Update: This article has been updated (Friday evening, Sept. 14, 2007) to clarify that the university has submitted a letter asking for expedited review of a Special Use Permit for the project.
University officials have submitted a letter to the town saying they’ll ask Chapel Hill for expedited review of its special use permit for an 80,000-square-foot Innovation Center on a site off Municipal Drive near the Horace Williams Airport.
The building would be the first in for the proposed Carolina North project, which university planners say could include more than 2.5 million square feet of construction over the next 15 years.
The university is working on a 15-year plan and a 50-year master plan for roughly a quarter of the nearly 1,000 acres in and around the airport property.
The Innovation Center site would allow construction to start at Carolina North ahead of the closing of Horace Williams Airport. Closing the airport has been a source of controversy among members of the General Assembly.
Town and gown officials have been discussing a plan to revise the current zoning on the land in light of Carolina North.
In late July, the UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees voted to shift the site for the Innovations Center away from an area on the south of Estes Drive Extension near the Elkins Hill neighborhood to the new site near Chapel Hill’s former public works facilities.
By submitting the project as a special-use permit under the present zoning, the Innovation Center could move forward ahead of any comprehensive agreement on Carolina North.
University officials have emphasized the need to proceed with the center, saying there’s a pressing demand for space close to campus for the kind of commercial spinoffs and public/private partnerships it will house and that the developer the university is working with is being aggressively courted by other campuses.