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CH2020 process concerns expressed

Posted on April 19, 2012April 18, 2012 by Susan Dickson

By Susan Dickson
Staff Writer

When the Chapel Hill Town Council decided to undertake the development of a new comprehensive plan, council members and community members alike hoped to use the process to reexamine the vision for the town and craft a plan for what Chapel Hill’s future should look like.

To be sure, the process was a huge undertaking, and when Chapel Hill 2020 launched last fall CH2020 leaders hoped to involve a huge, diverse group representing all niches of the community – something they’ve certainly at the very least come close to accomplishing, with hundreds of residents showing up to a number of meetings over the past seven months.

“We’ve had truly amazing outreach,” said 2020 Co-Chair and former Mayor Rosemary Waldorf. “I am extremely proud of how successful we’ve been at reaching a lot of people.”

Through that involvement, leaders hoped the community could craft a planning and visioning document creating a framework for the community to guide the council in managing the town’s future over the next decade. Under the proposed process timeline, that document would be ready in June.

“I feel that we have a really good shot at giving the council a good vision and framework document on schedule,” Waldorf said.

At the council’s March 26 meeting, a number of residents spoke critically of the Chapel Hill 2020 process thus far and asked the council to slow down the process, citing concerns about “future focus” land-use maps developed at meetings and what they called a rushed timeline to develop the document. Several of those who spoke were residents of the U.S. 15-501 South corridor, expressing concerns about their lack of representation on the recently appointed 15-501 South Corridor Discussion Group, which will develop land-use recommendations for the CH2020 process.

On Monday, the council heard a report regarding those concerns from Town Manager Roger Stancil, who said that the maps – which a number of residents said were not representative of the community’s vision and were developed in a rushed fashion – would not be included in the final document.

The map exercise, he said, was intended as an opportunity for community members to provide input.

“I think actually the next draft that comes out will be a much-improved draft based on the comments that we’ve received,” he added.

Waldorf emphasized that CH2020 is not just about land use, but is intended to develop an entire set of goals for the community regarding a variety of issues, including transportation, how to serve the teenage population, fiscal sustainability and more.

In addition, “We’ve been saying with a lot of regularity that it’s important that people not view this as something that has been rushed, but as something that has a part A and a part B.”

“This part of the process was not supposed to yield a zoning ordinance,” she continued. “We’re hoping that this process will identify where the participants are willing to allow some of the growth to go.”

Planning Board Chair Del Snow said the planning board is united in their concerns about the CH2020 process, citing issues with goals and visions being developed without data, not enough time to develop the document and the absence of UNC throughout the process.

“They are a driver of growth. They have a huge influence on our economy, and there’s the problem of student housing, which has a huge impact on the town,” she said.

Planning board member Amy Ryan and Julie McClintock echoed Snow’s concerns.

“One area of concern was that the story of Chapel Hill is not yet in the plan,” Ryan said. “The conversation we’re having needs to be about both change and preservation.”

McClintock reported progress at last week’s theme group meetings in further developing the vision and goals for the plan, but said that wide-ranging discussions based on data need to be held so that participants can weigh tradeoffs of potential goals.

The next Chapel Hill 2020 community meeting will be held Tuesday at 7 p.m. at Chapel Hill High School.

2 thoughts on “CH2020 process concerns expressed”

  1. Ruby Sinreich says:
    April 23, 2012 at 12:53 pm

    Just wanted to point out that there have been serious public criticisms of Chapel Hill 2020 since before it even started. http://orangepolitics.org/tags/ch2020

    The process has been unnecessarily rushed since they empaneled the initiating committee a year ago: http://orangepolitics.org/2011/04/initiating-matters

    In January, when the process was halfway through, 50 Chapel Hill 2020 participants called on the town to slow down: http://orangepolitics.org/2012/01/chapel-hill-2020-is-worth-doin

    These concerns have been thoroughly ignored at every turn. The Town staff is doing their best to crate a good plan in record time, but as Buddhists say: the path is the destination. No matter how good the ideas, if the public isn’t invested as authors and drivers of the plan it will mean nothing to us and certainly won’t serve the community well in the long term.

  2. Will Raymond says:
    April 24, 2012 at 4:06 pm

    The CH2020 program was the culmination of years of lobbying by residents like Ruby, Julie, Amy and myself to refresh the Comprehensive Plan. It was originally intended that the Comprehensive Plan would be revisited about every 5 years to fine tune and improve it. Letting that work go undone for so long resulted in a large backlog of issues.

    My criticism of the current CH2020 is been evenly divided between practical issues which impede community input and a process which marginalizes community input at every step.

    An example of the first problem is today’s delivery of the 2nd Draft proposal. Delivered less than 8 hours before the community has its last meeting to review and comment, the document has been thoroughly rewritten, community comments and materials from the last few months omitted, agreed upon edits missing and controversial issues – like using form-based zoning for Ephesus Rd. – which the community asked to be excised left in.

    How can we have a deliberative process when such a key document is delivered late, incomplete and skewed towards goals which the community has already said they disagree with?

    The many omissions of community input (I’ve attended most of the CH2020 meetings and taken my own notes), the continued use of staff/CH2020 leadership goals developed outside of the community process and the filtering of community concerns are just a few examples of the marginalization of true community input.

    Of course, add to these problems the continued confusion of all on what the specific June deliverable looks like and how it will be used makes the whole process, as Ruby notes, very hard to secure community buy-in.

    A product with integrity is a product developed in an open and honest fashion.

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