
{"id":9965,"date":"2010-04-15T17:26:43","date_gmt":"2010-04-16T01:26:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.carrborocitizen.com\/main\/?p=9965"},"modified":"2010-04-15T17:26:43","modified_gmt":"2010-04-16T01:26:43","slug":"comprehensive-plan-to-be-updated","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/2010\/04\/15\/comprehensive-plan-to-be-updated\/","title":{"rendered":"Comprehensive plan to be updated"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>By Kirk Ross,  Staff Writer<\/strong><br \/>\nCHAPEL HILL  \u00e2\u20ac\u201d 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s comprehensive plan \u00e2\u20ac\u201c the guiding document for its land-use plans.<\/p>\n<p>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.<br \/>\nThe council heard from several members of the town\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s year-long Sustainable Community Visioning Task Force, who encouraged the step.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s all theoretical then,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d she said. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153So if we say, \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcOh, there should be a lot of density along all the major transit corridors in town,\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 do we know if we can absorb that density?<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153We just feel it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s realistic to accept the fact that there are constraints, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Snow said. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153They should be evaluated before we make specific recommendations for any kind of density \u00e2\u20ac\u201c so they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re in context.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>Council members agreed that a review of the plan is overdue, echoing a consensus reached during the council\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s planning retreat last Saturday.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>Stancil said in an interview Wednesday that the town is \u00e2\u20ac\u0153at a crossroads\u00e2\u20ac\u009d 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.<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153It should be a vision for the community,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he said. Decisions on growth affect how the town does business \u00e2\u20ac\u201c from policing to garbage collection and other services.<\/p>\n<p>The initial step, Stancil said, will be to pull together an assessment of the task force\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>The timeline for the review will depend on the council\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s goals for the review and what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s already been done.<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153It will depend on how the council defines that gap,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Stancil said. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153To do it right will easily take a year.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>The process of developing the comprehensive plan adopted in 2000 took about 18 months.<br \/>\nAlso 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.<\/p>\n<p>In other action, the council:<br \/>\n\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s lease on the town-owned downtown library building so that the museum would not be responsible for the upkeep of the building;<br \/>\n\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 requested additional information to consider an action on a Highland Woods Conservation District development process;<br \/>\n\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 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<br \/>\n\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 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. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s comprehensive plan \u00e2\u20ac\u201c the guiding document for its land-use plans.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9965","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9965","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9965"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9965\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9991,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9965\/revisions\/9991"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9965"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9965"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9965"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}