The Steering Committee reviewed the presentation about these two concepts and requested time to continue the dicussion about these concepts and the concepts presented on June 4th. The Steering Committee will continue their conversation during the next Steering Committee meeting on July 1st from 6:00-9:00pm at the Siena Hotel.

For the A Walkable Residential Community concept, please see below:

For the Town/Gown Village concept, please see below:

For a copy of the presentation that provides more information about these concepts and their themes, please visit http://www.townofchapelhill.org/centralwest

The next Steering Committee meeting will be this evening, Tuesday, June 11th from 7:00-9:00pm in the Tuscany Room at the Siena Hotel, 1505 E. Franklin Street. The meeting summary notes from this meeting will also be posted on this blog.

Thanks for reading!

Central West Focus Area June 4, 2013, Steering Committee Meeting Co-Chair Summary

By: Michael Parker & Amy Ryan, Co-Chairs, Central West Steering Committee

The Central West Steering Committee met on June 4th at the Chapel Hill Public Library from 4:30–6:45 PM. Copies of all meeting materials can be found at www.townofchapelhill.org/centralwest

Agenda Items

1.  Citizen Concept Presentation:  A group of citizens from the Estes neighborhoods submitted an alternative concept plan to the steering committee for their consideration.  The normal citizen comment period was extended by five minutes to give the presenters time to describe their plan.

2.  Presentation of Workshop 2 findings:  Meredith Judy of Rhodeside-Harwell, our planning consultant, presented a summary of the results of community input on the concept plans from our May 18 workshop.  Full transcripts of the small group work were also provided to the committee and are available on the Central West website.

3.  Presentation of new concept plans:  Deana Rhodeside presented three new schematic concept plans for the committee to consider.  The new plans were based on the discussions of the steering committee to date and the input from Workshop 2 and the Farmers Market booth display on May 18.

4.  Small Group Discussions:  The steering committee broke into four groups to discuss the three RH concept plans: what they liked, what needed to be improved, and what was missing.  Each group was also given a copy of the concept plan presented by the citizens, to use as they chose.  Some tables decided to review and comment on the citizen plan in the same way they reviewed the RH plans, while others took note of the citizens’ submission but did not review it specifically in their discussions.

During the time the committee was working, a table was set up at the side of the room for audience members to review and comment on the RH plans.  These comments will be transcribed and made available to the steering committee and on the CW website.

5.  Report-Out:  Each group gave a summary of their discussions—what they’d liked in the various plans and changes they’d suggest.

Next Steps

The committee meets again on June 11 (7:00–9:00 PM at the Siena Hotel). Rhodeside-Harwell will be presenting a revised set of concept plans, based on the committee’s work at the June 4 session.  The committee will be reviewing the plans in detail and making the final revisions that will appear in our interim report to Council on June 24.

Thanks to everyone who attended the meeting and to the committee for their continued hard work.

The three concepts prepared by the consultants are available here.

For a larger image, click on the image of the concepts above.

The Steering Committee will meet again next week on June 11^th from 7:00-9:00PM in the Tuscany Room at the Siena Hotel, 1505 E. Franklin Street. During the meeting, the Committee will look at new concepts that respond to the input and discussion from the June 4th meeting.

The Steering Committee also received some ideas from the neighborhood representatives who attended the meeting. Click here for this presentation.

David Owens, UNC School of Government

The Town of Chapel Hill’s DESIGN 2020 will offer the special topic presentation, “Development Agreements in Chapel Hill,” by David Owens, professor of public law and government at the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Government at noon on Wednesday, June 19, in the Council Chamber of Chapel Hill Town Hall, 405 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.

The next Steering Committee meeting will be this afternoon, Tuesday, June 4th from 4:30-6:30pm in the meeting room at the Chapel Hill Public Library. The meeting summary notes from this meeting will also be posted on this blog.

Thanks for reading!

Central West Focus Area
May 30, 2013, Steering Committee Meeting
Co-Chair Summary

By: Michael Parker & Amy Ryan, Co-Chairs, Central West Steering Committee

The Central West Steering Committee met on May 30^th at the Hotel Siena from 6:30 to 10:00 PM. Copies of all meeting materials can be found at www.townofchapelhill.org/centralwest

Agenda Items

1.  Communications Issues: The co-chairs began by airing concerns they had about improving the accuracy and extent of the committee’s communications with the public and making sure all of our work is carried out in a manner that is transparent and easily accessible to the entire community.

The committee decided that the co-chairs would begin to produce a summary report for each meeting, to be distributed through the town’s Central West website, e-mail lists, and neighborhood listservs.  This will provide the community with an accessible and accurate record of the committee’s actions.

Also discussed was committee members’ participation on community listservs.  As long as open meeting laws are observed (three or more committee members should not engage in discussion with one another about committee matters in any forum outside of our public meetings), posting information or comments to a listserv and reading the comments of others is fine.  Committee members were reminded that these listservs are not always easily accessible to the community at large and are not read by all committee members, so they are not an optimal means of communication about Central West issues for the committee.  We feel it’s preferable that our discussions be held in committee meetings so that all members can participate and all community members can be aware of their content.

The committee reiterated its policy that official statements from the committee to the press should be made through staff or the committee co-chairs.  Members are free to share their personal opinions with reporters but should make clear they are speaking as private citizens, not on behalf of the committee.

2.  Debrief of May 18 workshop logistics:  Eighty-two people attended our Saturday workshop at the Chapel Hill Public Library, 63 who lived in the Central West area, 7 who worked there, 5 who both lived and worked there, and 7 from outside the area.  Our booth at the University Mall Farmers Market had 10 visitors who filled out comment cards; 2 people identified themselves as living in the CW area, and 1 was a YMCA member.

Ideas from the committee on how we could improve future workshops included providing childcare (the town can’t provide babysitting for liability reasons, but we are contacting the babysitting group at the YMCA to see if they can provide coverage in the future); finding mechanisms that enable those who can’t attend a workshop to submit their comments in some other way (staff is working on plans to mount displays of our work at different venues through town to capture such comments and to reach out to the larger community); a wish that there had been more time to consider the proposed bike/ped improvements; a suggestion that we find a way to break workshops into shorter activities, so those who can’t attend for an entire morning can still participate; concerns that our work was focused tightly on the planning area (centered on the MLK and Estes intersection) and should be extended across the broader Estes/MLK corridor (where our charge is to suggest transportation/circulation improvements); and thinking about how we can consider our recommendations in light of other plans for development in the rest of Chapel Hill.

3.  Consultant’s comments on concept development:  Deana Rhodeside, the CW planning consultant, submitted a list of key areas of change—based on feedback from the committee, the May 18^th workshop, and other sources—that will be incorporated into the set of new concept plans her firm is working on to present at the steering committee’s June 4 meeting. This list is available on the town’s CW website.

In response to an inquiry about using a neutral facilitator for the June 4^th meeting, the committee voted (12–4) to continue to use Deana Rhodeside of Rhodeside-Harwell to facilitate the meeting.

4.  Work on refining the CW planning objectives:  The greater part of the meeting was spent in discussing the list of more than 130 draft objectives presented at the May 18 workshop.  Committee members were provided with voting tallies on each objective from the earlier steering committee Survey Monkey exercise and the community’s responses to the red dot/green dot exercise at the workshop.  The committee broke into three small groups, each responsible for reviewing a part of the material, identifying objectives that had strong support, combining objectives that had similar content, and eliminating those that had been covered elsewhere, that were deemed to addressed through Town regulations/ordinances, or for which, after consideration, there was little support.

The group reconvened to report out their work and discuss further changes.  A subcommittee then volunteered (Lucy Carol Davis, Julie McClintock, Sarah McIntee, Abby Parcell, Michael Parker, and Amy Ryan) to edit and wordsmith the list and produce a final draft of the objectives, to be distributed to the committee via e-mail for review in mid-June and then submitted to Council on June 24.

5.  Proposed additional principle on fiscal considerations:  Because of time constraints, presentation and discussion of this topic was tabled until a future meeting.

Next Steps

The committee meets again on June 4 (4:30–6:30 PM at the Chapel Hill Public Library). Our planning consultant, Rhodeside-Harwell, will be presenting a new set of concept plan, and the committee will be reviewing the plans in detail, identifying revisions required before our interim report to Council on June 24.  Revisions, changes, etc. will be brought back to the group at our June 11 meeting.

We’d like to thank the members of the community who attended the meeting and all of the committee members who put in a very long night of thoughtful and productive work.

Enjoying the new art sculpture with colorful lighting and fog effects at downtown Chapel Hill’s new public plaza at 140 West Franklin.

“Exhale” consists of a folded and layered perforated metal skin that allows for fog to emanate through the textured surfaces of the piece. The amount of fog emanating from the sculpture is controlled by a sophisticated computerized weather station that reads the wind velocity and adjusts the amount of fog accordingly.

Artist Mikyoung Kim states: “Exhale moves beyond art as object, and suggests a point of transition, interaction, and activation – a place to observe people utilizing the various zones of the plaza, making them an active, integrated part of the art piece.”

To view the schedule of events at 140 West Plaza, visit http://www.townofchapelhill.org/140west

Bassett will present information a general view of economic development in Chapel Hill, including facts and information about retail, housing and office markets. He will provide an overview of some of the key projects now under way including Ephesus Church-Fordham, Rosemary Imagined, and Downtown Chapel Hill. Concepts from the Downtown Framework and Action Plan also will be discussed. 

The presentation will be aired live on Chapel Hill Gov TV-18 and via streaming video at www.townofchapelhill.org/video

Bassett is the Town of Chapel Hill’s first economic development officer, hired in 2007 to develop a clear economic development strategy. Learn more about Chapel Hill’s economic development strategy at www.townofchapelhill.org/index.aspx?page=1069. To access economic development studies and data, visit www.townofchapelhill.org/index.aspx?page=2063.  Office, housing and retail studies were completed to benchmark Chapel Hill for future economic development and to inform the Town Council of information to help in making decisions about our future. 

The Special Topics series began during the Chapel Hill 2020 comprehensive planning process as a way to share information with interested residents who want to know more about issues, trends and studies that affect the future. These presentations continue with DESIGN 2020, the implementation phase of advancing the comprehensive plan’s goals and objectives. For past topics, see www.townofchapelhill.org/video 

The Town of Chapel Hill will hold the Central West Community Workshop from 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Saturday, May 18, with sign-in at 8:30 a.m. The workshop will be in Meeting Room B at the Chapel Hill Public Library, 100 Library Drive. 

The purpose of the workshop is to gather the community’s thoughts and feedback about the draft planning principles, objectives, and planning concepts for the Central West Focus Area. 

The Central West Focus Area Steering Committee has developed a draft set of planning principles and objectives that define the important elements to be considered while developing the small area plan for the Central West Focus Area. The planning principles include statements about the importance of connectivity, pedestrian and bicycle safety, identity/sense of place, mixed uses, diversity, green environment, and others. 

In addition, the Central West Steering Committee has also begun developing different planning concepts which provide visuals of the locations of the different uses in the area. 

The Central West Focus Area Steering Committee was charged by the Council to develop recommendations for a small area plan for the Central West Focus Area that would address the appropriate uses, form, and intensity for the area. The Committee is to work with the community, Town staff, and a consultant, and the thoughts and ideas developed from this process will form a small area plan which if necessary, will be developed into new zoning regulations for this area. 

Please help spread the word about the Central West Community Workshop to your friends, neighbors, and colleagues! 

For more information about the Central West Focus Area process, visit www.townofchapelhill.org/centralwest.