Randy Kabrick, OWASA’s board chair, may have thought that the upside of sitting through four hours of a Town Council meeting before he had to give his report Monday night might work in his favor. Council members might be too worn out to pay much attention. He could run through his PowerPoint slides and be home before midnight.

But tired as they were, council members didn’t slack off. Kabrick hadn’t gotten through the first slide before the first question came in, from Jim Ward, followed by Sally Greene, then Penny Rich.

Council members’ concerns seemed to center on OWASA’s practice of buying water from neighboring jurisdictions during anything short of a drought. Would residents get lax and resume their profligate water use of before the 2001 drought, and would OWASA be purchasing water that was not up to the quality we are used to?

Kabrick assured council that OWASA was continuing its efforts to educate consumers about conservation. “Conservation is the low-hanging fruit to increase our water supply,” he said. But residents have already changed their water-use habits with conservation in mind and reduced water use by 25 percent since the last drought. Future conservation efforts won’t yield such a dramatic reduction because, “you can’t get more blood from that turnip,” Kabrick said.

Buying water is more cost-effective than developing a new water source, and OWASA’s charter requires it to operate at the lowest cost possible while still maintaining service and supply. The plan allows OWASA to buy water to cover temporary shortages, such as when equipment breaks down, rather than declaring a water supply shortage first, which would require residents to forgo watering lawns and washing cars until the temporary emergency was over.

As for OWASA accepting sub-standard quality water, public affairs director Greg Feller wrote in a follow-up e-mail that he “[couldn’t] imagine a utility buying or selling water if it did not meet the Federal Safe Drinking Water Act standards.” (A little too p.r. occluded to be truly refreshing for my taste.) But Kabrick explained to council Monday night that the state is moving toward regional, river-basin water supply management. Rather than all jurisdictions sinking to the lowest common denominator of quality, the state was pressuring all areas to rise to the highest standard.

As the clock hands edged ever closer to midnight, Kabrick launched into an explanation of how regional allocation and demand regulations could avoid the sort of water wars that plagued Atlanta in recent years.
“We have an allocation of water, and we have to live within our water budget,” he said. “Running out of water is not an option.”
— Nancy Oates

The list of items on the Town Council agenda for tonight’s meeting is long. There are many topics to discuss, but a few do stand out.

Town staff is recommending that the council take no action on a petition regarding the operation of the town’s skate park. Ryan Ogilvy, manager of the Chapel Hill Skate Park off Homestead Road, petitioned the council back in January about persistent problems at the 10,000-square-foot skate park, including overdue repairs at the 10-year-old facility. Some of the assorted 16 laminate-wood ramps are wearing out — holes in the ramps have injured kids, Ogilvy said. And town maintenance has been nonexistent. It’s a shame the town doesn’t want to act on Ogilvy’s petition, because it means the conditions at the skate park, already bad, are likely to just get worse.

There will be a discussion of the Community Survey results. The survey cost $18,000 and was mailed out to 1,800 randomly chosen households back in December and asked a variety of questions on how the town is going about its business. At last we will find out just what respondents said about town services. I wonder whether any skateboarders were among the respondents.

We’ll get an update on construction projects past and to come. The library expansion project will be revisited, with town staff seeking guidance on those plans. Maybe they want to know where exactly the council will move the library while the renovation moves forward. Also, the council will receive an update on UNC and UNC Hospitals construction. Does that mean the university will promise once again to replace trees it cut down along South Columbia Street?

Finally, staff has recommended the council adopt a resolution endorsing development of a Neighborhood Conservation District for Glen Lennox and set up a committee to come up with a timetable.
–Don Evans

When I was a kid, we sometimes played a game called Hot Potato. Kids would sit in a circle and toss a ball to one another while music played; when the music stopped, the one holding the ball was out, gone, loser. That Hot Potato concept may explain why 140 West Franklin seems to be struggling to sell its condominiums.

Because the town owns the land that 140 West Franklin will be built on and has only leased it to Ram Development, albeit for 99 years, someone purchasing a condo in the building buys the right to occupy a unit. The transaction is a leasehold, as opposed to the freehold transaction of condos at East 54, where East West Development owns the land the complex is built on. Once Ram’s 99-year lease is up, the right to occupy the unit you’ve purchased ends. Presumably, some other arrangement will be worked out — Ram will negotiate a new lease with the town or the town, as freeholder, will negotiate new leasehold agreements with the condo owners — but no one knows for sure. And who wants to be holding title when the music stops?

The leasehold concept may be why buyers are uneasy about signing a deal for a unit at 140 West Franklin. Although the units have been priced to sell since Ram dropped its prices last year, sales have stayed at the same 30 units for more than a year. Buyers still pay the high property taxes as if they owned the physical property. But the property may not have the investment appreciation that a freehold does. A leasehold unit owner can sell the leasehold, but at a point that much closer to the end of the 99-year lease. At some point, the appeal of buying a unit that is, say, within 20 years of the end of the lease would have all the appeal of buying beachfront property with the ocean lapping at its foundation.

The leasehold concept also might explain why no one with the town wanted to answer my question about what it would cost to back out of its agreement with Ram. All I got was a verbal “We can’t back out” from the mayor, but he did not follow through on sending me an e-mail confirming that. Nothing in writing to back up his assurances to me.

He might not want to emphasize that the town could make changes down the line that would change the terms of the leasehold.

With the gun-shy investors of this economy, it may take awhile before Ram comes up with the 50 percent of unit sales it needs before its lender will approve it breaking ground.

— Nancy Oates

Nancy and I got an invitation to speak about community journalism and the role blogging can play in keeping residents informed. This afternoon we’ll talk to students in a class taught by Leroy Towns, a professor in the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

Prepping to speak to the fast-track freshmen got us to thinking about how much we’ve accomplished since we started this blog in early September 2009.

We’ve provided information in a reliable format that just wasn’t available before – no one would take on the task and the commitment it entails without pay. We’ve gotten residents more involved in what goes on at Town Hall. We’ve broken a few stories, my favorite being the Cam Hill/illegal campaign flier piece. We dogged the Town Council on the Bill Strom issue, and now the appointment process is about to be discussed in greater detail. The town newspaper is going about its coverage of town government much more diligently than it did before we weighed in.

Most important, we engaged in discussions with some very observant, very informed and very community-oriented people who are concerned about our town.
That involvement and willingness to share is what this is all about. At its best this blog should be a discussion — as we said in our very first post, “Democracy is supposed to be a conversation between government and the people it represents.” We appreciate the comments from readers, who have shared what they know and have corrected us when we got some things wrong.

We have our good days and our bad days, just like any publication. The important thing is that we keep that conversation going. That’s a point we will stress with the students today. I hope we can covey to them just how important that conversation is for the future of their communities.
–Don Evans

Will Raymond mentioned at the Town Council public hearing Monday night that Google Fiber would bring benefits to Chapel Hill that we can’t see right now. He’s right about that. But he didn’t mention that those benefits will come at a cost in privacy and how much marketers and the government know about us.

The town wants to be a test market for the initiative to speed up Web connections. Everybody’s in favor of this one – council members, residents, even the mayor of Carrboro, Mark Chilton, spoke to the council in favor of the effort. Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today? Video-conferencing in 3D? Download a high-def film in less than 5 minutes? Instant access to the Internet? The idea that software may disappear? The potential benefits are heady stuff.

Before we all gather around the video monitor to celebrate, let’s remember that Google Fiber is an initiative by the search engine giant to get into the Internet Service Provider business. Google seems to agree with the FCC, which views slow connectivity as a detriment to economic growth. The FCC has proposed to make the United States “the world’s largest market of high-speed broadband users,” and Google is right there to help — the market, that is. Let’s keep that word “market” always in mind as we ooh and aah at the prospects, because there will be a price for all this wonderful connectivity.

Chapel Hill wants Google to build and test its network here. Asheville, Greensboro, Durham, Winston-Salem and Raleigh also want Google to choose them. Duluth, Minn., Huntsville, Ala., and Fresno, Calif., also are vying to tip Google in their favor. More than 100 communities across the United States have declared their wish to be anointed by Google, according to themoderatevoice.com. Stiff competition.

As council member Laurin Easthom pointed out at the public hearing, we’re shovel-ready because of a state Department of Transportation initiative to run fiber to each of the town’s 100-plus signalized traffic intersections. All Google would have to do is get its fiber to the doors of households.

Raymond was right about one thing – the town must enter into this with its eyes wide open. And getting every household connected to the Internet can be a blessing, that’s for sure. But this is the same community that balked at the intrusiveness of red-light cameras. Google Fiber could be a whole new take on Big Brother, because let’s not forget, Google is doing this as a business venture and there will be a cost.

The competitive application is due March 26. Go to the town’s Web site to get more information and decide whether to lend your name to the petition.
–Don Evans

Taking the long-term view before making short-term fixes yields better decisions and reduces the chances of having to make expensive, time-consuming corrections. Some members of the town’s Sustainable Community Visioning Task Force have taken a stand for looking at the overall needs of the community and how action in one part of town affects the rest of the community.

Below is the letter that those members sent to the task force at large on March 8. Will Raymond will comment further on WCHL-1360 A.M. radio this morning.

— Nancy Oates

Members of the Sustainable Community Visioning Task Force,

When the task force was convened last summer, we were united in one thing: our willingness to commit a significant amount of time and energy to the task of ensuring that the future development of Chapel Hill would proceed in a positive and equitable manner. We all see the importance of providing citizen guidance to town staff, review boards, and local developers for managing the successful growth of our town.

As was made evident at the last meeting, there is a group of task force members who are concerned with the direction our work has taken and feel that our mission is being compromised. We would therefore like to take this opportunity to state our concerns in detail and propose an alternative to the process currently under way.

Our concerns with the current process fall into four specific areas:

1. No opportunity to look at the big picture

By focusing first on individual key areas in town that are likely to develop, we will not be looking at the town as a whole, as we were charged to do, and will not be able to see the cumulative impacts of our recommendations.

Unless we spend many meetings looking at every key area (which the task force seems disinclined to do) and then assessing the cumulative impact of all of them together, under the current plan we will have no way of determining whether our recommendations are reasonable, equitable, or practical for the town as a whole.

2. No specificity

The current Comprehensive Plan does an admirable job of providing general guidance for the development of Chapel Hill, but many of its provisions and recommendations are vague enough that they can be used to justify a broad range of development options, some less desirable than others. The task force’s set of guiding principles, while useful as a general statement of our vision, do not make any progress toward offering more specific, concrete guidelines for the town and local developers.

We agree that it is not the SCVTF’s job to create detailed small area plans, nor do we feel that such exercises are a particularly effective way of guiding real world development. Rather, beginning with the principles’ general vision for the town’s development, it should be the task force’s goal to provide leadership in guiding the town to begin developing specific, context-based guidelines for future development.

3. No acknowledgment of constraints

As the process is currently constituted, there is no mechanism for the task force to acknowledge and plan for factors that will limit the town’s development. The school district has confirmed that we are running out of sites in town for building new schools; the resources of our local watershed are finite; we can add only so many more cars to current roads before quality of life deteriorates; like all communities we have a responsibility to work toward sustainable resource use.

Phil’s “Where Do We Go from Here” memo of 3/9/10 states that our charge is “recommending what kinds of growth and where growth can occur if it does occur, not whether growth should occur, or how much or how little.” While none of us are in a position to predict the future, we also can offer no meaningful guidance to growth without accepting and working with at least some general parameters of how much growth is expected, responsible, and desirable. We were charged by Mayor Foy to “challenge all assumptions,” not to work without any assumptions whatsoever.

4. No plan for iterative community input

In our discussions at the beginning of our tenure, the group was strongly in favor of obtaining community input that would provide feedback on our work along the way.

Until Phil’s 3/9 memo, the task force had not been informed of any plans for eliciting community opinion on our recommendations before our report goes to council. If the goal of a May report to council still holds, we question whether there is time for steps 3 and 4 of Phil’s plan to be implemented and incorporated into our report.

For our work to succeed, it must be “owned” not just by us, but by the community as a whole. Adequate time for public input on the guiding principles, hierarchy of tradeoffs, and vision for all key development areas is crucial to making this happen.

Given these concerns, we would like to propose modifications to the plan of the task force’s work as we carry forward:

1. Spend one or two meetings on a Reality Check exercise

Given high and low estimates of population changes anticipated in Chapel Hill, along with accepted formulas for calculating expected demand for schools, commercial space, water, etc., it should be possible to form rough estimates of how many square feet of new residential, commercial, and civic space the town will require and can support. The task force could then spend one meeting in small groups deciding how this growth could be logically allocated throughout town; another meeting would allow reconciliation of the groups’ visions into a single task force plan, which town staff could review for conflicts or other problems.

This step would allow us to address big picture issues while avoiding hours of extra meting time looking at each small area in detail in order to build a picture of the cumulative development effects. It would also allow us to work within our development “budget,” accommodating constraints and planning for the town’s future needs. The resulting map would also provide a clear object for testing against the task force’s guiding principles.

2. Conduct character-based small-area development studies of one or two key neighborhoods

Using the information obtained from the Reality Check exercise, the task force could take the development allocated to one or two specific areas and take a close look at how best it could be accommodated.

The product of such a study would be a clear statement of the current neighborhood character, identification of opportunities for development and important elements to preserve, guidance for reconciling expected conflicts and making trade-offs, and specific examples for developers and town staff and boards on what kind of development would be appropriate.

Ideally, this exercise would be a quick example of a more in-depth process that the town would ultimately conduct in each neighborhood in town where significant development is likely to occur.

3. Plan for community input

It is vital to provide enough time for citizens to review and comment on the task force’s work as it progresses. Key elements for review would include (1) our refined list of guiding principles (after we have tested them in one or two small areas); (2) our map showing general allocation of development across the town from the Reality Check exercise; and (3) our recommendations for the select key areas we study.

When the town moved forward to develop in-depth neighborhood plans, it would obviously be crucial to get citizen input about how they see the neighborhood, what is lacking, what development works, and what doesn’t. This information would be the basis for the work of whatever group was charged with carrying this work forward.

While all members of the SCVTF may not have the exact same vision for Chapel Hill, we are united in our concern for the town and its future. It is time for us to be united in framing and agreeing to the process that will carry us forward. At the end of our tenure, we should all agree that we have produced a product that will identify the principles we hold in common, help us preserve what we value and improve what is falling short, and provide useful guidance for the town as it grows and develops. The process we have outlined above can be accomplished efficiently, will produce more useful guidance for the town, and will provide the basis for developing the specific development vision and guidelines the town so urgently needs.

Signed,

Amy Ryan
Del Snow
Madeline Jefferson
Will Raymond