Chapel Hill wants own meeting with Carolina North consultant

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."