"I had this vision of ... linking those parking lots with a monorail system."

No, that wasn't a comment from last night's Town Council hearing on Carolina North. And it didn't come up at last week's traffic impact presentation or Neighborhoods for Responsible Growth forum.

It came from the late Chancellor Michael Hooker ... in 1997.

Hooker envisioned the main campus ringed by satellite parking lots served by a monorail. Critics derided it as Disneyland, but it was a bold idea. And judging from last night's Town Council hearing, we could use some bold ideas on Carolina North.

Plans for Carolina North call for 5,834 parking space by 2025, when 3 million square feet of the planned 8 million square feet are built. (By 2015, when 800,000 square fee are built, there would 1,743 parking spaces.)   

That's not good enough for some council members. The parking figures assume 60 percent of people will drive to Carolina North and only 20 percent take the bus. "I'm concerned that we need to look at some additonal scenarios," Councilman Bill Strom said in staff writer Jesse DeConto's story today.

We're not hearing a lot from readers right now, and that may reflect a degree of Carolina North fatigue. But now is when it counts, with UNC and the town heading for a development agreement next month. As we've seen with East 54 and Greenbridge, many people don't pay attention until projects are on the ground, and by then it's too late to influence them.

Mayor Kevin Foy also wants a bolder vision. Even a "constrained" parking scenario -- less parking, more transit -- calls for only 20 percent fewer spaces. If that's the case, local roads will need to be widened or become bottlenecks.

What people need to do is "look at the vehicles on our roads and try to envision what it would actually be like with more than a minute and a half delay at every intersection," Foy says. "If you can get people to think about that."

So think about, and tell us what you think. Because that's the thing about vision, you need to have one to make sure you end up where you want. 

Here is the top of a story by staff writer Jesse James DeConto we just now posted online.

Fifteen years from now, the future Carolina North campus will nearly double the traffic on the roads that feed it, according to a draft analysis released Tuesday.

Right now, approximately 40,000 vehicles travel Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Estes Drive every day. By 2025, 40,000 more will enter or leave the campus, and MLK Jr. Boulevard will exceed capacity by 2015 because of the new traffic, says the analysis prepared by consultants at Vanasse Hangen Brustlin Inc.

By 2025, parts of Estes and Eubanks Road will see traffic volume more than twice capacity, unless those roads are widened or traffic is diverted elsewhere.

The study says MLK Jr. Boulevard northbound will need an additional left turn lane onto Estes Drive Extension by 2015. By 2025, “many more intersections may need signal timing adjustments and turn lane additions to maintain their level-of-service,” the report states. “More extensive reconstruction may also be needed of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Estes Drive in the immediate vicinity of the site.”

More than a dozen intersections along MLK, Homestead Road, Greensboro Street in Carrboro, Columbia Street, Estes Drive and U.S. 15-501 already have poor levels of service, according to the study. With the new traffic as of 2015, others would reduce their levels to E or F, the lowest two grades.

Read Jesse's full story here.

Residents and commuters will get a better idea of how much traffic Carolina North will generate today when the town releases a draft traffic impact study.

The study will show estimated traffic counts at key intersections around UNC’s future satellite campus, to be built north of Estes Drive Extension and west of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.
The traffic impact study will be presented at a public meeting at 7 p.m. Thursday at the Chapel Hill Library. It cost $300,000, paid for by UNC-Chapel Hill as part of the negotiations between town and gown.

Steve Spade, director of Chapel Hill Transit, says the plan is to serve the new campus through a combination of cars, buses and bicycles. A rapid transit bus service, basically express routes that run in dedicated bus lines is expected to carry a significant portion of traffic to and from the new campus. The report today will help determine how many additional buses are needed.

At a meeting Sunday, Carolina North director Jack Evans said there are no plans for a new north-south roadway parallel to Martin Luther King in the first 1.5 million square feet of development. The university expects to build 3 million square feet in the first 20 years of the new campus. Evans said it is too soon to know if a road will be considered during the second 1.5 million square feet.

The citizens group Neighborhoods for Responsible Growth held the meeting to share ideas before the release of the draft traffic impact analysis. The group has found many of the nearly 600 people responding already have complaints: MLK and Estes Drive back up at rush hour, cut-through traffic makes neighborhood streets dangerous, pedestrians can’t cross busy streets now.

NRG will summarize its survey results and suggest solutions in a report to the Town Council May 11.       

Mayor Kevin Foy is concerned that a lot of Carolina North's projected benefit comes in the form of indirect monies like sales tax. It's hard to project indirect benefits. Town Manager Roger Stancil doesn't want to include them as the town negotiates with UNC to make sure the new campus doesn't cost Chapel Hill taxpayers money.

We interviewed Foy for Sunday's Chapel Hill News. He says the consultants' reliance on indirect benefits "distorts" the fiscal impact study. But Foy also says he's not overly concerned right now because he thinks UNC is willing to make some kind of payments to keep the project revenue neutral. Here's an excerpt.

CHN: So does it concern you that this report shows [Carolina North is] going to have a net cost to the town?

FOY: No, ... because I think we can make some arrangement so that it does become cost neutral. I think the university is open to that. They have said all along they don’t want this to become a drain on the town’s resources.

I think where push come to shove is the old argument we’ve had in the past: [UNC’s saying] ‘Well, we create a lot of jobs,’ which is true. But as the [town] manager has said, ‘In order to pay people I need the cash.’ You can’t pay them in some phantom impact that Carolina North is going to have on the economy. It probably will have some overall impact on the economy of Orange County and North Carolina. But our manager is looking at ‘how do I get money to sign paychecks for the people who are going to provide the services?’

Chapel Hill Town Council members Matt Czajkowski and Mark Kleinschmidt don't always see eye to eye -- unless they're arguing across the council dais (well, on some issues anyway). Tonight they were in total agreement.

The council was meeting with UNC officials to go over the timeline for the town's review of Carolina North, the big satellite campus planned off MLK Boulevard. The university's consultants are holding a public meeting March 31 to explain how they came up with a 180-something page fiscal impact report that shows the campus will generate a net $40M gain for local governments over 15 years.

Since Chapel Hill will bear the brunt of the development and stands to possibly lose money on the deal (mostly due to a fire station that could put the town up to $3M in the hole), Czajkowski said he wanted some quality time with the consultants. The March 31 group meeting at the UNC School of Government with the Carrboro Board of Aldermen, Orange County Board of Commissioners and up to 150 spectators, he said, would not give the council time to understand how the consultants crunched their numbers.

"I have real questions about the opportunity to get true clarity to how this model is structured," he said."The negative impact is vastly greater on Chapel Hill than those two other bodies [Carrboro and Orange County governments]."

"I think Matt might be right," Kleinschmidt said. "We need more of an intimate setting so we can be clear our questions are understood."

Roger Perry, the chairman of the Board of Trustees, agreed to have the consultants meet with the council the morning after the March 31 public presentation. Later, he added, "We all need to be on our P's and Q's. [Carolina North director] Jack [Evans] just pointed out that's April Fool's Day."

Doing a cross-post here to send you over to the Campus Notes blog, where I'm writing today about the release of a fiscal impact analysis on the Carolina North project.

Click here. The report itself is attached to that blog post for your reading pleasure.

Revenue from sales and property taxes would largely offset the costs local governments would incur providing services to UNC Chapel Hill’s proposed Carolina North campus, according to a new study.

A fiscal impact analysis by economic planning consultant TischlerBise examined the direct and indirect financial affects that a first-phase, 15-year development of Carolina North would have on Chapel Hill, Carrboro and Orange County, the three local governments that would have to provide services to the new campus.

The direct impact on the town of Chapel Hill would be the most significant — a $12 million loss over 15 years — due to a new fire station needed in the ninth year of the plan.

But the direct and indirect impacts on the other governments are largely a wash, the report concludes. The findings help the university’s case, since a key component to the planning of the new campus was to make sure Carolina North was a revenue-neutral enterprise.

“This [report] says it shouldn’t be terribly difficult to make this fiscally neutral,” said Jack Evans, the Carolina North project’s executive director.

While university functions aren’t taxed, the project expects to incorporate tax-paying private enterprise as well.

Reached late this afternoon, Chapel Hill Mayor Kevin Foy said he had not yet had time to synthesize but he was pleased to have it.

"It gives us something to work from; it's information," Foy said. "We're going to have to look at it in some depth and come to some conclusions on how to proceed."

The 70-page report is heavy on data and detail; its table of contents stretches to three full pages.  All fiscal impacts are examined under two development scenarios. Under one, the lion’s share of housing is developed early in the 15-year plan. In the other scenario, more corporate office space is built early on.

A few highlights:

• The report assumes the university would provide its own police coverage and pick up its own trash and recycling, but Chapel Hill would provide fire coverage.

• Orange County would would do well financially under either scenario, netting a surplus of $13.8 million under the housing-first scenario and $16.4 million if office space is developed earlier.

• The study assumes a project start date of 2011.

Click on this blog post's attachment to read the report.

Documents:

Eventually, UNC Chapel Hill's law school will relocate to Carolina North, the long-discussed, 50-year plan to bring a new campus to town.

When it does, departments on UNC-CH's main campus will have a rare opportunity to move things around and create what planners expect to be a social sciences cluster in that building.

 Read more here.

From staff writer Jesse James DeConto:

The Town Council Monday approved a
three-story building on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard as the start of the future Carolina North campus.

The Innovation Center will
comprise 80,745 square feet of laboratories, offices and support
facilities and will serve as an incubator for businesses that evolve
from scientific research at UNC-Chapel Hill. It will be located on the
old public works site north of Estes Drive.

The university agreed
to construct a building that will perform 25 percent better than the
latest standard set forth by American Society of Heating, Refrigerating
and Air-Conditioning Engineers at the time the building permit is
issued, probably in 2010 or 2011.

Don’t feed deer corn.

Some folks in Carrboro are feeding deer corn. At least that’s the word from Greg Kopsch, manager of the Carolina North Forest.

Alderwoman Randee Haven-O’Donnell recently asked town staff if they knew how many deer live in town limits and if there’s anything the town can do to manage them.

In an e-mail, Police Chief Carolyn Hutchison says Town Animal Control Officer Robert Nekoranec spoke with Kopsch, who said the university hires a wildlife expert to hunt deer when the population gets too large. During the last “culling” of the herd in the Carolina North Forest, 18 deer were killed using a firearm.

Kopsch says Carrboro residents living adjacent to the UNC land have mixed reactions to the deer. Some welcome and feed them. Others want to remove all of the deer from the forest. He said from their looks the deer appear tbe eating corn. 

“Apparently, their fur looks mangy when they eat too much corn,” Hutchison writes.

When Nekoranec returns to work Thursday, he plans to contact NC Department of Wildlife personnel to learn of their population control techniques.

As for allowing limited hunting, Hutchison recommends against it.

“I simply cannot imagine how the Town of Carrboro would be able to ensure the safety of our residents and guests if we were to suspend our ordinance to allow the shooting of deer within Town limits,” she writes.