UNC officials hope to begin construction on the first building at the Carolina North satellite campus early next year.

A lot of things will have to fall neatly into place for the university to meet that timetable, said Bruce Runberg, associate vice chancellor for facilities planning. Runberg and Anna Wu, director of facilties planning, presented an update of the first phase of the the university's planned research campus at a public information session Thursday night.

"There are a lot of things we have to have in place before we can build the first building," Runberg said. "In a perfect world, we hope to start construction in early 2013."

That first building will be an as-yet-unnamed 225,000 square-foot research building, which is one of five buildings that will make up the first 800,000 square feet of the project. The first phase is planned to go on and around what is now a portion of the Horace Williams Airport runway, and will be accessed by extending the existing Airport Drive across Estes Drive Extension into the Carolina North property.

Closing the Horace Williams runway is one of the things that has to happen before construction can begin, of course, and Runberg said he hopes that will be done by the end of this year.

There's still time to sign up for Fleet Feet's popular Pumpkin Run, but registration closes soon — at 11:59 p.m. Thursday.

This fall family classic, proceeds from which benefit the local YMCA, features a 4K trail run on the "Pumpkin Loop" through Carolina North Forest. It starts at 5 p.m. Saturday near the CNF's entrance.

Awards go to top finishers, as well as to those wearing the best costumes.

The run costs $25 per entrant. Space is limited and proceeds benefit the Chapel Hill-Carrboro YMCA's We Build People Campaign.

See http://www.fleetfeetcarrboro.com/racing/premier-events/pumpkin-run for details or to register.

UNC Chapel Hill's long-anticipated Carolina North project just had a false start.

The massive project on the Horace Williams property north of the main campus appears to be stalling out a bit. As Jesse DeConto reports in today's News & Observer, a deal to build a tech-transfer incubator there, the first project for the new campus, is off.

The university has not been able to come to terms with Alexandria Real Estate Properties, the private firm it has been working with to develop an Innovation Center for the new campus.

Thanks, lousy economy.

The weak economy has also put the UNC School of Law's move to the new campus on hold, DeConto reports.

Posted by correspondent Tammy Grubb:

Local residents have a lot of ideas for how to make the proposed Campus-to-Campus Connector from Carolina North to the main campus more useful, and the town’s staff is looking for more. Some suggestions so far include:

- Give pedestrians and bicyclists a variety of routes from which to choose.

“We have to prepare a plan where we anticipate that people leave from multiple places on the border of Carolina North,” including surrounding neighborhoods, says Mt. Bolus resident Will Raymond.

Sometimes, for instance, Raymond uses a trail across from Seawell School Road to ride his bike to and from downtown. The rough trail starts below Estes Drive Extension at the end of Ward Street. It can be accessed at the eastern end of the Estes Drive guardrail opposite Seawell School Road. From there, it’s a quick ride to Barclay Road and Weiner Street, which ends in an unpaved path to Umstead Park.

- Be sure the connector fits into the map of local greenways – the nearby Bolin Creek Greenway, for example, and the network of trails on the Horace Williams tract.

- Add signs to direct pedestrians and bicyclists to different legs of the greenway network. Raymond said this would be especially helpful for students who are new to the area.

- Add lighting and blue-light emergency call boxes to the off-road sections.

To offer your comments or suggestions, e-mail carolinanorth@townofchapelhill.org or call (919) 968-2728.

"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.