Initiating matters

As we've mentioned before here on OP, the Town of Chapel Hill is preparing to revise its decade-old Comprehensive Plan (CP). In addition to documenting something of a shared vision of the community, it is also used as the basis of the Town's LUMO (Land Use Management Ordinance) which contains the actual policies and regulations with which all developers must comply. In an attempt to ramp up the process of creating this community document, the Town Council is trying a new approach: they decided to empanel an "Initiating Committee" (IC) that will lay out the process through which the actual CP wil be created.

Once the IC's work is finished, the Town will establish a Coordinating Committee and Stakeholders that will guide and participate in the creation of the actual content of the new CP. Some people seem to be hoping to have the 12-member IC represent every perspective in Chapel Hill, but I actually think it's more important to have a committee that brings an understanding of the many facets of democratic public participation, and enough knowledge of land-use planning and local government to have a sense of what types of information will be useful.

The key to the new Comprehensive Plan's success (and the Town working together toward our common goals) is to effectively engage a wide range of people who have a stake in Chapel Hill's present and future. If people are not bought in to the plan, then every step the town tries to take in the next 10 years may be questioned by residents who don't understand or agree with the strategies.

For example, I think the Town wants to encourage people to use their cars less and to build a community that is more friendly to transit, cycling, and pedestrians.  This also means limiting sprawl, and accordingly building more densely in central parts of the town. Many Chapel Hillians may share the goal of protecting the environment, but they adamantly disagree when that goal is manifested in proposals to create taller buildings, even when they are proposed in our downtown and on high-capacity arterial streets. To me, this is just what is needed and where. To others, this density will ruin our community. Which will it be?

Hopefully the answer isn't either/or, but what a good comprehensive planning process can do is bring people with disparate ideas together so that we can better understand and maybe even share some of each other's values. We have to figure out what the areas are where we do agree, and also establish a process for how to handle the unavoidable disagreements.

Since the goal is to engage a wide range of people from across the a community in developing the Comprehensive Plan, I'm hoping the Town will go above and beyond it's usual public outreach methods. If we get a chance to try some new approaches, perhaps this can be a model - or at least a test lab - for better civic engagement that can be employed for other Town projects in the future.

I understand through the grapevine that the Initiating Committee has been selected, but I haven't yet seen a list of the members. The Council's process on this has been less than transparent, which I think sets a bad precedent. But regardless of this frustrating first step, I will be observing the upcoming process with deep interest.