Perhaps I missed the announcement, but at some point the public information meetings scheduled for today were moved to Thursday, and they will be held at The Friday Center which I think will be easier to get to than the School of Government was for the last round of meetings. I managed some moderate live blogging of the last meeting, but I'm not even sure if I can make it this time. Someone please go and pick up the slack!
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill invites local residents, faculty, staff and students to participate in a second round of community meetings about Carolina North on April 26.
The meetings will begin at 3:30 p.m. at the William and Ida Friday Continuing Education Center off N.C. 54. The presentation will be repeated at 5:30 p.m. in the same location. Parking will be available at the Friday Center. Chapel Hill Transit service is available via the FCX, S and V routes. See http://www.townofchapelhill.org/index.asp?NID=399 for timetables of these routes.
University representatives will present revised conceptual drawings with possible approaches to issues including open space, pedestrian and vehicular circulation, utilities, and land use on the UNC-owned property.
- UNC News release -- Second round of community meetings set to offer feedback on Carolina North concepts
UNC posted last month's presentations and people's comments on them at their website: http://research.unc.edu/cn/community.php
Update: The Village Project has also weighed in on UNC's plans with their preference for the "centers" option and some great suggestions.
Update 2: Here are UNC's revised scenarios from http://research.unc.edu/cn/community.php
Issues:
Comments
This is what Linda sent out
This is what Linda sent out April 6th:
From: Convissor, Linda [mailto:linda_convissor@unc.edu]
Sent: Friday, April 06, 2007 8:49 PM
To: Convissor, Linda
Subject: Carolina North Meetings, April 26, 2007
Please save the date for our next series of community meetings on Carolina North. They will be held on Thursday, April 26, 2007 at the Friday Center. As we did on March 27, we will have a session at 3:30 and again at 5:30; the same material will be presented at both sessions.
More details will follow but I will be out of town during the next week and wanted to get the dates to you as soon as possible. Please watch the local papers for stories and I will send an email with more information when I return.
As usual, my apologies to those of you who receive multiple copies of this email. I do encourage you to share with interested friends and neighbors, especially if you are a neighborhood contact.
Best,
Linda
Linda Convissor, Director of Local Relations
Office of University Relations
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Linda_Convissor@unc.edu
CB# 6225
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-6225
919-962-9245
919-843-5966 (fax)
I know that one student - a
I know that one student - a member of UNC's track and cross country team - has called a Facebook meeting to try to get students to attend this meeting.
Seems to me UNC has planned these at the perfect time to keep students out of the loop. Students are starting to stress about finals and the next meeting is when most of them will have returned home for summer break.
A quick note to let everyone
A quick note to let everyone know the Village Project has published its response to UNC's March 2007 plans. View comments, and a brief slideshow by clicking the link at the bottom of the comments page.
Patrick, I also added the VP
Patrick, I also added the VP info to the main post above (yesterday, after I discovered it in your previous comment).
I'm reporting late, but
I'm reporting late, but live, from the Friday Center. There are about 120 people here, in a room with capacity for 100. :-(
Full house. Standing room
Full house. Standing room only.
Jack Evans showed us some
Jack Evans showed us some insanely complex diagrams that represent the planning process for CN. Now he is introducing the 3 scenarios which have changed in response to last month's feedback.
Jack is reviewing the
Jack is reviewing the timeline, which works toward UNC submitting an application to the town by December of this year. They hope to be down to one scenario by June, and present a plan to the UNC Board of Trustees in July.
A veritable "who's who" of
A veritable "who's who" of local leadership.
I am in the breakout group
I am in the breakout group looking at the INTERWOVEN plan first. Like last time, it seems they are going to spend half of the session telling about things that are not the plan. In this case, it's the site's ecological assessment which was completed months ago.
For each plan they are
For each plan they are showing overlays highlighting different aspects such transportation modes, land uses, etc.
I amazed how much is "research/instutional" there seems to be almost no housing.
My idea for INTERWOVEN,
My idea for INTERWOVEN, which has a northern clump, is to connect with the new Chapel Ridge (?) development being built behind the car wash on MLK Blvd.
Suggestion for next time: the first breakout session should be longer to allow for more introductory explanations.
In the GRID session now, and they are telling us about the "Carolina Innovation Center."
GRID is more mixed use
GRID is more mixed use within each block. It has the least "working landscape."
None of the plans so far show a convenient connection to the Bolin Creek Greenway.
The modified GRID plan is
The modified GRID plan is now more curvy. The retail seems clustured at the edge as well as in the main corridor.
Ana Wu tells me today's
Ana Wu tells me today's presentations are already on the web site! http://cn.unc.edu
Now I am in CENTERS and we are hearing about the FPG Child Development Institute.
I like how CENTERS has
I like how CENTERS has little integrated parks as well as the large central ones. Like how this (still) keeps parking @ the edges, especially near MLK. Some housing is in the center and some where the edges border existing neighborhoods.
Dearth of numbers. For
Dearth of numbers.
For instance, I asked if they had a general idea of how many on street parking spaces there were. No idea. One side or both? Nope. Parking decks: How big? Capacity? Not there yet. Environmental impact of dispersed parking/transit design? Haven't got there.
Still haven't worked up specifics of their off-site impact studies. Watersheds in the SE quadrant. Light and noise pollution. Traffic consequences of the MLK facing parking areas.
I agree with Ruby that there should be more time for the "working" part of the interaction though I wouldn't have UNC sacrifice time for rolling out a detail ladened plan. The way the content of the presentations was segregated was interesting but suffered, I think, because it wasn't easy to compare options A,B,C (would be easier if they did like the ophthalmologist - "Is this lens in focus or that one?")
The early session was packed - a good sign considering the 3:30 start time. As the plans come into focus and as elements are combined or discarded I would hope UNC does more and more outreach (different times, church/political/social/service groups, etc.)
The current time line has only two more community meetings for feedback until the draft plan. As the detail increases, the outreach should also...
Really wish there had been more detail to work with today. Funny, the timeline - 2 more community meetings, draft proposal July, B.o.T. assessment Sept. , Town review Oct. is well established - but the underlying data, design and detail for the plan is not there less than 6 months out.
There were a couple of new
There were a couple of new information items shared by UNC today: (1) for the first time I've seen the University acknowledge a co-gen plant on the site although they were repeatedly asked about this during the LAC discussions; and (2) Jack Evans discussed that Alexandria Realty would be a partner in the Innovations Center and that begs the question of how the University is going to deal with providing the Town with a fair and equitable share of taxes for a building in which a private entity is its partner and profiting from the relationship.
Patrick Please explain the
Patrick
Please explain the Village Project statement:
"Eliminate the road running north of the campus to Homestead Road, which fragments critical natural areas. Instead, consider departing Homestead Road just east of Bolin Creek and continuing along the northwestern border of UNC property to Seawell School Road. This configuration would accommodate transit and traffic from the west, where many UNC employees already reside."
I can not for the life of me understand the concept that making Seawell School Road with three public schools on it a major exit for CN is a good idea. At the same time "critical nature areas" being fragmented has some relevance to the argument but given development and "infill" in the area and town it seems a thin point at best. I believe making the natural areas of CN into parks off the Bolin Creek corridor makes sense but would not be worried about a northern road.
I think the major concern about the north road is that UNC might someday develop along the road. If so state that concern.
Living in the here and now I worry about exits from CN. I have lived for years in this area of town. My kids go to the schools on Seawell School Road. The statement that a Seawell-Homestead connection somehow better accommodates transit and traffic west seems wrong to me on many levels. And what about traffic going North?
The public "announcement" of
The public "announcement" of the co-gen plant was welcomed. There's been pretty strong hints through the BOCC's recent relook at methane recovery that the University is serious about on-site energy production.
I also thought Alexandria was an interesting choice - I plan to post more info on their developments.
Got a shrug on the equity issue (another "to be discussed further" item).
The N&O beat me to the
The N&O beat me to the punch:
So, no leveraging of the billion dollar investment in infrastructure to research and develop "green" tech (this is a "research campus" isn't it or is it now just a fancy business park?).
I thought this quite troubling - and possibly indicative of how insular this development could be - separated from local and global concerns.
There's boodles of "green" to be made in green - can't believe UNC-CH is tossing a great opportunity to be a world-class leader in what promises to be the leading tech trend of this century.
They didn't say anything
They didn't say anything about a cogen plant in the second session. They had two central utility sites marked on the map, a temporary site for the first phase of construction and a second, larger site located closer to the railroad line. The statement I heard was that the desire is to maximize use of renewable energy. It is possible to use biomass as the fuel source for a cogen facility though. What would be wrong with that?
Terri, they specifically
Terri, they specifically mentioned landfill gas during the INTERWOVEN session (and the accessibility of the co-gen plant to the rail spur).
During that same session, the Ayres-St. Gross person spoke of the "artful" distribution of housing "dots". In other words, kind of following up on similar comments from the other sessions - housing was distributed based on fairly rough criteria (one person said it was a "feathered" distribution) - not, apparently, on use-patterns.
What's OWASAs take on these rough conceptual plans? Is anyone from OWASA directly involved?
Terri, I was in the same
Terri,
I was in the same session Will was and, as Will pointed out, the reference to the co-gen plant was in terms of the necessity of locating it convenient to the rail line. No mention of fuel source was made and I'm sure that would be another detail yet to be worked out.
Here is some quick info on
Here is some quick info on Alexandria pulled off the web:
Alexandria, a real estate investment trust (REIT), develops and operates life science properties. It owns about 134 office and laboratory properties in nine states and in Canada; these are occupied by biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies, research institutions, government agencies, and similar tenants. Its portfolio of nearly 9 million sq. ft. is entirely located in high-tech hotbed areas (North Carolina's Research Triangle area; San Diego; San Francisco; Seattle; Washington, DC; and in Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and other states). Tenants include ZymoGenetics, Theravance, Quest Diagnostics, and Merck; these companies typically rent the REIT's properties under triple-net leases.
Key numbers for fiscal year ending December, 2005:
Sale: $244.1M
One year growth: 33.2%
Net income: $63.4M
Income growth: 5.4%
Very disturbed by the
Very disturbed by the Interwoven Plan and the appearance of the Homestead connector road in all three plans. To me this just signals inevitable build-out of the entire tract and I think everyone should keep in mind that, regardless of timetable, that's where this is headed unless there is a fervent appeal for preservation of a significant part of this land.
Also, it should be noted that the pond is not in the Interwoven plan. I asked the Biohabitats presenter if that was wetlands and he said it was, but it hadn't been declared wetlands. That's just sneaky and I think it reveals the tenor of UNC's commitment to rigorously factor environmental impact into their "studies." [ie...it's not wetlands unless it's declared wetlands....]
I showed the interwoven to a couple of beavers that have lodges on the pond and they are very concerned for the future of their families.
Another note on wildlife impact. We've spotted two couples of pileated woodpeckers "out there" and while these birds are no longer on the endangered species list, they are still threatened.
They are big and wonderful birds and require 1000 to 4000 acres of habitat. Question: how does a threatened woodpecker become an endangered one? Answer: loss of habitat.
All three plans looked nice with their clean lines and circles and pretty colors. Without any teeth in the covenant to hold development at 250 acres for 50 years, I think they'll be over 400 acres, including infrastructure, in the first 5 years.
I've just uploaded pictures
I've just uploaded pictures of each scenario, extracted from UNC's PDF's at http://cn.unc.edu. I will add them to the main body of this post above.
SQuonk, when I was on the
SQuonk, when I was on the Horace-William's Cit. Comm. we started to draft some principles/guidelines for monitoring environmental impacts. We submitted a truncated proposal to Council just after the Mayor precipitously pulled the plug on that citizen-led effort.
Unfortunately, though the broad outlines of the HWCC's request were discussed within the LAC, the commitment to do a detailed on and off site assay kind of got lost. I asked the LAC to go beyond their consultants (BioHabitats) work in assessing current and future impacts much more "scientifically" - as if CN represented the largest environmental "experiment" in UNC's history. This effort could be coordinated possibly under the aegis of UNC's Institute for the Environment.
What's "going beyond" Biohabitat's current efforts? Identifying champion species, unique habitats, off-site consequences (monitoring air and water pollution), etc. The HWCC laid out several avenues of investigation.
As of yesterday, UNC still hadn't committed to an off-site environmental review of consequences and a plan for further continuous monitoring of both on-site and off-site conditions. It was quite clear that Biohabitat and UNC continue to feel that a two week "walk through" of the site plus a review of aged and/or spotty studies was more than thorough enough for their purposes.
Yep, adequate enough to squeak under the federal and state minimum requirements - completely insufficient for doing a once in a lifetime longitudinal study of the consequences of developing a 1,000 acre campus.
And, of course, Evans put the kibosh on leveraging the billions of dollars of taxpayer investments in CN to do additional work - like studying "best in class" green development techniques/technology, doing a scientific assay of the current environmental conditions to establish a baseline for studying CN's impacts, researching cost-effective building strategies, etc.
It's a shame that Evans celebrates a "same old, same old" pedestrian approach to public investment - one which can't double/triple the impact of each dollar spent. This really doesn't bode well for an effort that's supposed to be taking UNC to the next level - to establish it as a top tier institution on the cutting-edge of green development.
On the wetlands issue, Tom
On the wetlands issue, Tom Croy's doing some digging on how one goes about getting something that is what it is declared what it is so that it is what it is before it's what it was.
Toms Cors, that is.
Toms Cors, that is.