By Tammy Grubb
The Carrboro Board of Aldermen will meet at 7:30 p.m. tonight to revise the town’s small business loan program, discuss library siting criteria and hear about the future of several Eubanks Road parcels.
Durham Area Designers will give the board five conceptual plans for how to develop roughly 30 acres at the intersection of Eubanks Road and Old N.C. 86. The plans are expected to show a range of neighborhood, commercial and denser residential uses, as well as transportation improvements for the Old N.C. 86 corridor. They have been in development since 2007 with input from about 30 residents, landowner Parker Louis LLC and members of the Northern Study Area Plan Implementation Review Committee.
The recommendations will be studied in more detail at a later work session.
Three aldermen – Dan Coleman, Jacqueline Gist and Randee Haven-O’Donnell – also will present a rough draft of the board’s criteria for siting a new county library branch.
The proposed criteria emphasize getting citizen input early in the process and finding a location that is central to elderly and low-income residents, schools, and other businesses and libraries. It is less focused on visibility from the street and parking, and questions the county’s goal of “space for future expansion.”
The board’s revised criteria list will be returned to county officials for further discussion as the governments continue to seek land for a full-service, 18,000- to 22,000-square-foot Southwestern Branch Library. The county has set aside roughly $550,000 to buy the land and a little more than $5 million to $6 million to build the new library.
Among other topics, the board also will consider changing the town’s Business Revolving Loan Fund to streamline it and reflect current business and economic development trends.
One of the more notable changes to the fund, established in 1986, is a requirement that the business generate one full-time job for every $25,000 in loan funds. The current program requires one job per $10,000 in loan funds. Other changes include updated requirements for collateral, privately contributed capital and business planning and financial forecasting.
