Last night marked the last meeting of the stakeholder involvement portion of the Chapel Hill 2020 process. After brief introductions from the leadership of the process and town staff, the theme groups met to consider the action items drawn up by town staff based on pervious meetings. If you haven’t yet been able to have your say on 2020, you still have a few opportunities including:
- The information meeting for the town advisory boards on Chapel Hill 2020 on May 10 at 6 p.m. in the Town Council Chamber
- A “public information meeting” on May 14 at noon in the Town Council Chamber
- A public hearing when the Town Council receives the plan as part of its regular meeting on May 21 at 7 p.m. in Town Council Chamber
Moving through the rest of the year and beyond, there will also be opportunities for involvement that aren’t directly related to Chapel Hill 2020. Some of these opportunities will include engagement surrounding the update of land use management ordinance, priority budgeting, workforce planning and planning for small areas, just to name a few.
Though overall the meeting went well and it was great to do some actual plan writing, one common issue from the process as a whole still emerged: the time issue. The group I was in—Getting Around—wasn’t able to finish reviewing the action items, and is no forced to meet “on it’s own time.” Though there were only five or so of us, we weren’t able to find a mutually convenient time before the town staff works on its next draft on Monday, so it looks as though we’ll attempt to do the remaining work through email, or a small subset of our already small group will meet and make the final edits without everyone being represented.
Issues:
Comments
How to engage with the drafts?
I admire you for still going to these meetings even though the process has been so badly mangled and so very unresponsive to the public. That's really disappointing (but sadly not surprising) that the town didn't support your theme group (and others, and the Planning Board) in taking the time required to propoerly finish your most elemental task! I don't understand how they can say they have been true to the promise of taking as long as it needs to "do it right."I have been wanting to read and comment on the draft plan, but I can't figure out when I'm supposed to do that given the multiple drafts coming out. And there is no way I will have time to thoroughly read more than one draft of the plan. Do you know where they are with that (ie: which "draft" is current right now) and when the most effective time to try to read it and give feedback would be?
More Questions Than Answers
So at this point, it's a bit unclear to me as to how people are supposed to make comments on the draft, which is interesting because that's a major part of the "public engagement" that is supposed to be happening right now. I think the blog is your best bet, or maybe one of the meetings that I listed on my post above, but again I'm not sure. That in-and-of itself is troubling to me, since one would assume I would know how to give feedback considering I've attended all the meetings, gotten all the emails, etc.As far as where they are with the process now, I'm about 95 percent sure that this draft is the current one. My five percent of doubt comes from the fact that a town staff member told me theme group-proposed "action items" were in one color and staff-proposed "action items" were in another, but in this copy everything is black.Also, this draft will be out-of-date on Monday. The staff will be presenting a new one to the council for a work session that night based on the feedback received at Tuesday's meeting (this was the problem I mentioned in my post).Just to reiterate one more time what a problem is what we weren't able to finish in the allotted time. When going through the action items Tuesday night, my group--that is Getting Around--"tabled" some of the key issues (most notably parking) so we discuss them in greater detail at the end of the meeting. Since time was so short we're trying to shcedule time Monday to make corrections and wrap up discussion, but it probably won't work out since I have exams and most in the gorup have to work. I think the last line of the commentary Ruby and I did on 2020 on WCHL says it best: "Let's take the time to get it right--we won't get a second chance." At this point, it looks like we won't get that time.