Marketing is everything, especially when it comes to easing development through the town’s approval process. Witness The Cottages at Homestead. The name evokes images of cozy little clapboard-sided single-story abodes, flowers in the window boxes, snuggled together in a clearing.

But look at the specs: The 1,175 parking spaces is your first indication that “cozy” and “little” won’t show up anywhere in the project description. The Cottages, proposed by The Capstone Co. of Birmingham, Ala., bills itself as “a university student housing neighborhood.” The development is entirely residential with a mix of 57 two-story cottage homes, 60 two-story townhouse units (15 buildings with four units per building) and 213 apartments divided among 71 three-story buildings. The units range from one to five bedrooms, and the complex includes a 12,000-square-foot clubhouse and indoor and outdoor recreation areas.

The Cottages is proposed to be built directly across Homestead Road from the proposed Bridgepoint development, bounded on the south and east by Carolina North, just west of the Southern Human Services Center. Harkening back to Town Council members’ discussion a couple weeks ago in which some council members objected to a commercial area at Bridgepoint because of the extra traffic it would engender, I wondered whether council members had any inkling of what was in the works across the street. One council member thought the 80 spaces planned for Bridgepoint’s commercial space was a bit much. I posit that those 80 spaces and then some will be needed for spillover parking from The Cottages.

Capstone has planned a parking space for each of the 1,120 bedrooms in its rental complex, plus 55 spaces for guests, sufficient parking, its proposal says, to serve as a park-and-ride lot. Granted, plans are in the works for a bike path to link Carolina North and the main campus, and buses already connect Homestead Road to the main campus and elsewhere in town. Still, the 80 spaces at Bridgepoint pale in comparison to the 1,175 across the street.

This illustrates the Sustainability Committee’s complaint about the futility of looking at development in a vacuum. What happens in one neighborhood has an impact elsewhere. If The Cottages is approved, the commercial section of Bridgepoint is a necessity. Think how well Ken’s Quickie Mart has done from Granville Towers business alone. How well will the proposed traffic circle on Homestead and Weaver Dairy Extension function with an additional 1,175 cars driving to Harris Teeter for orange juice and eggs Saturday morning?

The occupants of those 1,120 bedrooms, and their 55 guests, need a store within walking distance. Don and I are ready to put in a bid to open a small grocery store at Bridgepoint. Maybe we’ll call it Ye Olde Country Shoppe. It will fit right in.
— Nancy Oates

Next week I will begin training to be a U.S. Census enumerator. Yes, I will be one of those folks who go from dwelling to dwelling to gather information to complete the decannual count.

The Census expects to hire 870,000 temporary workers such as myself to go around and knock on doors – as many as six visits just to get the information that very easily could have been mailed back to the bureau.

Some states will need more door-knockers than others. The latest figures indicate that 72 percent of U.S. households that were sent the Census questionnaire actually mailed it back. Nancy, who’s from the Midwest, was gratified to learn that Wisconsin led the nation in percentage of households that returned census forms by mail – 81 percent. And Wisconsin is clustered among several states that exceeded 78 percent in their return rates. North Carolina’s rate was 74 percent. New Mexico had the worst rate, 63 percent.

Another way to think of those return rates is how much money we taxpayers could have saved if all of us just filled out and mailed in the questionnaire sent to us. That 28 percent who didn’t mail back a form is costing us as much as $1.5 billion in extra effort by hiring more workers. (Some perspective on that $1.5 billion: That’s enough money to take care of Orange County’s budget for 20 years.)

To put it another way, households that mailed back questionnaires cost the government less than a half-dollar in census-taking fees. To hire and coordinate enumerators to trudge door-to-door to get that information will cost $57 per household. If people had just done what they supposed to do, that extra expense could have been saved.

The census is not something that can be ignored. Local communities depend on the periodic count to help the governments apportion federal funds each year for such things as hospitals, job training centers, schools, senior centers, bridges, tunnels and other-public works projects and emergency services. An accurate count can benefit every community. It’s a shame that filling out and mailing the form was too onerous a task for so many Americans.

Turns out it also was very costly.
–Don Evans

Two neighborhoods in Chapel Hill are proceeding with Neighborhood Conservation District applications. The town has six NCDs already and has spent tens of thousands of dollars on consultants to help with the process.

So who’s in charge of making sure that land owners in and residents of NCDs comply with the ordinance? Nobody.

That was clear Monday night at the council meeting as Town Manager Roger Stancil and council member Donna Bell discussed their recent experience of taking a walking tour of the Northside neighborhood to check out neighborhood needs and just how far some land owners have bent the rules. The fact that two town officials were on the tour had nothing to do with town vigilance.

It took a concerted effort by Orange County Justice United and Empowerment Inc. to audit the state of the Northside and Pine Knolls neighborhoods and report back to the town before it got the council’s attention.

Two properties appeared to be in violation of restrictions on front-yard parking, and one property was in disrepair. Sidewalks are nonexistent in many places, especially along North Graham Street, where construction on Greenbridge has forced regular foot traffic into the streets. Street signs were either damaged or missing. Streets are cracked and need repair.

The NCD designation means that a neighborhood is a “unique and distinctive” older in-town residential neighborhood or commercial district that contributes “significantly to the overall character and identity of the town and [is] worthy of preservation and protection,” according to the town website. The Glen Lennox and Highland Woods neighborhoods are knocking at the club door. Northside was the first to join.

Even with the NCD rules, Northside continues to slip away. The council doesn’t monitor what goes on in the NCDs. There’s no early-warning system when questionable practices develop, except for a resident to point it out. There’s no follow-up on how a neighborhood is doing once the NCD designation is approved.

If the Northside tour proved anything it is that the town needs a system for checking on and enforcing NCD rules before these distinctive parts of town edge beyond distinctive and into questionable.

Stancil suggested that strengthening a neighborhood’s Community Watch will spur input. That can work to some extent when the community has an active and committed contingent such as Justice United and Empowerment. But what about the town making good on its commitment to these neighborhoods? The town cannot just proudly proclaim its pride in these neighborhoods and then ignore them.

In the end Mayor Kleinschmidt suggested the town revisit the NCD process in its entirety, from instigation to follow-up. That’s a great idea – it could mean taxpayer money that was spent on establishing NCDs will not have been wasted.
–Don Evans

Council members Laurin Easthom and Penny Rich were chatting at the snack table in council chambers Monday night when, at 7 p.m. sharp, Mayor Mark Kleinschmidt shooed them to their seats. “We want to end on time tonight,” he said, making a veiled reference to a petition Easthom put on the agenda.

With two council meetings of late not winding up until close to 1 a.m., Easthom wanted to nip the problem in the bud. She petitioned for council to follow its own rule that “the council not begin discussion of an agenda item after 10:30 p.m. without the affirmative vote of two-thirds of those members present.”

Kleinschmidt reminded his colleagues that at both late meetings he suggested removing some items from the agenda but was out-voted by council members who thought that citizens and presenters who had already sat through three and a half hours of discussion on other topics shouldn’t be told to come back another time. But Gene Pease pointed out that it was equally unfair to citizens to have the weary council consider issues at such a late hour. “We don’t do good work after about 10 or 10:30,” he said.

Though Easthom moved that her petition be referred to staff to fix the problem, Kleinschmidt added that the petition should also be referred to council itself. For his part, he will let the staff know of topics that are likely to spark a large turnout of citizens wanting to speak, so that the agenda won’t be overloaded. (Town staff sets the agenda, but the mayor can remove items from it.) He urged council members to let him know when comments they receive from citizens indicate a large turnout for a topic. “We can predict better than staff how full the moon is going to be that night,” Kleinschmidt said.

He also suggested that consent agenda items pulled be discussed at the end of the night, if time allows; however, Jim Ward cautioned that that might put a hardship on staff members who would have to stay until the end of the meeting to answer questions.

Donna Bell recommended that council members shave minutes off the meeting by not reiterating what their colleagues have said on a topic. Along those lines, we might suggest that members quell any tendency toward self-aggrandizement (you know who you are, and if you don’t, rest assured your colleagues and constituents do).

Items pulled from the agenda would be put on the agenda for the following meeting, or council could recess and resume the following night. Some on the dais seemed momentarily disappointed to learn that items pulled from the agenda wouldn’t just disappear. That won’t be the solution to the urban archery issue.

The meeting adjourned at 9:25 p.m.
— Nancy Oates