MJ sang "don't stop 'til you get enough." Chapel Hill's growth task force's new motto may be "don't start 'til you get enough."

Enough diversity, that is.

The town's Sustainable Community Visioning Task Force put itself on hiatus Wednesday night until it gets more racial and/or ethnic minorities. The 18-member, all-white committee, decided it wasn't ready to start advising the town on how to grow until its membership looked more like the town.

The vote was 11-5. The Town Council wants an interim report by November, chairman George Cianciolo reminded the group. But not everyone wanted to wait to begin discussing where growth should occur and what it should look like.

"There are a lot of other ways we can get diversity in," member Madeline Jefferson said, attending the meeting in a wheelchair after a bad accident. For example, the committee can invite people in include their points of view, she said.

Members pointed out that the committee has been widely publicized. We reported weeks ago that no members of any minority groups even applied. 

"It's an ongoing problem," said Glen Greenstreet. "It's a real problem. If we're an imperfect group doing an imperfect job, I think that's still better than stopping the process."

But a majority decided to spend the next few weeks making one last push to add diversity to the group. Read more about the meeting and what else the group said in Sunday's Chapel Hill News.