Thu 3 May 2007
Carrot or Stick: House Approves Chapel Hill’s Energy Reduction Incentives
Posted by WillR under ChapelHill , Community , Development , Downtown , EconomicDevelopment , environment , Ruminations[2] Comments
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Will,
While I disagree with your analysis of the Council, (and risking putting the horse before the cart), I look forward to your input on what the ultimate ordinance will look like. Developing the standards will an important community exercise.
Although it’s hard at this point to understand how a payment in lieu could work, I disagree with your characterization of how the Town has used payment in lieu in the affordable housing realm. While it has been used a couple of times (the only one I can think of at this moment is the McCorkle condo conversion), it is extraordinarily rare. Note that we refrained from using this tool with Greenbridge and several other developments where this idea has been proposed. The only circumstance in which I see it becoming anything near a common practice is in the case of rental communities. We’ve been struggling with rental properties for a long time and haven’t been able to develop a policy that matches the economic differences between rental projects and for sale projects.
Mark, your support for square footage over money has been commendable. I agree, the success of this strategy hinges on picking measurable standards and making sure folks deliver. Beyond that, as technology and understanding advances, we need a mechanism to incorporate the best-thinking at that point in time to determine reasonable requirements.
I understand you differ with me on Council but as a close observer of what they do I believe there’s been a distinct sea change. For instance, somewhere along the way some folks stopped leading and started commanding. And getting your political way, as some of your colleagues have, through sleight-of-hand is something we should reserve for the national arena.
I expect our local government to rise above the average and act to the best of the public interest. Part of that is going beyond informing our citizenry to educating them. Look at the difference in the level of debate between setting the height limits for Nationsbank and setting the TC-3 zone. Huge! And the Council that decided Nationsbank, as near as I can tell, did not profess a commitment to bring an informed public into the process as our current Council has…
Thanks for responding. I will volunteer for a task force to draft those standards if we get that far.