The Chelsea Theater’s Future is In Question. Is The ArtsCenter the Answer?

Posted on November 15, 2017 by patrick

This evening I caught the Herald-Sun article announcing that Chapel Hill’s Chelsea Theater may be near the end of its run. Having seen many films there and having given my spouse Chelsea gift certificates for many birthdays, this is a gut punch and a sad reckoning for arthouse and related films in Chapel Hill / Carrboro.

The article states:

“Now in the last year of our current five-year lease, with only a handful of months to go, we must make some serious choices about the future of the Chelsea Theater,” the release said. “Given the advancing years of the current owner it might be difficult committing to another five year lease. And yet there may be some interest in continuing the legacy of the Chelsea.”

The theater is asking interested parties to reach out to the theater via email.

Cutting to the chase, unless there is some deep-pocketed film aficionado interested in taking over the labor of love that has been Bruce Stone’s stewardship of the Chelsea (and previously the Varsity), then there is one obvious organization to ask if they are interested in stepping into the breach: The ArtsCenter.

It wouldn’t be the first time an arthouse theater has gone the non-profit route to stay in business. The Coolidge Corner theater in Brookline, MA made the move in 1989. A/perture Cinema in Winston-Salem did, too, in the past 7 years.

What’s different from both of these other situations is that these locations were stand-alone operations without other infrastructure that they needed to develop to execute their plans. The ArtsCenter already has a box office, online ticket sales, a wine/beer permit, and people who know about running a theater, not to mention a non-profit board in place. Clearly there’s a space question to be managed, but 300 East Main has a few spaces that aren’t fully leased and maybe there’s a temporary opportunity that could be figured out while larger programming questions about the ArtsCenter’s footprint downtown could be managed.

So what’s in this idea for various parties?

For the ArtsCenter, it presents an opportunity to open up a new fundraising and stakeholder channel around arthouse films like the two theaters above, in addition to embracing a new level of film engagement.

For Carrboro, it’s a potential downtown economic development opportunity that fits with the town’s brand that is authentic, artistic, and independent.

For film fans, it’s a chance to put their money where their mouth is and support the Chelsea as the community institution it is. Our household currently buys tickets to ArtsCenter events a la carte. I’m certain that if the ArtsCenter made this move, we’d become members, and I bet others would, too.

What do you think?

Comments for Second Public Hearing on Library Site at 203 S Greensboro St

Posted on October 3, 2017 by patrick

I sent some comments to the Carrboro Board of Aldermen this evening for tonight’s public hearing. Sorry for not formatting them better, but time was short! Here they are:

First, I appreciate Mr. Spencer’s efforts to capture what was heard last time- I think he got much of the input from the public captured well, and better still- I see it expressed in the new material he created.

Here are my reactions:

1. On the north side of the block, fronting Roberson Street, remove the drop-off lane. Drop-off-pickup lanes are generally a suburban construct so that traffic can keep moving at high speed. That should not be a purpose that is encouraged on Roberson. Drop-off and pick-up in the urban context should happen at the curb, and these movements help to calm traffic. Removing this zone allows for the extension of the sidewalk to the entrance to the underground parking.

2. Carrboro has a chance to do real street trees here. If the trees are against the building on Roberson, they do not act as effectively as a traffic control device, and provide less shade in summer. Put the sidewalk between the trees and the building, and it will be easier to look into what I hope will be big windows into the library, while providing more shade for people using the sidewalk.

3. The parking underground cites 88 spaces per underground tier. I think the project can function with two parking tiers, or even one, meaning either 88 spaces or 176. I suggest dedicating less than 20 spaces to Town Use and leaving the rest as public parking which would be Shared, Managed, Unbundled, and Paid. I talked about what each of these mean in my prior comments.

http://citybeautiful21.com/2017/09/19/development-at-203-s-greensboro-needs-less-parking-startup-space-to-complement-library/

4. The remote parking options continue to replicate the primary problem with how “parking” issues have been addressed in downtown Carrboro for years, which is the thought that there will need to be parking built, and that it should be a public deck. We ***MUST*** get beyond this limiting mindset and think about DISTRICT parking downtown where public and private lots contribute spaces to a PUBLIC PARKING DISTRICT.

What does this look like? Let’s say you do a one tier underground parking facility at 203 S Greensboro. 15 spaces reserved for the town, the remaining 73 are public. They get added to the Public Parking District. At any time when those 73 spaces are less than 85% full, it is free to park. When those spaces are more than 85% full, a price is added to help free up some spaces. This gets managed with smart parking apps like those in Chapel Hill, Asheville, and Durham.

How do we add private spaces to the Public Parking District? The parking study clearly shows that one of the emptiest lots in all of downtown is the Bank of America lot, right next to 203 S Greensboro. The Town, having set up the Public Parking District, approaches Bank of America and says: “We see you have 35 spaces that are mostly unused during the lunch crush time for restaurants. We have set up a software-managed Public Parking District. We invite you to put ten spaces into the Public Parking District, keeping 25 for yourself. They will be priced to keep them 15% empty. At times of day when they are 15% empty without charging, they will be free. For participating, after covering the cost of managing the system, the Town of Carrboro will provide some of the revenue received from pricing back to your business, and some of the revenue will go to the town to help fund access projects to downtown Carrboro, including Parking Signage and lighting, wayfinding, bike and sidewalk projects, and additional bus service.”

Once you have 10 spaces there, you approach another business- perhaps the lot owned by the folks who own the Clean Machine building. You add the Century Center Lot to the Public Parking District as well, running on the same rules. You keep going from business to business, and others will join. You will *FIND* additional parking it by freeing it from those private lots. Businesses who are open 9 to 5 can elect only to participate after 5:30 pm. Bars that open at 11 am can elect only to participate to 10:30 am.

This is going to cost orders of magnitude less than additional parking construction, and perhaps bring the Town and businesses revenue. It also means that someone in a minivan with 3 kids driving from Lake Hogan Farms who wants to park at 203 S Greensboro will *ALWAYS* find a space. That’s what pricing does. If you’re that parent, are you willing to pay $1.25 to have a convenient, easy place to park to take your kids into the library? If they can pay by smartphone app, the answer is definitely “YES.”

So let’s stop trying to site decks, and work on freeing private spaces by becoming the leader of a downtown Public Parking District, and invite private partners to join.

5. In terms of the site layout Jim Spencer has created with the space to walk between the buildings, consider whether an upper floor connection for the levels above the ground makes sense. This could provide a sense of enclosure to the space and also make it easier for employees to move around.

6. We’re trying to do economic development, right? Then this building should be five stories. The Level 3 floorplate should be replicated on Level 4, and again on a 5th level. We only have one downtown, and if we are tapering building height to transition to residents on the south side of Carr Street, we are literally reducing the economic capacity of Carrboro’s (population: 20k plus) most productive real estate to honor the theoretical aesthetic concerns of maybe 10-12 people. Folks who live next to downtown should be prepared for the buildings to get taller over time, and to their credit- those who spoke from the Carr Street neighborhood at the meeting seemed to understand this.

Development at 203 S Greensboro Needs Less Parking, More Startup Space to Complement Library

Posted on September 19, 2017 by patrick

On September 19, the Carrboro Board of Aldermen will be discussing a proposal to redevelop 203 S. Greensboro St into the Southern Orange County library and several other public uses for Town of Carrboro departments.The current plan significantly over-provides parking and under-supplies useful commercial space in a downtown whose own recent parking study found that there are over 1,280 unused parking spaces in downtown Carrboro (click here, see page 9 of PDF) at virtually all times of day, 365 days a year.

Before moving forward with this plan, the Board of Aldermen should modify the project as follows:

Reduce the overall parking program to 150 spaces, using only the below ground and 1st levels for parking.
Add a minimum of 8,400 square feet to the project on the upper floors that would be leased to private, taxpaying uses
Explore if building more sq footage brings cost per square foot down, especially if building full, flat floors across floors three and four
Pursue a partnership with American Underground to fill some of the space with startups, and/or use a commercial broker to lease the space
Allocate the 150 parking spaces as follows:
1. 20 spaces for use by Town (all departments combined)
2. 130 public spaces (can be used by library patrons, artscenter, town workers, etc as long as they follow parking rules)
Price the parking in the deck to keep 15% of public spaces free at all times, adjusting the price by time of day according to demand. If the deck can have 15% of spaces free without charging at some time of day, parking should be free in that time period.

Why The Aldermen Should Take These Steps

Let’s unpack these moves one by one.

1. Reduce parking to 150 spaces. Here’s the ground floor of the proposed building. South Greensboro Street is to the left, Open Eye Cafe is be directly above the building. The ground floor of our new signature Town building would be a 14,000-odd square foot library and 19,000 or so square feet of parking. As you go up, the pattern remains this way- about 33,000 sq feet of development of which 58% is parking and 42% is everything else. The below ground floor is 80% parking. This is just too much. If you look at the total program proposed, it comes out to 5.4 spaces per 1000 gross square feet (GSF) of building. To put this in perspective, malls and big box stores generally provide 4 spaces per 1000 GSF. After the administration in Washington signaled its intent to pull out of the Paris Climate accords, Carrboro put green lights up on Town Hall to signal its commitment to climate action. If we are going to build more parking for our public buildings than Southpoint Mall builds for its shoppers, then I would suggest we take those green lights down and stop pretending we’re committed to fighting climate change. A lot of communities don’t even have parking requirements downtown anymore (i.e. Durham) because they are working to help people use more sustainable travel modes by not subsidizing auto usage.

14,390 square ft of Library, 19,000 square feet of parking!

2. If we took out two levels of the parking deck, according to the cost per square foot and cost per space of parking for the Town in the June 20th presentation, we could add 8,400 square feet of space and pay the same amount to build the building as if we built 55,000 square feet and two more levels of parking. However, we would have more space to lease that would hopefully bring a return on investment to the Town over the years.

3. The cost of this building is projected at $250 per square foot. I am not sure if this is high, but the irregular shape of each floor to wrap around the parking deck may be driving the cost up. The Board should seek advice from Jim Spencer, the architect, on whether having more conventional floor plates on the third and fourth floor in lieu of parking would bring the overall cost per square foot down. If so, then the Town could consider even more square footage that could be rented to the private sector.

4. Pursue a partnership with American Underground. For those who don’t know, American Underground is the wildly successful startup incubator in the basement of the American Tobacco Campus in Durham which has since expanded to two more buildings in Durham and one location in Raleigh. Now that Carrboro has direct bus connections to Durham with stop one block from 203 S Greensboro and one block from American Underground(AU), it’s a great time to leverage a lot of the common cultural affinity between Carrboro and Durham and see if AU is interested in establishing a “Western Outpost” for their ecosystem in Carrboro. We may be able to offer less costly expansion than the increasingly expensive office space market in Downtown Durham, while still offering many of the amenities that both downtowns share.

5. Allocate the 150 spaces as follows: 10 for town employees, 140 public spaces. The current proposal has 30 spaces for Parks and Rec. If the Town wants to get businesses in downtown Carrboro to get their employees to stop using up public parking that visitors and customers could use, they should lead by example. Last year, a delegation from Chapel Hill and Carrboro visited a very successful mixed use project in Boulder, Colorado that had multiple users using one parking garage called Boulder Junction.

Boulder Junction in Boulder, CO has its parking Shared, Managed, Unbundled and Paid

Boulder Junction’s parking operates on four principles: it is shared, managed, unbundled, and paid. “Shared” means that any person can use any space; there’s no “parking for XYZ business only” signage. “Managed” means that there is a strategy for how the parking is to be used, and an entity providing policy and enforcement to ensure the strategy is carried out. (in this case, the city of Boulder) “Unbundled” means that if you rent space in the building, you are not automatically allocated a parking space- you must also rent spaces individually as well, whether you rent by the hour, day, week, or month. Finally, “paid” is relatively obvious. While the Carrboro Parking Study’s chief failure is no mention of the word pricing, the Town actually went ahead and priced the Rosemary Street lot by Carrburritos and Bowbarr recently, so we’ve crossed the Rubicon and now charge for parking in Carrboro. So let’s do it right. Let’s start where we are as a Town, and implement a system that lets the first 2 hours (or 3! or 4! or whatever we decide!) be free, and only thereafter charges the user. This system is deployed in the North Deck at the American Tobacco Campus in Durham, and people can pay using the Parkmobile app. It’s convenient, promotes turnover, prevents park and ride in inappropriate places, and allows for parking to be free as long as it makes sense.

Taking these four principles, a purist approach would put all 150 spaces into this system. But the Town has storage for some departments in the basement, and there are probably some needs for moving equipment in and out of the building for key events that should have those spaces reserved for town staff. But ten spaces should be enough.

Beyond those ten spaces, the Town should be encouraging downtown employees to park on fringe lots and either walking, biking, or busing to the core sites downtown (203 S Greensboro and the Century Center).

On page 20 of the parking study, you can see that VHB documented 151 cars parking for over 7 hours in our “2-hour stay” public lots. VHB estimates that 50 to 60 of these are town employees, and another 90 to 95 belonged to other downtown employees or UNC students stealth park-and-riding to campus.

I’m sure town employees who currently enjoying parking downtown may be disappointed with this recommendation. But hopefully they recognize that if they can park a little further away, they can support vitality for downtown businesses, and get a few more steps in to finish their commutes, or snag a CHT bus from a lot a little further away.

6. Price the deck for 85% occupancy. This is considered a best practice in the parking industry. If you set the price so that 15% of spaces are empty, then you can pretty much guarantee that with people coming and going, you will ALWAYS find a space at your destination. No more circling and hunting for a space. If demand for spaces is such that 15% of spaces are empty even if the price is free, then that’s what you charge – $0. Based on the Carrboro Parking Survey, it appears weekday lunch hours represent the greatest crunch given our current conditions. In this case, the parking at 203 S Greensboro might have a charge at lunchtime, but not earlier or later in the day. We’d have to set up the system and see. That said, once the system is up and running, businesses could opt in, just as they did in Asheville.

If you take these steps together, and only add the 8,400 square feet while reducing to 150 spaces, you still get a parking ratio of 2.4 spaces per 1000 square feet, which is higher than many downtowns like Carrboro require today. That’s a reasonable outcome to transition downtown away from auto dependence and towards greater economic vitality, while also delivering needed Town office space and the library everyone wants to see happen.

It’s time to do parking pricing right, on the Town’s terms, in a strategic way that balances our goals and puts us on a path to unlock the 1,280 spaces that are tied up in 140+ individual lots, while raising money for alternative modes. This worthy project is the place to start that new effort.

If you agree, please let the board know by emailing boa@townofcarrboro.org.

Lloyd Farm: What Happens When You Let a Grocery Store Chain Do Urban Design

Posted on June 27, 2016 by patrick

After several years of hearing suggestions for improvements from adjacent neighborhoods, elected officials, advisory boards and citizens from all over Carrboro, the folks at Argus Development have submitted plans for what they have always wanted to build here – a grocery-anchored strip mall. I first wrote about this project in 2014, nearly 18 months ago, and have talked to many Carrboro residents about it since. Very, very little about the proposal has changed and its chief flaws dating back to 2014 remain mostly unaddressed.

If I was a member of the Carrboro Board of Aldermen, I would vote to deny this rezoning application.

The most recent site plan attached to Tuesday’s packet is below. If you look at the link above to my prior post, you’ll see little has changed in 18 months. I’m going to list several shortcomings ahead of the image below.

The overall design of the site is simply too suburban, which makes it hard to redevelop into something better in the future. Some of the suburban features damaging this site layout in particular are the gently curving road from the top of the site the area down by the two stores surrounded by stormwater detention ponds. This roadway geometry and lack of buildings along the side of the road will encourage speeding through the site by cars.
Tax base efficiency for the town. This design incorporates several of the low-value per acre approaches documented in the 2014 presentation by Urban 3 to the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Chamber of Commerce (click to see slides-they’re EXCELLENT!). In a town with a rural buffer, we need to do our best to maximize our tax value per acre on parcels inside the buffer to produce a better balance between commercial and residential tax base in Carrboro, and that means building up in a denser format. The site design for this plan incorporates the limited value proposition of the Timberlyne Shopping Center and the “Older Outparcel Format” on slide 18 with parking completely surrounding a building, providing a much lower value per acre (in this case, about $950,000/acre) than more urban building types such as the Hampton Inn in downtown Carrboro. (Over $33 million per acre!). Go to the final slide and look at the comparison of mall or strip development per acre with mixed-use at 3 and six stories. The Lloyd Property should be in the categories on the right hand side of the chart; instead, it is mostly in the strip mall category, with limited tax base per acre developed and a design that locks that in for probably 30 or more years.
The massive parking field in front of the Harris Teeter grocery store. I don’t think I have had a single conversation about this project that doesn’t involve someone lamenting the massive parking lot fronting the grocery store, and how much better it would be to have something more akin to Southern Village instead. This suggestion has been made repeatedly to the applicant, and they have done nothing to engage with this community request in their design. The most likely reason is that their client, Harris Teeter, has probably sent some middle management person to the site who looked around and said “yup, this looks suburban, it must have the suburban standard site layout,” which comes with a checklist that says, more or less- “if we can’t have all the parking right in front of the store in a massive parking field, the store will not make money. Our customers are simply too stupid to figure out how to use our stores otherwise.” Harris Teeter’s own store at North Hills in Raleigh shows this isn’t true, but since the corporate grocery office has labeled this “suburban” rather than “urban” they are shoving the standard design down our throats. Let me say that again another way- one of the most significant undeveloped parcels in Carrboro is being designed primarily around the needs of a checklist in a major grocery store corporate office, not the town’s needs and goals.
The two water detention ponds with the two outparcel sites featuring a triple drive-through (worst kind of drive through!) bank and another retail site are a pretty irreversible suburban set of uses that work to prevent a future urban street grid from being installed while also only supporting low-intensity uses.
No public gathering spaces. There are two locations titled “Plaza Lawn” on this drawing. Neither of them are likely to be used by many people and become the beloved community space that the Weaver Street lawn is. One Plaza Lawn (bottom left) is going to be nearly empty, all the time. With no adjacent uses other than parking, and a walking path to Old Fayetteville- the side of the site featuring the least pedestrian traffic, there’s no reason to be here. The Plaza Lawn in the curve near the top center of the site will have high-speed traffic on one side, and a retail/restaurant space on the left side. Perhaps there may be some spillover here if this is a restaurant, but if it is a retail store, this will just be another grassy berm that goes unused. Looking at these two sites plus the big green swath of land between the road and the detention pond north of the senior housing, there was plenty of space in this site to create a village green surrounded by active uses, but the parking for the grocery store was too important. Are you one of the folks who was really interested in a gathering spot, or are you interested in learning more about the failures of American “plazas,” and why the Lloyd Farm “Plaza Lawns” fail in the same way? Check out this neat piece by Neil Takemoto on the difference between Americanized “plazas’ and Italian “Piazzas.”
Age-restricted housing. My most recent post on Lloyd Farm covered the issues with Senior Housing instead of housing for all ages. Click here to read why going from apartments to age-restricted housing presents a dilemma when it comes to equity issues in housing.
None of the buildings have any relationships with the streets. They have relationships with the parking lots. This means that it will be harder to tear these buildings down and replace them with more dense development in the future, effectively restricting the future economic capacity of one of our limited commercial zones.
Virtually all of the commercial buildings are one story. Orangepolitics ran a great piece recently on how we don’t have space to receive small and growing companies, and we can’t get ANY of these buildings to have a second story with some space for the next business that breaks out of an incubator to move to?

Lloyd Farm Plan April 2016

In closing, I’m going to share a few comments from the advisory boards that I thought were particularly good:

Add multistory mixed use development with ground floor commercial with residential
and/or office use above, and increased clustering of buildings relative to the current site
plan. Consider the model of Southern Village. The current site plan has too many
buildings too far apart with too much separated parking. Building up and clustering
would reduce impervious surface and therefore more effectively address stormwater
runoff and flooding issues. – Environmental Advisory Board

And…

The Board recognizes the need for senior housing in Carrboro, but is disappointed with
the lack of affordable or workforce housing. We would like to see some of the senior
residences made available at workforce rates. A payment-in-lieu should be required as a
condition of the rezoning.- Planning Board

And…

The Board strongly suggests that the final plan reverse the positions of the grocery store
and the buildings facing it. The intent is to reinforce a residential buffer. It would also
serve to decrease the distance between the grocery store and the senior housing.
The rezoning should include conditions regarding architectural standards, including
uniformity of materials and setback of taller buildings in proximity to residential areas,
which mirror the Downtown Districts. The conditions suggested by the Applicants should
also be included, however condition #1 should be amended to reflect the change in
positions of the grocery store and the facing retail buildings.

It seems pretty clear that the rezoning is the last chance to get any improvements to the design or reconsideration of strategies, and I hope the Board signals that this proposal should not proceed unless these issues are addressed. Given we’ve been at this for 18 months formally and longer informally, I’m not terribly optimistic that we’re going to get much better by giving them a green light.

In closing, I want to acknowledge that I think that development processes that don’t make it clear what the community wants and expects make it harder for developers to come to reasonable win-win outcomes for the community. I understand that the proposed investment at this site is a big deal, but I also think a superior project would offer better upside for the town and the developer if they could get past the inflexible approach to the parking on the grocery store and the other conventional mid-to-late twentieth century design approaches they are taking to the site layout and organization. Honestly, I feel like the investors and the Town are leaving profit and taxbase on the table to cater to the checklist at the Harris Teeter corporate office.

Given that we already have a Harris Teeter with a dangerous, pedestrian-hostile parking lot in Carrboro, and that these folks don’t seem to have incorporated much of what the community is asking for, I think that denying this rezoning is reasonable, and that the town should then turn to establishing a process that the TOWN leads to establish what type of development is appropriate for this site. We can (and should) do better.

Carrboro Advisory Boards Should Push For Gathering Space at Lloyd Farm

Posted on June 2, 2016 by patrick

Tonight, at 7:30 pm in Town Hall, the various Carrboro Town Advisory Boards will meet to review the Lloyd Farm rezoning proposal before it goes to the Carrboro Board of Aldermen later in June. This site represents a significant opportunity to do something compelling or make a lasting mistake for Carrboro.

All in all, Lloyd Farm is a mildly better than average suburban strip mall concept with a bunch of single story buildings surrounding a large parking field fronting a Harris Teeter. The “better than average” points come for significantly more attention to bike/ped mobility through the site than is usually present in proposals like this. That said, here are the key problems with it:

The layout is driven first and foremost by traffic engineering concerns; the two drive-thru parcels are particularly awful.
The green “Plaza Lawns” are located in places that almost guarantee they will never be used as public spaces.
No multi-story buildings on a large site that could accommodate them and surface parking
Too small a residential component for a town struggling with increasing housing affordability challenges

I’m not sure the last two are going to be addressed at this point in the game, so I’m going to focus on ONE MEANINGFUL CHANGE that could significantly improve this project.

Re-Configure the Lawns and Parking to Create a Gathering Space, So That There is An Urban Core to a Suburban Site

The image above is the most recent site plan with a few minor changes:

It removes the 7,810 square foot building in the curve of the road, and places parking there instead. (Blue circle)
It moves the square footage of those buildings into two buildings that front a place reminiscent of the the Weaver Street Market Lawn among several buildings. Just as people can walk into the center of Southpoint Mall’s primary walkway between Barnes & Noble and the Apple Store, you could do the same between these two buildings. Harris Teeter would still have a massive parking field out front, albeit in a slightly different shape than they are used to. If they can build a two-story Harris Teeter at North Hills, they should be able to handle this.
The public space allows for more urban cafe-style dining fronting a space for people rather than a space for cars. This could be accomplished with greenspace, hardscaped space like a brick plaza, or both. Ideally I think the developer could steal brick and planting design cues from the UNC campus, and then allow for dining along both sides of the space. The Piazza at Schmidt’s development in Philadelphia strikes this balance well, see below:
This closes the movement of trucks from behind Harris Teeter to the road with the bus pull-out closer to the apartments. Trucks will then need to make a 90-degree turn in front of Harris Teeter and then head north to the road to go left towards Old Fayetteville Rd, or somehow move south of the public space and adjacent retail and exit that way.
Finally, this move does take some retail away from the terminus of the greenway coming from Carol St. I understand how if I was coming from Carol Street, I would find this a bit of an aesthetic loss. However, I think that transition by walking and biking can be made reasonably well if there is also a greenway east of the bioretention area (PURPLE dotted line) that leads to the crossing near the proposed bus pullout. This consolidates crossings from the two directions that pedestrians and cyclists may arrive near a potential bus stop, and give them the smallest amount of parking lot/road combination to cross to reach the stores and the public space.

This Site Needs More Housing, For ALL Ages

It’s also worth noting that there’s just not enough housing being built on such a large site. Carrboro is not going to be able to address its rising housing cost challenges without building new units. Although there are 200+ new units here, this site can accommodate many more, and more stories of height over podium parking. Additionally, it’s disappointing to see only senior housing being proposed. While there are clearly needs for housing for senior citizens in Carrboro, since the Board of Aldermen proposed to look at every decision through the prism of equity at their annual retreat, it is worth noting that generally speaking, older Americans are generally wealthier than everyone else. The chart below shows the median net worth by age in the USA. The data is from the Census Bureau in 2015 via an article at the financial planning website fool.com. Given this distribution, it is hard for me to see how we can talk about equity in a complex that doesn’t allow people under 55 to live there.

One Chance to Get This Right

In closing, I strongly recommend that the advisory boards to be energetic in encouraging the Lloyd Farm development team to use this opportunity to provide a special place on the edge of Carrboro. Not only do I think this concept of a gathering space would garner them more support for approval, I think they’d actually get higher rents! I suspect that the primary pushback will be about their anchor tenant (Harris Teeter) and expectations regarding parking. If they are getting roughly the number of spaces they expect in view of the front door of the store (as my proposal above provides) I think they should be willing to compromise.

Chapel Hill News Describes Very Typical Carrboro Infill Project as “Unusual Density”

Posted on May 31, 2016 by patrick

There are a few rezoning hearings coming up at the Carrboro Board of Aldermen meetings in June. One of them is a project called Inara Court, slated for 102 to 104 Fidelity St, which is right behind the O2 Fitness property, on the same side of Fidelity Street. I am very familiar with the area as I previously lived at two different addresses on Fidelity.

CH News Reporter Jean Bolduc’s description of the project in the paper was strange, stating:

The Board of Aldermen will hear from residents this month about a plan to build six homes on about a half-acre on Fidelity Street, behind the O2 Fitness Club. The infill project offered by Yates-Greene, LLC is classified as an “Architecturally Integrated Subdivision,” which would allow for the unusual density of so many homes on so little land.

The math here is pretty straightforward – six units on 1/2-acre of land yields 6/.5 = 13 dwelling units per acre. Is this “unusual” in Carrboro? I did some quick checking in Google Earth with the polygon tool to measure acreage, then counted units using Google Streetview.

Literally directly across the street is White Oak, a condo complex built in the early 1980s with 96 units on about 6.1 acres, or roughly 16 dwelling units per acre.

Immediately next to White Oak, also on Fidelity Street, is Village Square, with about 26 units on 2.4 acres, or roughly 11 dwelling units per acre.

At the end of Fidelity Street at the intersection with Davie Rd, there is Fidelity Court- with 72 units on about 4.5 acres or again, 16 dwelling units per acre.

Just north of the O2 Fitness and Looking Glass Cafe, there is the 605 West Main building, which if you ignore the two floors of commercial above the parking, sports 7 units in about 0.26 acres, which is about 27 dwelling units per acre.

Nothing Unusual About This Density

At 13 dwelling units to the acre, the Inara Court project fits in very consistently with residential projects in its immediate vicinity, as well as being consistent with density found at places such as Cedar Court or The Flats on North Greensboro Street. While the “Architecturally Integrated Subdivision” may be a new way of delivering 13 units/acre in town, this is a very commonplace residential density in Carrboro, and has been for nearly 4 decades.

Hopefully in the future, the Chapel Hill News will use simple comparative techniques to describe the relative density of a project as accurately as possible.

Carrboro Should Aim Higher for Infill

While I think this project has a nice aesthetic if they turn out looking like the rendering, I’m also somewhat disappointed that there was not a proposal to combine these properties with the O2 Fitness site for a larger redevelopment project. Having vacant land next to a mostly past-its life suburban strip mall that used to be ~~Piggly Wiggly~~ [correction: an A&P grocery store] way back when would have been a terrific opportunity to get at least this many housing units, maybe many more on both the market rate and affordable side, **AND** also build some new office and commercial space in downtown.

The rezoning to the higher density is certainly better infill than the two single family houses that have gone in on Poplar just behind the proposed Inara Court project, but I think we could have done even better here for the tax base, for affordable housing, and for economic vitality if we had positioned this site as a true redevelopment opportunity and put appropriate zoning in place. This is another reason Carrboro needs a comprehensive plan.

ArtsCenter-Kidzu Building: A Compelling Idea That Needs Some Work Before Going Forward

Posted on January 20, 2015 by patrick

The Short Take: The Town of Carrboro has been approached by two cherished local non-profits (Kidzu and The ArtsCenter) with a proposal to build a new “Carrboro Arts and Innovation Center” (CAIC) involving town funds from a not-presently-existent revenue stream. The proposal has several issues that should discourage the Town from moving forward until these challenges can be resolved or greatly improved upon. These issues are exacerbated by a lack of public policy guidance documents, most notably a Town Comprehensive Plan, that would guide such proposals to be more in sync with community priorities from the outset.

I urge the Carrboro Board of Aldermen to NOT move forward with this proposal at this time, and to step back and ask themselves:

Broadly: What can the Town do to better prepare itself for major proposals such as The CAIC and the Lloyd Farm project? Why is the Town so unprepared to deal with ideas like this?
More Narrowly: What pieces of the ArtsCenter proposal are at an inappropriate level of detail (too much? too little?) to effectively evaluate whether the Town should:
- Support such a project?
- Support such a project AND participate in it financially?

The Long Take: There are multiple issues to consider with this proposal and I will try to take them on one at a time.

Background on my Point of View

For those who don’t know me who are reading this, I’ve lived in Carrboro for about 15 years, and my interest in the arts is one of the reasons I live here. I’ve been a performing musician since high school, and have played locally at the Festival for the Eno, Blue Horn Lounge, Cafe Driade, the Carrboro Music Festival, Open Eye Cafe, Johnny’s, The Station, and yes, The ArtsCenter. Our family has patronized concerts, theater events, public meetings and art shows there. With a small child in our family, we have also recently been members of Kidzu. I am a supporter of both of these organizations and what they do in the community, both in spirit and as a patron of their activities. I hope that those who have spent time assembling the CAIC proposal will read the remainder of this post while keeping in mind that I am someone who wants to see both The ArtsCenter and Kidzu succeed.

What’s Good – Carrboro, The Arts, and Institutions for Young Families

The exciting part of the proposal is the promise of an expanded ArtsCenter in a town where the populace loves the arts from a participant point of view as much as a concertgoer/theatergoer/galleryhopper point of view. A great space for the arts is in keeping with Carrboro’s strengths and brand as a community. There’s no doubt that the idea is compelling. Additionally, Carrboro’s percentage of population under age 10 is almost 16%, so a place like Kidzu also makes sense to be in the community.

However, as we move from the general to the specific, these positives get overwhelmed by details (and in some cases, the lack thereof) that detract from other things residents cherish about Carrboro, most notably its nature as one of the truly walkable communities in North Carolina and the Southeast.

What’s Problematic:

The Architectural Style

To start with the challenges of the proposal, I’m going to focus on what I’ve learned from the media coverage as I have not been able to attend any public forums. Below are some images that I believe came from the Chapel Hill News. They show a modernist/postmodernist building that is heavy on glass and steel. The building has uneven projections from multiple sides, which certainly probably raise the cost of the building over continuous walls in the same space. I assume that the building would not actually have all the text labels on the outside and that those labels are to help explain interior functions.

ArtsCenter Visualization 1

ArtsCenter Visualization 2

First, if the town wants to take on debt to build a building for non-profit organizations, we should have a plan for how the building could be used if those nonprofits fail and cannot use the space as proposed. I flag this because the track record of re-using modernist buildings is not that good.

Carrboro’s Town Hall, a former school, has found adaptive re-use, as has Carr Mill. Meanwhile, the BCBSNC property sits empty because it ignored many timeless building practices for trendy abstract art statement-making.

If the Town is going to build a building, it should build in a style that has a record of attracting new uses when the original ones fail or leave, and we should try to build it without expensive, hard-to-maintain materials and profiles.

The Building’s Orientation to Its Surroundings

I’ve been to DPAC for a show and I walk by there all the time. It’s a beautiful facility on the inside, and it sounds great. That said, I don’t know that its interaction with the rest of the city is all that great in Durham. To be fair, I’m not sure the site of DPAC presented many opportunities for synergy when it was built, but this site has the opportunity to embrace one of Carrboro’s most busy intersections for pedestrian activity. Unfortunately, the design seems to “hide” the CAIC behind two trees and there is no relationship with Main Street, the most important or “A” street on which the property fronts. Instead, the primary orientation for people walking to and from the entrance is towards the “B” street of lower importance, Roberson Street. Additionally, nearly the full length of the ArtsCenter’s interface with the block is for drop-off/pick-up for cars.

The present design honors the car first and the pedestrian second. This needs to change, and any project at this location needs to do more to honor Main St and contribute to it as a place.

The Multiple Roles of the Architect

Mr. Szostak is on the board of the ArtsCenter. What happens when the ArtsCenter is pushing for a design element that raises the cost to the Town, and the Town wants to reduce it? Wouldn’t it be awkward for an architect to fulfill the Town’s (his client’s) wish while upsetting his Board colleagues? It doesn’t seem fair to ask the architect of a Town building to negotiate that tension. Also, shouldn’t the Town, if it’s undertaking a signature building project, seek proposals that would include competitive bids for the design work? There’s no doubt Mr. Szostak is a talented architect. I suspect he’s done many good things for the ArtsCenter board as well. If this proposal goes forward, the Town should consider how to prevent conflict between the non-profits and itself via the roles of the architect.

Architecture, Decorum, and Placemaking

Former Mayor Mark Chilton once said that Carrboro’s architecture has “a certain humility” to it. I think he was onto something, but I would say it a little differently, perhaps that our architecture has a “common dignity” to it. I think that any new ArtsCenter building would best serve its purpose by contributing to the common dignity of the street scape rather than making a big statement unrelated to the rest of downtown.

Calls for New Revenue Streams

To the extent that any of this proposal relies on new revenue streams, it is hard to ignore that the NCGA has recently taken away the privilege license tax from municipalities and is looking to redistribute some of their sales tax revenue to rural areas. This is a legislature that also put new limits on sales tax for counties last year. A realist proposal would not include a component of asking the NCGA for new revenue sources for a municipality.

Collateral from Non-Profits

The proposal suggests that the Town would only move forward if the ArtsCenter or Kidzu could offer some collateral. Realistically, what assets do these organizations have, and what is the value of these assets?

Continued Failure on Parking Policy From the Town

It is extremely painful to see that one of the four key points this agreement suggests that the Town would not move forward without the appropriate parking infrastructure. Forgetting all the other points I have made, this is more than enough to oppose the entire proposal until we get off of the idea that because we have a new use of any type in our walkable, transit-served downtown we need more (implied: free) PARKING. During the Carrboro music festival this year, theoretically our biggest visitor event which will DWARF the busiest night at any new ArtsCenter, the deck was not full. Why on earth would we put public money toward any structured parking (which eats up truly finite economically productive land in the downtown) without pricing the parking we already have? (which would also bring revenue). Or without stepping up enforcement? (which would bring revenue and reduce predatory towing)

I’ve already hashed out most of the reasons for being smarter about parking in this post. Please take a look.

How We’re Getting Input On This

I’m also disappointed that what we’re doing to decide how to proceed with this project is to hold a public hearing. First, let me say that holding a hearing is vastly better than not holding one. Still, what’s happening is that everyone is debating the merits of this proposal against itself, and not as part of a broader vision for downtown and the community. It’s the same type of short-term, single-faceted thinking that led the Town to recently consider turning the bike lanes on Fidelty Street into car parking. It’s almost as if because one idea emerges, we forget everything else we’ve agreed to as goals for the community.

The recent Lloyd Farm meetings with the community highlight some of the same problems. In frustration, one neighbor said to the developer “we’re not supposed to be designing the project for you!” This line brought lots of laughs, but it held a lot of truth. But I also had sympathy for the developers. Our zones and our code don’t tell them what we want; many of the ideas in our zoning and codes are decades old and are not made for this moment in our community’s life, but we keep governing off of them.

Of course, with both the CAIC and Lloyd Farm, the missing document that is supposed to manage all these tensions is a comprehensive plan. Carrboro needs one.

Closing

As I finish this piece, there are a lot of pieces of the CAIC proposal that need work. I hope The ArtsCenter and Kidzu will step up to the challenge and address those issues in a refined proposal to be considered somewhere down the road. I also hope the Town will take a hard look at whether our current policy tools are adequate to deal with Carrboro’s growth in the next twenty years.

Lloyd Farm Development: Can We Avoid a Missed Opportunity?

Posted on December 1, 2014 by patrick

One of the more significant development projects in recent Carrboro history may reach the Board of Aldermen soon- the Lloyd Farm property. Located across NC 54 from Carrboro Plaza and just west of the Carrboro Post Office, this is one of the largest contiguous areas of mostly undeveloped land left in Carrboro. Here’s the location in question:

On September 11th I attended a meeting on the project at Town Hall. Late that night, I forwarded some thoughts to the development team. Having not heard back from them, I’m not sure what they thought of those comments, which were mostly about how to make changes to the organization of the buildings on the site that tried to allow for maintaining the overall building program, but organizing it into a more urban pattern, as opposed to a suburban pattern.

The more I think about the site plan that has been proposed, however, the more I think an outcome similar to what the developer is currently proposing is going to be a missed opportunity for Carrboro.

Let me start simply- if this parcel is going to develop (and it is) then it should develop in an urban pattern. In the plan proposed by the developer, the project is largely organized around a very parking lot. None of the other buildings have any substantial relationship to each other; instead they have relationships to the car circulation features. This is a suburban layout.

Lloyd Farm Site Plan

The Carr Mill parking lot in front of Harris Teeter and CVS is a good example of what you might get here with the large parking field.

Carr Mill Parking Lot from Greensboro St Side (click to enlarge)

What would an urban layout look like? More like one of these locations below. Forget about building height for right now. Just look at the relationships of the buildings to each other, and the spaces they create or frame. I chose these locations because the Lloyd site is about 40 acres. Where I could ballpark estimate the acreage of the commercial core of these projects, I did.

North Hills, Raleigh – 21-acre core, 850,000+ sq ft. Apartments also.

North Hills, Raleigh

North Hills Beach Music Series

American Tobacco Campus, Durham- 22-acre core; 1 million sq feet office space, 10 restaurants, 90,000 sq feet of apartments

American Tobacco Campus

American Tobacco Musical Event

Birkdale Village, Huntersville, NC – 52 acres; 300,00 sq ft, 320 apts

Birkdale Village, Huntersville

Birkdale Village Streetscape

Birkdale Village Fountain

The Piazza at Schmidt’s, Philadelphia – 8-acres: 500 apts, 50,000 sq feet office space, 80,000 sq foot public space

The Piazza at Schmidt’s, Philadelphia

Piazza at Schmidt’s, Market Day

Piazza at Schmidt’s – From Above

Biltmore Park, Asheville – 42-acres: 276 apts, 270,000 ft class A office, 283,000 sq feet retail.dining/entertainment, 65,00 sq ft YMCA, 165-room hotel

Biltmore Park, Asheville Layout

Biltmore Park Event

Biltmore Park Main Street

I have additional more detailed thoughts on how we’ve arrived where we are with the Lloyd project, but big picture stuff first: What do you think of these places as inspiration for the Lloyd property?

A Few Things to Think About When Planning for Downtown ACCESS, Including Parking

Posted on January 18, 2014 by patrick

Carrboro Parking Deck At Sunset from Weaver Street Market Lawn

Carrboro Parking Deck (center, beyond The Station) At Sunset from Weaver Street Market Lawn

The Carrboro Board of Aldermen has pledged to take up downtown parking as one of their major issues to work on in 2014. Before they kick off this effort, I’d like to offer a few thoughts on how to frame this issue in a way that leads to a larger toolbox of potential solutions to get more people and wallets downtown.

Why is Getting Parking Right in Downtown Carrboro Critical?

Carrboro values local businesses and a local living economy. There is a limited amount of land in our downtown core, where most businesses that come to Carrboro want to be – and every surface parking space we add in the downtown core is a lost opportunity to put a more compelling use on it- another local business, more residential units, or a community facility such as a library. If one of our homegrown businesses wants to expand, and we are locking up an increasing amount of land as parking, the likelihood that business will find a bigger space to move into in Downtown Carrboro is reduced. At a certain point, the degree to which we commit to adding parking puts a de facto upper bound on how big a local business sector we can develop in our downtown, and businesses that want to expand may have to move out of Carrboro altogether.

Nobody wants this to be the case. So what can we do?

Strategy #1: Put People First. Stop Defining Parking Spaces As A Goal, Start Defining Parking Spaces as One Way Among MANY to Provide ACCESS for People

There’s a section of the memo the Town Staff prepared for a meeting in May 2013 that I think is particularly well-put together. It states:

In, Parking Evaluation, Evaluating Parking Problems, Solutions, Costs, and Benefits, a publication from the Victoria Transport Institute, the author notes, “A problem correctly defined is a problem half solved.” As the Board continues to refine its overall parking objective–from the continuum of creating a greater number of parking spaces, to encouraging more consumers to the downtown, to reducing the number of existing parking spaces, to removing automobiles from the downtown and thereby reducing the Town’s carbon footprint—it may become easier to frame potential policy changes and LUO text amendments.

Some downtowns that are marginal business locations absolutely require free parking because they have no transit service, no arterial bike lanes and separated bike paths leading to the town center, no sidewalks to adjacent neighborhoods, and low residential densities immediately outside of downtown. They may also be located in communities that are not growing. If foot traffic is absent, then creating greater access for cars from greater distances is often perceived as critical. Frankly, this line of thinking often leads to the downtown being a bit of an old-timey sub-regional tourist destination with a proliferation of antique shops.

But the scenario in the prior paragraph is not Carrboro- in fact, Carrboro, the densest town in North Carolina, is in many ways the antithesis of this. Carrboro is a place people WANT to do business, and the numerous development proposals and construction downtown provide ample evidence this is true. Carrboro has excellent bicycle network connections to downtown, a decent sidewalk network, and a transit network that produces over 1000 weekday boardings in between Cliff’s Meat Market and Carrburrito’s.

The key point here is that if we want local business to thrive, we want more PEOPLE to walk through their doors. A person could arrive at a local business on foot, by bike, by bus, by skateboard, by taxi, or by personal car. We should focus most of all on increasing ACCESS to downtown for PEOPLE (who carry wallets/purses/cash/credit regardless of how they arrive). By doing so, we can help local business thrive and still accommodate additional growth downtown.

Strategy #2: Recognize That Not Every Access Strategy Needs to Be Used by Everyone In Order for Everyone to Experience Better Access

Pick up a Chapel Hill Transit map and you will see that all of the bus service in Carrboro is south of Homestead Rd. Now, so is most of the population of Carrboro, but still- if you live in Lake Hogan Farms and are thinking about downtown access, I think the following is a pretty rational point of view:

“Well, I’d love to get downtown without my car, but I can drive all the way to downtown much faster than I can walk 15 to 30 minutes to a bus stop and ride a bus that will take me another 8 to 10 minutes to get downtown. My time is valuable and driving downtown makes the most sense for where I live.”

But what about the much larger group of people who live within the area served by the CHT bus routes that touch downtown Carrboro? I think this is also a pretty rational point of view:

CHT Bus Heading to Garage by Flickr User bendertj

“Well, I’d love to get downtown without my car, but I’m going to a show at the ArtsCenter that probably ends around 10:00 – 10:30 pm and the last time the F bus leaves downtown is 9:20 pm, so I’ll drive even though I like using the F bus to go to UNC during the week.”

Adding one more parking space somewhere downtown adds storage space for one more car downtown, and adds access for one to perhaps a maximum of four or five other people in most cases.

Running a bus route later provides additional access to hundreds of people who live along the route. While not everyone in those neighborhoods will suddenly stop driving downtown and taking the F bus at night, in a town like Carrboro, more than a few of them will.

And the spaces that were used by those who are now taking the later bus- are freed up for the Lake Hogan Farm resident above who doesn’t have the same opportunity to use the F bus.

The same is true for biking and walking trips to downtown. The more people with cars who sometimes drive to downtown that we can help try walking or biking downtown, the more parking will be available for folks driving in from places where biking, walking, or using transit are not as easy.

Strategy #3: The People Who Drive Downtown Most Often (and Stay the Longest) Represent the Biggest Potential Pool of Parking Spaces to Free Up: Employees

When it comes to freeing up parking spaces in Downtown Carrboro, Annette Stone, the town’s Economic Development Director, recently noted:

“Then there are the unintended consequences of catching people in our enforcement net that we didn’t intend,” Stone said. “We are trying to prevent people from parking, riding and walking out of down town, [but] we are catching our employees that are down there. It just shined a big light in our face of what we have had to deal with.”

While this is a problem, it is also an opportunity, as people who come to downtown five times a week to work are the ones for whom a change in habits would have the most impact in freeing up parking for shoppers, diners, and show or concertgoers. So why might employees drive to downtown Carrboro despite having some alternatives to driving alone to get there? It’s fair to say that restaurants are one of our larger evening job categories. Here are the dinner hours for several downtown restaurants. See a pattern?

Sample of Restaurant Dinner Hours in Downtown Carrboro (Friday/Saturday nights)

ACME: 5:30 – 9:30 pm
Venable: 5:30 – 9:30 pm
Tyler’s: 5:00 -9:00 pm
Elmo’s: morning – 10:00 pm
Carrboro Pizza Oven: lunch – 10:00 pm
Amante Pizza: lunch – 11:00 pm
Glass Half Full 5:00 pm – 10:00 pm

The last CW bus departs downtown Carrboro at 9:05 pm on weeknights, including Fridays. On Saturdays, the last CW leaves downtown at 5:48 pm. For the F bus, the last departure is at 9:20 on weekdays, and the bus does not run on Saturdays. The weekday J route has departures as late as 11:35 pm (GREAT!) but on weekends, the JN route does not touch downtown Carrboro.

The key point is that with most restaurants having shifts end somewhere between 9:15 pm and 10:30 pm, any employee that doesn’t live in a few select spots along the J route who might take the bus to work will not do so- because there is no bus to take them home. The town should work with Chapel Hill Transit to explore how any contemplated night and weekend service improvements that may be coming in the next few years could make sure this employment market is served by any schedule adjustments.

Of course, extending the service span (the total extent of hours covered during the day and evening) of the buses would be used by some diners as well. However, the reason why getting the employees to shift from driving to another mode is so powerful is that employees leave a car parked downtown for 4 to 8 hours at a time, whereas a diner/shopper may park for 1-3 hours and then turn over a parking space to someone else.

Something that can be done even faster is promoting ridesharing to work in downtown Carrboro among downtown employees. The ShareTheRideNC website provides an easy-to-use portal to help workers who may have similar schedules, work near each other, and live near each other- figure out how they could coordinate commuting to work together.

Strategy #4: Consider the Power of Many Small Changes

Finally, I think the most important thing to recognize is that improving access to downtown Carrboro will be most successful with several strategies all helping a little. Let’s consider a downtown employer with 10 employees, all of whom drive to work every day. Generally speaking, that employer will have a much easier time getting all ten of them to find a way to only drive 4 out of 5 days instead of getting two of them to stop driving downtown altogether. Either approach still reduces this group of ten’s collective demand for downtown parking by 20 percent. I doubt that there is any single strategy that will solve the downtown access issue, but a host of strategies that all temper parking demand by 3% here and 6% there can cumulatively have a big impact.

2014 should be an interesting year when it comes to this issue, and I look forward to seeing what happens next.

Interim County Manager Recommends Downtown Carrboro Location for Southern Orange County Library Site to Move Forward

Posted on November 3, 2013 by patrick

Carrboro Cybrary (Photo by Carrboro.com)

For anyone who has been following the discussion of where the Southern Orange County Library will be located, the County Commissioners will pick up the discussion thread again on Tuesday evening, November 5th. The library discussion is Item 7 in the 468-page PDF (55 MB!) agenda, and begins on page 369. The meeting will be held at 7:00 p.m. at the Central Orange Senior Center, located at 103 Meadowland Drive in Hillsborough.

At this point in the process, there are three sites under discussion, all located in Carrboro:

1128 Hillsborough Rd
401 Fidelity St
120 Brewer Ln

A quick perusal of the item shows that Carrboro Town Manager David Andrews sent a letter to Interim County Manager Michael Talbert on October 23 that states:

In response to your letter from October 1, 2013, and in particular in response to the inquiry on the Town of Carrboro’s interest in ‘swapping’ property located at 1128 Hillsborough Rd (Shetley Property) for the site of MLK, Jr. Park, the Carrboro Board of Aldermen have not taken an official position as to whether they will or will not support such an arrangement. However, initial conversations with members of the Board indicate that there is not currently support for such an action.”

Elsewhere in the document the County report indicates that the County staff believes that some type of a land swap is needed to make the 1128 Hillsborough Rd site feasible for a library location. On page 370, County staff also expresses the following concerns regarding the 401 Fidelity St site:

There is significant exposed weathered rock crowning in the center of the most logical building site for a potential library structure and associated parking, indicating sizable potential subterranean rock formations. County staff requested a legal opinion from Carrboro with regard to associated liabilities involving development adjacent to a cemetery-specifically related to the County’s interest in rock blasting that is probable should this property be chosen for library development. The Town Attorney provided an opinion. (See Attachment E within Attachment 1 -10/23/13 David Andrews letter) There are strong concerns from Orange County staff that probable blasting adjacent to a cemetery exposes the County to significant liabilities that will not only drive up the cost of the project, but may cause concerns with residents and stakeholders in Orange County. County staffs’ experience is that rock blasting and removal adds significant cost to a project ranging from a 5-15% increase of a project’s overall cost. Potential liability costs associated with disturbing existing cemetery burial plots adjacent to the building site through a probable rock blasting process are incalculable.

Given these circumstances, but also undoubtedly influenced by the Twitter-reported enthusiasm among County Commissioners and complete unanimity among the Carrboro Aldermen that the Brewer Lane site is the best, Interim County Manager is recommending:

1) Receive and discuss the letters from the Town of Carrboro;
2) Eliminate 1128 Hillsborough Road and 401 Fidelity Street from further consideration for a Southern Branch Library; and
3) Direct staff to conduct further Phase 1 Site Criteria Analysis for 120 Brewer Lane and provide follow-up information to the Board.

For many of the reasons enunciated in my March 2013 post on this issue, this is absolutely terrific news. It is also exciting to see from the October 21 Chapel Hill News article that Library Director Lucinda Munger is already considering how to tailor potential programming for a library at 120 Brewer Ln to serve nearby children and families, as well as close-by community resources such as the Skills Development Center and The ArtsCenter. This is inspired thinking and I look forward to hearing where her efforts lead.

I hope the County Commissioners will take Interim Manager Talbert’s recommendation, and follow a path that a lot of citizens want to take, not to mention saving the county $20,000 to $30,000 in the process by not studying two sites with clear shortcomings.

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