I have officially been serving in Chapel Hill for 13 months and thought it was time to reflect on what I've learned about this town. Granted, I was 14 the first time I visited Chapel Hill, but here's what I've learned after more extensive time spent among the townies:
1. There actually is a hill. Only, just like Crabtree Valley in Raleigh, you can't always tell it's there depending on which road you take to get here.
2. Not everyone is a Tar Heel. Probably about 95%, but there are some Duke fans, NC State fans, Virginia Tech fans, etc., who have snuck in.
3. Not everyone leans left. Chapel Hill and abutting Carrboro are known for being liberal, but there are some conservatives and moderates around, too.
4. Not everyone is in Chapel Hill because of UNC. Some folks think it's a great place to live and commute elsewhere in the Triangle for work, some moved here for family, others are from families who preceded the university and have been here since forever.
5. There's more to Chapel Hill than Franklin Street. Sure, it's the main place for university students, but locals know about other places...
6. Finally, there's an interesting relationship between the town and the church, or maybe the town and religion, I'm not sure. Chapel Hill is as picky as Cary, NC is about town ordinances and permits (Cary once ruled that the Gypsy Shiny Diner was too shiny and the restaurant had to plant big bushes around the building), but church members here imply their town's pickiness towards us is because we're a church. The process to construct the new parking lot involved a lot of bureaucracy; I can only imagine it'll be worse when we build the new building. It was also really weird during the 7 p.m.. Christmas Eve service to have the police pull someone over and they turned into our driveway and stopped directly in front of the sanctuary doors during the sermon!
Hi Heather,
ReplyDeleteAs I worked with the committee on getting the church's building plans through the development process, I can tell you that the reality is that a church is going to be treated like any other "developer." It's not that we're treated differently. It's that we're not given any breaks just because we're a church. We feel like we're "discriminated against" and that our good works in the community are not appreciated, but that's not really the case. This is just the only experience most people in the church have had with being on this side of a "development" project. When others want to develop a piece of property, we're usually on the outside looking in & doing the scrutinizing of that development. This time the tables are turned.
We have to play by the same rules as a private developer with deep pockets. The urban development process is a moving target. That's true anywhere now, but especially in an academic town like Chapel Hill. Citizen advisory boards have a lot of influence on a project. So, you're not only trying to support your organization's stated space needs, but you're also going to have to satisfy the desires of citizens who are not members of your organization. As you can imagine, everybody has a "pet project" and they'll view your development plans to see how what you're proposing to do can better serve that "pet project." Your project is a Christmas tree and they get to hang the ornaments -- or you don't get to put up that tree.
Given the nature of the beast, the process is never going to get any less time consuming, less frustrating or less expensive. Good intentions have gotten us here, though. And yes, for the most part, the final approved Master Plan for Orange church is a better plan than what we submitted initially. But the required revisions did make it more expensive to build the space we determined we needed (in our own long review & planning process) and the design became more compact, which greatly limited our ability to phase buildings in more financially feasible stages. (Much of this had to do with tree conservation and addressing storm water run off concerns.)
The good news is that the site work we performed over the last year allowed us to keep our Special Use Permit open until approx. 2019. This makes the permitting process for moving forward with a new building much quicker (6 - 9 months instead of 18 mos. +) and considerably less expensive. I'm not saying it will be "easy" but it will be MUCH easier than if we had let our Special Use Permit expire in March 2012 -- which is what would have happened if we had not elected to move forward and completed the required site work.
Finally, by having completed the site work, it should be very obvious to the community at large and to our own membership about what part of the property will be developed. We have done all the clearing that we'll ever do. So, there's not a lot to argue about in future. Even if we have to go back in front of Citizen Advisory boards, we have eliminated a lot of question marks and we have addressed all the major concerns from the advisory boards because almost everything they added had to do with site work.
In His service,
Cindy Parks
Thank you for clarifying, Cindy. I apologize for over-simplifying and making uninformed assumptions. I've never had to work with development from any side before.
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