It’s your Monday roundup.
Locally: Fall council season kicks off this week, with meetings in Chapel Hill on Wednesday at 6 (agenda) and in Carrboro on Thursday at 6 (agenda). There’s also an OWASA meeting on Thursday at 6 (agenda), and various advisory board meetings (Chapel Hill, Carrboro, Orange County.)
State-wide: Highly recommend subscribing to Kirk Ross’s state legislature updates. Ross is a veteran statehouse reporter who is back to updates throughout the election cycle.
We’ll have an update on the NC ballots later this week and you can read what’s going on in Democracy Docket. (The Court of Appeals ruled Friday that they need to be reprinted to remove RFK Jr., which is both costly and will delay early voting for absentee ballots. Shortly after this court order was issued, NCSBE’s general counsel Paul Cox sent an email to the state’s 100 county election directors, telling them to hold their outgoing absentee ballots.)
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In Carrboro: They’re doing something about the dangerous tree on Rosemary Street
There’s a dead tree on the property of the Love Overboard Kennels & Grooming. For months, tree limbs have been falling on the sidewalk. Earlier this month, they took out Internet lines. Previously, there have been some near-misses with cars and pedestrians. There’s a full timeline here.
The tree is dangerous and the branches could kill someone. The owner of the property has been told several times and not removed the tree.
This week, the town is holding a quasi-judicial hearing to assess the removal of the tree, which is fully on the private property. Under the town code, the property owner will be responsible for the town’s expenses. And if the the property owner doesn’t pay, the expenses will be collected as unpaid taxes on the property.
The presentation is aptly named Dead Tree Presentation.
Also in Carrboro: We’ll get the results of the paid parking survey
Last June, the town sent out a survey on paid parking. As we’ve pointed out before, the Town of Chapel Hill charges and enforces parking, while the Town of Carrboro currently has “free” parking and no enforcement of time limits. People appear to be parking in Carrboro and taking the bus to UNC or Chapel Hill. This results in less turnover for businesses, fewer parking spots for residents, and Carrboro essentially subsidizing parking for Chapel Hill.
The results of the survey overwhelmingly show that people are against paid parking (report here, presentation here) as it was originally detailed in the survey, but may be willing to pay nominal amounts if the time period and incentive structures are changed.
It will be interesting to see how town council approaches this. This would only apply to town-owned lots during certain times of day. (Most of the lots in town are private and this wouldn’t affect them.) We already have a major problem with Carr Mill Mall (private) towing people who leave the lot.
We know business owners downtown are against it. We know lots of neighborhood listservs have asked people to write in against it. We think it would be hard to do right now, politically. It would be costly to implement and likely cost the town money. Our guess is that they’ll vote no.
This is challenging: There’s a fair amount of evidence that there’s environmental/climate reasons to charge for parking, because some percentage of people find alternative means (bus, bike) to get around – which makes parking more available for everyone else.
Carrboro is one of only a few municipalities in our state that doesn’t charge for parking. (Boone, Chapel Hill, Greensboro, Wilson, Hendersonville, and Greenville all do.) There’s a fair amount of research that shows that turnover is good for small businesses, and there’s an entire movement to put parking fees back into reinvestment funds for that neighborhood or area. We’d love for Carrboro to talk through this. Columbus, Ohio recently spent meter revenue to give employees discounted transit fares and car, ride and bike share memberships. They also established an employee permit program for both on and off street parking, giving businesses an opportunity to purchase up to 10 permits at a progressive rate. Portland, Oregon reinvests some of their revenue into building and repairing sidewalks.
Complete communities is not complete
Last Friday Rod Stevens – the consultant who said Chapel Hill would turn into Palo Alto if we didn’t build more housing – penned a column in Chapelboro.
Stevens’ column was weird and unprofessional – and flat out wrong.
In the piece, Stevens claims that Complete Communities has been a failure. (If you don’t follow this stuff closely, Complete Communities is the plan that encourages us to build differently in the future, more densely, with homes, businesses, and schools connected to greenways and transit, helping us achieve our housing and climate goals.)
Let’s be clear: the Complete Communities plan is a little over one year old. It was passed by Council in May of 2023.
Does Rod Stevens actually think a visioning document like Complete Communities is going to transform Chapel Hill in 16 months? Does Stevens actually think decades of resistance to the housing we need in Chapel Hill will fade away in 16 months? Is he really surprised that “there is still no consensus that the town can adequately manage growth”? The noisiest opponents of Complete Communities do not want to manage growth, they want to block it. The opponents don’t even believe in greenways, an essential part of building a more connected and sustainable town. It’s hard to reach consensus when you have an organization like CHALT that operates in bad faith and believes community engagement in Chapel Hill is illegitimate unless the community thinks exactly like CHALT does. Is Stevens unaware of their role in hindering the town’s ability to “carefully plan where and how to grow”?
That Complete Communities passed is an important signal that the town is changing in important ways. Its ongoing support for affordable housing projects should show Stevens that, no, we are not content to become the Palo Alto of the east coast. Additionally, based on the work done by Jennifer Keesmaat, the town applied for and won a federal RAISE grant to fund a feasibility study to begin development of a greenway network. The $1 million grant includes funding to evaluate alignment alternatives, conduct public engagement, and prepare initial 15 percent conceptual designs for about 25 miles of greenway facilities.
That already is a win.
Stevens can keep conducting his post mortem on a body that isn’t even cold yet. We’re electing instead to keep pushing for implementation of the Complete Communities vision via the LUMO rewrite, the town’s Affordable Housing Plan & Investment Strategy, and Shaping our Future planning process. We’d rather work on making Complete Communities a success than declaring it dead on arrival.
SECU elections
The State Employee Credit Union (SECU), the second largest credit union in the country, is currently holding an election that will determine the institution’s future and all SECU account-holders can cast a vote.
A slate of reformers called “SECU for All” are currently running in a bid to make SECU more transparent, more equitable, and to fight the use of credit scores in SECU’s lending. As summed up in this Assembly piece from the last election cycle, “All SECU members have historically paid the same interest rate for the same type of loan. Across the banking and the credit union industries, this approach has become vanishingly rare. At most lending institutions, credit scores now dictate the interest rate a borrower pays. This policy, called risk- or tier-based lending, means that people with superb credit ratings pay less while people with blemished records pay more.”
Last year, challengers seeking to fight the imposition of risk-based lending at SECU swept the elections, and if this slate does the same this cycle, reformers will hold a majority of seats on SECU’s governing board.
Voting closes October first– read up on the challenger’s platforms at the SECU For All website, and then cast your vote at the SECU portal!