Chapel Hill Town Council is revisiting a plan from six years ago to discard a couple of seats, reducing from nine (eight council members and a mayor) to seven, and at the same time extending the mayor’s term from two to four years.
Back in February 2020, at the Town Council retreat, the town’s elected officials discussed reducing the number of council members from eight to six. Then-mayor Pam Hemminger noted that the size of Chapel Hill’s elected body is larger than its much larger neighbor Durham, which has six elected council members despite having more than four times the population. Raleigh also has eight council members, but a population of more than a half-million, much larger than Chapel Hill’s 64,000. Apex, a town growing much faster than Chapel Hill with 72,000 residents as of the most recent estimate, has five council members.
The discussion to reduce the size of the council arose shortly after first-time council member Rachel Schaevitz resigned her seat two years into her term because her family was moving out of the country. The effort to change the composition of the Council was overtaken by the COVID pandemic, and the Town Council chose not to move forward with a change to the town’s basic governance during the time of sheltering-in-place and remote meetings. (Schaevitz’s seat was not filled until elections were held in November 2021, 21 months after her resignation.)
This new effort to reduce the size of the Town Council is on the April 15 council agenda. A resolution on the consent agenda states that the town intends to reduce the size of the council from 8 to 6, and to extend the mayor’s term from two years to four years. A public hearing is set for April 29, with a vote expected at the May 6 meeting. The Town Council has the choice, but is not required to, hold a referendum allowing voters the opportunity to weigh in on the change. No other changes are proposed—each council member would continue to be an at-large representative, meaning they are elected by all Chapel Hill residents.
The state law governing the composition of local government, the length of elected officials’ terms, and the means of making changes are in Section 160A-101, 160A-102, and 160A-103 of the North Carolina General Statutes.