UNC
People keep e-mailing me about it, so I might as well blog it: on Friday the Chancellor of UNC wrote a letter to local elected officials pledging to not pursue the 17,000 parking spaces that were previously proposed for Carolina North, and to cooperate with the regional transit study in which UNC was already supposed to be a partner.
Coverage from WCHL (with audio clips, cool!), Chapel Hill Herald, and a mention in the News & Observer (scroll down).
I appreciate the Chancellor's affirmation that the community has some part to play in making Carolina North successful.
What an interesting week for UNC-watchers! On Wednesday, the Board of Trustees (BOT) came out firing against the Chancellor's Leadership Advisory Committee, specifically the local elected officials who were invited to be members.
Seems the BOT does not share the Chancellor's faith in Chair Ken Broun's leadership, as they are complaining that too much time is being spent on process and not enough on developing plans. That's funny because according to UNC's own press release, plans were never a part of the committee's, um, plan:
The committee's purpose is to get community input on Carolina North from as broad a range of interests as possible. The committee is being asked to develop principles that will guide the university in preparing plans for submission to the local governing bodies as part of the regulatory process.
- OP: Broun Committee on TV, 2/28/06
I have been so incredibly upset since I heard about the Chapel Hill Town Council's swift decision to retire the Technology Advisory Board and the Horace Williams Citizens Committee last week, that I couldn't even write about it. I have been waiting to cool down, but the more I think and the more people I talk to about it, the madder I get.
So I will let Jason Baker do the talking for me (from his blog):
Last week, the Chapel Hill Town Council opted to end the service of both the Horace Williams citizens' committee and the technology committee.
Doing so was a mistake. With her sole dissenting vote, apparently only former citizens' committee member Laurin Easthom saw the value of the hard work and diversity of perspectives those folks would bring to the town in the years to come.
As a town, we're far behind where we ought to be in the technology realm, and disbanding our technology committee without a thoughtful replacement is only going to put us farther back.
I was pretty shocked to read today that Chapel Hill Mayor Kevin Foy has written a memo to the Town Council proposing that they should end the Horace Williams Citizen's Committee (old web site, new web site). Just a few months ago, I helped to draft a plan for how the HWCC would proceed in the next year or two to study some of the issues surrounding Carolina North and to make recommendations on them to the Town Council.
In all of the discussion of Ken Broun's new committee to advise UNC's leaders, it has always been made clear that the HWCC would still exist to advise Chapel Hill's leaders. I have not seen any change in situation that would mean we don't need this service any longer. This decision would be a major reversal and it deserves more explanation than the Mayor has given.
Nancy Suttenfield, a key UNC "mover-n-shaker" since 2000, current member on many Town-n-Gown related boards, is leaving UNC and is headed to Wake Forest.
Nancy's been quite busy both at UNC overseeing the recent tidal wave of capital expenditures. She's also been involved in a number of Town-n-Gown outreach efforts, such as Kevin Foy's Downtown Partnership. Not only did she help form UNC's new Carolina North committee, she's one of UNC's key representatives on that committee.
I wonder if her leaving will change the current shaky dynamic of that committee?
More from today's Herald-Sun.
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