I looked at the agenda for tonight’s Town Council meeting and got that same sort 
of funny feeling in my heart I got when I saw my first gray hair or when I realized my child had grown too big for me to pick up and carry. Time was moving on, and life would never be the same. It wasn’t a bad feeling, more like an equal mix of excitement and dread.
The public hearing tonight includes some development projects in key areas of town. We ease into the evening with a request to transfer four residential lots totaling 2.15 acres to the Rizzo Conference Center to allow for it to expand its facilities and parking. The project would add a four-story building containing 65 guest rooms and office space for a total of nearly 73,000 square feet. The plan calls for an additional 99 parking spaces.
After a peek at the revised taxi ordinance, we dive into one of the most heated issues of the night: the request for rezoning of the re-jiggered properties that make room for Charterwood. The entire MLK Jr. Boulevard corridor is ripe for redevelopment, a fact that makes many of us nervous, and Charterwood leads the way. As any first-born child can tell you, going first has its advantages and disadvantages. Charterwood developers should be toughened by their previous experience before council and frightened neighbors, but expect the opposition to be intense.
We wrap up with a concept review of The Park, 800 upscale apartments to replace the 189 affordable units of the Colony Apartments on Ephesus Church Road, on the Fordham Boulevard side of Ephesus Elementary School.
Taken altogether, the agenda bodes a lot of change for our ever-growing town. We’ve made Chapel Hill a nice place to live; of course, we’ve got to share. We need places for newcomers. We just need to make sure we create spaces for modest-income newcomers, not just the wealthy ones.
– Nancy Oates
