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Letter: Public input needed

Posted on February 11, 2010 by Staff

There has been a shift in Carrboro’s public-input process over the past several years from gathering information from the Carrboro citizens in some type of public-input process prior to developing full-blown plans to presenting fully developed plans to the public in a very brief public-hearing process.

This new paternalistic approach’s shortcomings are obvious in many recent projects that have or have not come before the public. These include the new fire station, which was not designed to good green standards and took a lot of individual citizen vigilance to bring to some semblance of a healthy building. The latest transportation plan was presented almost fully formed, and when input was received from the public, it was met with scowls and anger on the part of some members of the council. The latest is the greenway debate. It is my opinion that had the town held a design charrette or at least asked the public what it thought appropriate for this public space, we may have avoided a polarized process. As an architect, I can’t imagine designing a house for someone without asking how they might like it to be.

The latest affront which is still unfolding is the Carrboro 2020 vision developed by Carrboro citizens 10 years ago. It is my understanding that the board has taken upon itself to make the 2020 plan the topic of their retreat, again, without any public input. The recent history of lack of gathering early input from citizens makes me very wary of this process, for while a board retreat is not behind closed doors, it is hardly a public venue for discussion.

This father-knows-best approach is at best inefficient and at worst runs the risk of pandering to select classes of the public, as seen in the road-connectivity debate, where a very few were served at the expense of the public at large. Again some members of the board were outwardly less than happy with dissenting opinions that favored the larger public.

In today’s world of information sharing and readily available science, the potential cost of defending uninformed decisions is a waste of precious resources.

GILES BLUNDEN
Carrboro

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