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Comprehensive plan to be updated

Posted on April 15, 2010 by Staff

By Kirk Ross, Staff Writer
CHAPEL HILL — The Chapel Hill Town Council suspended the work of a visioning task force Monday night and moved ahead on a full review of the town’s comprehensive plan – the guiding document for its land-use plans.

At its meeting at Town Hall, the council asked Town Manager Roger Stancil to develop a process for a review of the comprehensive plan, the first since the plan was adopted in May 2000.
The council heard from several members of the town’s year-long Sustainable Community Visioning Task Force, who encouraged the step.

Del Snow, task force member and town planning board vice-chair, said the carrying capacity of the town needed to be understood before decisions about density could be made.

“It’s all theoretical then,” she said. “So if we say, ‘Oh, there should be a lot of density along all the major transit corridors in town,’ do we know if we can absorb that density?

“We just feel it’s realistic to accept the fact that there are constraints, “Snow said. “They should be evaluated before we make specific recommendations for any kind of density – so they’re in context.”

Council members agreed that a review of the plan is overdue, echoing a consensus reached during the council’s planning retreat last Saturday.

Mayor Mark Kleinschmidt said he and others have been reluctant over the years to revise the comprehensive plan, in part because it is such a long and involved process. The task force and several other committees and efforts have helped provide a jump-start to the process.

Stancil said in an interview Wednesday that the town is “at a crossroads” and the time is ripe for a focus on how the town should grow and by how much. The effort should extend beyond just land-use planning, he said.

“It should be a vision for the community,” he said. Decisions on growth affect how the town does business – from policing to garbage collection and other services.

The initial step, Stancil said, will be to pull together an assessment of the task force’s work, especially public input gathered during a series of community discussions last summer, as well as other recent reports and studies that might be useful.

The idea, he said, is to figure out where the gap is between what has already been done and what the council wants in the way of a formal review of the plan. That information will be presented to the council at its May 24 meeting.

The timeline for the review will depend on the council’s goals for the review and what’s already been done.

“It will depend on how the council defines that gap,” Stancil said. “To do it right will easily take a year.”

The process of developing the comprehensive plan adopted in 2000 took about 18 months.
Also on Monday, the council adopted a resolution on the upcoming legislative session, asking to add Chapel Hill to Session Law 2009-149, allowing the town an exemption from bidding requirements for public projects associated with energy efficiency and renewable energy. The council also will ask the local legislative delegation to protect state-shared revenues provided to local governments and support for further state regulation of the use of handheld cell phones and similar devices while driving.

In other action, the council:
• heard a request from representatives of the Chapel Hill Museum asking the town for $34,000 in annual financial support and a change in the museum’s lease on the town-owned downtown library building so that the museum would not be responsible for the upkeep of the building;
• requested additional information to consider an action on a Highland Woods Conservation District development process;
• endorsed three alternative routes to connect Carrboro and Chapel Hill to the Mountain to Sea Trail as proposed by the Orange County Intergovernmental Park Work Group; and
• heard a petition asking for improvements to pedestrian safety on East Franklin Street and another petition from students in a Sociology of Human Rights course and representatives of the Human Rights Center of Chapel Hill and Carrboro asking for the town to adopt a resolution supporting fair trade.

2 thoughts on “Comprehensive plan to be updated”

  1. Elliot Baron says:
    April 17, 2010 at 5:44 am

    Too bad that the Council can’t rewind the last five years to make the decisions on the major developments that the approved, starting with East 54, to see whether or not the carrying capacity can accept what is ALREADY approved, let alone what might be coming in the future.

  2. Judith Blau says:
    June 23, 2010 at 6:32 pm

    Actually the Town Council approved the resolution making Chapel Hill a Fair Trade Town. Some things get buried in the agenda without a verbal announcement. This is significant. Chapel Hill is among only 15 towns in the nation to have approved a Fair Trade (read, anti-sweatshop) resolution. The town of Chapel Hill will only serve fair-trade coffee and tea (and chocolates), but, more significantly, this signals to retailers and consumers to avoid products made by sweatshop labor.

    The university belongs to two consortia that monitor conditions in factories that make products for universities and their athletic teams. I am delighted that the Town has embraced these anti-sweatshop principles.

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