for seven years. He currently manages 150 beehives and has seven bee yards throughout Chatham County, hosted on local farms and private landowners’ properties, mostly near Jordan Lake and the Haw River.

Blue Truck Honey’s raw, unprocessed artisanal honey is gently filtered to remove beeswax but is never heated, mixed, or microfiltered. The bees visit approximately two million flowers to make one pound of honey. It’s important to Scott to preserve the integrity of their effort, and that makes the honey he produces pure and high-quality.

Blue Truck Honey makes two types of honey:

Jordan Lake honey: This is raw wildflower honey that highlights the diversity of the Apex, NC, area. It includes tulip poplar, blackberries, holly, mimosa, locust, and privet.

Mountain honey: In June and July, Scott takes trailers of bees on an adventure to the western North Carolina mountains near Hot Springs to produce basswood honey that is lighter in color and has a subtle citrus flavor.

You can purchase Blue Truck Honey at the Downtown Apex Farmers Market once a month, the Cary Night Market, Stylish Living and The Studio in downtown Apex, VEG ER for Pets, Jordan Lake Farms, and soon at Peak City Farms Urban Market.

For more information, you can email Scott at [email protected]. Follow Blue Truck Honey on Instagram and Facebook to find out when they’ll be at the markets.

You can also check out their website at www.bluetruckhoney.com, where online sales will be added soon.

Civic News:

⚠️ Data Exposure Update
Town Council is now on summer break so we’ll be light on the civic updates for a couple of weeks. Instead, I’ll take the opportunity to update you on the data exposure.

Two years ago today — July 2, 2024 — the Town of Apex discovered a ransomware attack on its network. To its credit, the Town moved fast: it took systems offline, brought in privacy professionals and federal law enforcement, and notified residents within a day that their information may have been exposed. That was the standard the Town set for itself.

Last week, I documented a different kind of exposure - and this one was the Town's own doing. Seven Town systems were publishing residents' personal contact information - names, emails, phone numbers, and addresses - to the open internet, retrievable by anyone, with no password. More than 31,000 records were exposed. Town employees and contractors were in there too.

I found it without collecting anyone's personal data, preserved timestamped evidence, notified the Town privately first, and reported it to NCDIT and NC Emergency Management. The systems exposing the data were quietly fixed and closed, and the Town didn’t even have the decency to respond to me.

They did respond to some of you who reached out, though. And here’s how they described it:

The Town is describing 31,106 lines of resident contact and home address data as "test entries" 🙄 and non-sensitive form details.

They must think you are stupid to even mention test entries on 31,106 lines of data.

After explaining how they fixed the exposure that they down-played, they followed it up with this:

Why would you need to notify them about test data and non-sensitive form details?

Allow me to elaborate on why it’s a problem that the Town of Apex provides various contact forms on their website which often require you to input your full name, email address, phone number, and home address alongside your comments… and then publishes all of that on the open internet.

Imagine you filled out a form with your name, email, phone, and home address and left a comment like "I need bulk waste pickup next week." And then imagine a bad actor, who can see this wide open on the internet, picks up the phone and calls you and says, "Hey this is Tom with Town of Apex. Got your bulk trash pickup request. That's going to be $100; what's your credit card number?"

For a Town who has warned its residents multiple times about telephone phishing scams, to call an exposure of your information like this, that was completely their own doing, “non-sensitive” is wildly concerning, don’t you agree?

Just for the sake of a visual:

This is an example of one of the exposed tables (I have of course redacted the sensitive information). Behind that tall black rectangle are home addresses of Apex residents. Scrolling left & right on that table would reveal the full name, email, phone number, and comments. That data, in this table, was also visible in that right hand sidebar. And see the pencil icon the arrow is pointing to? That’s the edit button.

This is just a website. Open to anyone in the world. See the “Sign in” link in the top right? I’m not signed in, there was no password, no API needed (though it was accessible there too). 31,106 total rows of Apex resident info spanning years just like this.

And remember the first data exposure I reported?

The Town Attorney and Terry Mahaffey both said that my reporting was false and that the data in the exposure was “Public Record” anyway, therefore it cannot be a data exposure.

Back it up, Terry. I did a public record request for the information. Here’s what they sent me:

WEIRD. The information I said that Mahaffey leaked which he called me a liar, lied about me being a political actor, said an investigation cleared him, and then changed the website to fix the exposure was… REDACTED when I requested it?

But I thought it was public record anyway and I’m such a liar?

If you can’t understand that they hid information, which they said didn’t need to be hidden while launching a public attack on me that several of you reading this ran with to attack me, lead by the Town Attorney and Terry Mahaffey, then I don’t know what else to tell you. Just unsubscribe from this newsletter, please, because you don’t care about the truth or this town like I do.

Are we seeing a pattern? Are we understanding why the Town Attorney resigned? Is the newsletter guy with a deep collection of evidence for everything he has ever said crazy? Or is it the politician with the news website that filters out stories, who owns the network of websites which track you and your behaviors across every single one of them, whose biggest donor is the pro-development Realtor PAC, who has raised your taxes every single year that he’s been on Council… is maybe the dishonest one???

Terry Mahaffey is the biggest threat to the Town of Apex. The second biggest threat is those who protect him.

Concerned About Your Information? Here's Where to Raise It.

I can’t do this by myself. If you've contacted the Town of Apex through one of its online systems and you're concerned your personal information may have been among the data exposed, you can raise it as a data-protection concern with the North Carolina Department of Justice. (NC’s Department of Information Technology directs consumer privacy and data-protection concerns to the N.C. DOJ, which oversees how personal information is safeguarded and receives government data-breach reports.

You can file your questions and concerns here:

• N.C. Department of Justice — Online Form (choose ‘other’)

• Phone: 1-877-566-7226

• Email: [email protected]

Questions a resident might reasonably want answered:

• Was my personal information exposed, and how long was it accessible before it was caught?

• What exactly caused this, and has the Town completed a formal root-cause analysis?

• Beyond names and contact details, did the Town review the free-text description and comment fields for other personal information residents may have entered — and what did that review find?

• What steps were taken to secure the data once the exposure was found, and what is the plan to prevent it from happening again?

• Will the Town notify everyone whose information was involved?

A note: communications you send to a state or federal agency may become public record, so share only what you're comfortable putting on the record. These offices may also refer a concern to whichever agency is the best fit — a normal part of how they route things.

And one last request: If you are one of those people who is subscribed to this newsletter, reads every issue, loves the free information, but turns around and calls me names and bullies me on Facebook for reporting honest stories that don’t make your favorite politician look so great (their fault, not mine by the way), please unsubscribe. I did not create this newsletter nor put in the time and money and sweat for you. You can find all of the information that fits your narrative about how super transparent and wonderful the Town is over on Terry’s Truth Social Network.

But if you want to continue to hear the unbiased truth - good or bad - I appreciate you and I hope you’ll stick around. ❤️

Upcoming Meetings:

Monday, July 6
Multimodal Transportation Advisory Board
Subcommittee Meeting on Infrastructure
4pm - 5pm | Mason Street Municipal Building

Wednesday, July 8
Multimodal Transportation Advisory Board
Regular Meeting
4:45pm - 6:45pm | Town Hall

A Look Ahead:

July 10
Art Reception - Susan Parrish | The Halle

July 11
Summer Fun Dance | The Halle

July 14
Invasive Plant Removal Workday | Kelley Road Park

July 15
Wednesday Morning Movie | The Halle

July 17
Pickleball Palooza | Apex Nature Park

July 18
SuperFun Saturday | The Halle

July 18
Open House for Kidstowne Playground Project Renovation

July 24
Afternoon in the Garden | Apex Nature Park

July 24
Moth Night | Apex Nature Park

July 31
Splash Blash | Pleasant Park

A Final Note:

Thank you for taking time out of your day today to read this week’s edition of The Peak Weekly. If you love it, please forward it to a friend. If you don’t love it, please unsubscribe.

And, as always, if you have any ideas of how to make this newsletter better, want to nominate a local business or organization to be featured, or anything else, please respond to this email or email me directly at [email protected]

See you next Thursday... 😘