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Chapel Hill council gets expanded powers

Posted on July 17, 2008 by Staff

by Rich Fowler
Staff Writer

Chapel Hill officials say they’re pleased to see that a slate of local measures they sought have now cleared the General Assembly.

Legislators recently passed new laws that give the town the power to raise vehicle fees, regulate the demolition of historic buildings and better deal with parks and recreation needs in new developments.

The town now has the power to raise vehicle registration fees by another $10, to $30 per year. According to the N.C. Department of Transportation, there are more than 36,000 vehicles registered in Chapel Hill, so the extra fee would add over $360,000 a year to Chapel Hill Transit’s budget. The money will go to help pay operating costs and expand
services. Carrboro recently raised its vehicle registration fee by $10 as well.

Chapel Hill Mayor Kevin Foy said that in a time when more and more people are using public transit, people want more services.

“We haven’t been able to add routes on Saturdays and Sundays, routes in the late evening, that type of thing. So that will give us more flexibility,” he said.

The town also now has the power to pass laws to regulate the demolition of historic buildings.

“We wanted to be able to provide as much protection as possible for historic structures, and so hopefully that legislation will give us some more flexibility with regard to providing an incentive for somebody who owns an historic building not to knock it down,” Foy said.

He said that the town tries to provide incentives to protect historic buildings, but when they can’t do that they need to provide disincentives to keep those buildings from being torn down.

The town can also pass an ordinance requiring developers to pay the town instead of setting aside land in new developments for parks and recreation. The money would go to the Parks and Recreation Department.

Foy said that because most new developments in town are being built in established neighborhoods, there are already parks and recreation facilities in place.

“What we need now is to be able to improve the parks and to be able to accommodate different kinds of activities in the parks,” he said.

“We have a lot of needs for our parks. We need improved softball fields, we need new soccer fields and we may even be able to cobble together more land for a small regional park that would serve a lot of different places.”

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