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Halloween questions haunt town council

Posted on September 25, 2008 by Staff

Rich Fowler
Staff Writer

Chapel Hill’s Halloween celebration has gotten too big, too expensive and too difficult to manage, according to a report by Chapel Hill Chief of Police Brian Curran and Parks and Recreation director Butch Kisiah. The Chapel Hill Town Council heard Curran and Kisiah’s report on plans for taming the celebration at their business meeting on Monday night.

Last year, 80,000 people came to Franklin Street for Halloween, and that required approximately 400 police officers and 125 firefighters from all over the area — some from as far away as Fayetteville. The cost for hosting the 2007 celebration and cleaning up after it was $221,000, which is roughly equal to one-half of a cent of town property tax.

According to the report, the event has grown so large that it now presents a significant risk to public safety. Senior town staff wants to reduce the number of people coming to Franklin Street from out of town before strains on resources limit their ability to prevent a serious incident. They also want to return the event to its roots — a community event where everyone feels safe.

“It tends to be an alcohol-fueled event from our perspective,” Curran said.

To start shrinking the size of the event, the report recommends that the town starts making it more difficult to get to Franklin Street and discourages large groups of people coming from out of town. It suggests that the town:
-Stop running shuttle buses from park and ride lots to Franklin Street.
-Change the traffic flow around downtown to encourage people to leave the downtown area: one lane for inbound traffic, two lanes for outbound and one lane for emergency vehicles.
-Put 80 to 100 parking monitors in surrounding neighborhoods to discourage illegal parking.
-Work to limit alcohol consumption in downtown bars.
-Conduct an aggressive public information campaign.
-Work with the university and students to make the event a smaller-scale community event.

Deputy Town Manager Flo Miller said, “I think that it will probably take at least two years before we see a substantial decrease.”

“We don’t have any illusions that there are going to be 25,000 people there this year,” Mayor Kevin Foy said.

Plans for this year’s event won’t be finalized until two to three weeks before Halloween, Curran said.

“We’re not trying to end Halloween,” he said. “We’re just really trying to get it down to a size where we can get our arms back around it.”

Glen Lennox

The council also agreed to pay $10,000 to hire a facilitator to run informational meetings for residents in the Glen Lennox neighborhood during the first phase of the Neighborhood Conservation District process. The facilitator would only present information to residents and would have no personal interest in the NCD’s creation.

“The purpose of the facilitator,” said Foy, “is to make sure that there is an unbiased, disinterested party running each meeting, and making sure that the process isn’t only perceived as fair, but is in fact fair, and that there’s nobody trying to manipulate things for one outcome or another.”

The planning board wanted an outside facilitator to run extra informational meetings to make sure that residents who missed the first NCD informational meeting could get all the information about the process they need. The facilitator is not going to be involved in the second phase of the NCD process and will not try to mediate between landowners in the Glen Lennox neighborhood.

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