Planning & Transportation

Town Council Delays Vote on Obey Creek

At their meeting last night, the Chapel Hill Town Council took public comment and discussed the Obey Creek development agreement, but delayed a vote on the proposal until next Monday.

The Council also discussed and enacted the 2015-16 budget and approved a revised personnel ordinance.

Public comment on Obey Creek centered around the issues that have long dominated the discussion: traffic, transit, and the size of the development. Council members seemed interested in delaying their vote a week due to new staff information, including smaller development scenario outcomes, that the Council received last Friday.

Tweets recapping last night's meeting are captured in the Storify below. Have thoughts about Obey Creek or the other items discussed? Add them in the comments.

What We're Reading: June 5

We read a lot of articles about local government, public sector innovation, open government, urban planning, and social justice. Since we often relate these articles to things happening locally here in Orange County and the Triangle, we thought we'd start sharing them from time to time. Here's what we read this week:

Affordable Housing: Policy Tools & Best Practices

In its ongoing series on affordable housing, the Town of Chapel Hill hosted Michelle Winters, senior visiting fellow at the Urban Land Institute’s Terwilliger Center for Housing last Tuesday to talk about the policy tools and best practices for affordable and workforce housing.

Winters began her presentation discussing housing trends nationwide and specifically talked about the recent surge in renter households that is expected to continue into the future. The most important takeaway: Half of all renter households are at least moderately cost burdened, meaning they spend at least 30% of their income on rent. This statistic highlights why housing professionals have broadened their discussion of what affordable means in recent years to include a range, all the way from homelessness to just below market rate. As the town’s executive director for housing and community development, Loryn Clark, put it: housing needs to be affordable for everybody.

When Art Reflects Reality (Even After 130 Years)

As I took my seat in the Paul Green Theatre last Saturday for PlayMakers Repertory Company’s production of An Enemy of the People, I had no expectation that the performance would resonate with the kind of local government discourse and behavior I see right here in Chapel Hill. Yet, as the play began and the story unfolded, that is exactly what happened.

Written by Henrik Ibsen in 1882 and adapted by Arthur Miller in 1950, Enemy tells the story of Dr. Stockmann, a physician who attempts to expose an inconvenient truth about his town, only to find himself and his family alienated, alone, and in danger as a result of his actions.

As the play reaches its climax, Dr. Stockmann makes a final attempt to convey his findings and alert his community to what he has uncovered. But rather than being able to speak freely, he is silenced from speaking about the issue at hand, which causes him to dive into a monologue condemning the tyranny of the majority, the silencing of his freedom of speech, and the hypocrisy of those around him who abandon their values in the face of inconvenient truths.

This Week in Orange Politics: February 16-22

Though the Carrboro Alderfolks and Chapel Hill-Carrboro School Board are both are break this week, it’ll still be a busy week for Orange County’s public bodies. The Chapel Hill Town Council will consider Obey Creek and talk about a number of other development proposals currently on the table, while the county school board will consider approving its strategic plan.

The Hillsborough Town Board will hold a workshop on stormwater and Riverwalk, and host a joint meeting with the county commissioners covering transit, economic development, planning and host of other issues.

Other events across the county this week include a town hall with Chapel Hill Town Council member Lee Storrow and a meeting of the Chapel Hill Transit Partners. We’ll also hold our monthly editors meeting Sunday.

Here’s the full summary:

CARRBORO BOARD OF ALDERPERSONS

  • There is no meeting this week. The next meeting is Tuesday, March 3rd.

CHAPEL HILL TOWN COUNCIL

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