Sent to the Chapel Hill Town Council on 9-10-12:
Dear Chapel Hill Mayor and Town Council:
I wish to thank those of you planning to vote against approval of the Charterwood development on September 12, 2012. It shows your recognition of the terrible precedent being set by the developer’s legal maneuver of merely recombining property tracts in order to circumvent neighborhood rights associated with the protest-petition.
For those of you still planning to approve the Charterwood project at Wednesday evening’s vote, I urge you to reconsider. Just because something is legal does not necessarily make it ethical. And please don’t convince yourselves that you are not setting precedent by endorsing the Charterwood developer’s end-run around the intent of the protest-petition law that has been on the books in North Carolina since 1923. You will absolutely be setting a precedent—not just for the town, but the entire state—that will place neighborhoods at the mercy of developers’ whims without substantive recourse. By approving the Charterwood development, you will be simultaneously approving silencing the voice of those in neighborhoods who trusted you to look out for citizens’ best interests from the moment you took office.
Remember who “the people” actually are.
Sincerely,
Joe Buonfiglio
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