Making some progress on a GoogleEarth visualization of downtown.
Here’s some data if you want to either visualize Chapel Hill within GoogleEarth or want to start fresh with a re-import. Small caveat on the GoogleEarth import – don’t turn on the terrain as I still need to tweak the elevations to get the right output.
If anyone manages to adjust the terrain before Sunday, please consider routing the changes back my way….
Hope to have Granville Towers and RAM’s Lot 5 proposal by Sunday. And, with any luck, a decent flyby to demonstrate the visual impact of the 104′ leviathan.
I believed the Town’s web site covering the Downtown Development Initiative would be updated after Nov. 20th’s public forum. After ten days, I finally sent in a formal request.
Here is Town Manager Stancil’s response:
Dear Mr. Raymond:
Thank you for our email message at 10:49 am on Dec. 1 to the Manager, Mayor and Town Council in which you requested that we “publish the remaining reports, discussions notes, comments, etc. that went into forming the “new deal” over the Summer”.
To the extent that there are documents related to the negotiations that took place this past summer which are public records under North Carolina law, we will be pleased to make them available for copying.
We are in the process of reviewing the staff files to determine what materials are public records and can now be released. However, it will not be possible to complete this work and determine what documents can be provided until next week.
Your message also states that “the final deal is set and the public still doesn’t have those details.” As the Agenda materials for the Council’s Dec. 4 meeting indicate, the Council is being asked to consider whether to authorize the completion of a Development Agreement to be brought back for the Council’s consideration in early 2007.
If you have any questions, please let me know.
Roger Stancil
Town Manager
Thank you Roger for getting back before close of business.
CitizenWill readers, I apologize for not moving more quickly on my request for further information.
If you’re interested in working with the Rogers Road community to correct these longstanding problems, Monday would be a great time to turn out and let your views be heard.
This is still very raw, but I thought I’d put out this demo to stir some thought within the community. Visualization tools like GoogleEarth (GE) can help remove some of the difficulty in assessing the visual impact of new development.
Our town’s planning department has the raw data needed to create a GoogleEarth representation of our town which I plan to massage and then release into the public domain for other citizens to elaborate on.
Why GoogleEarth?
While GE is a proprietary tool, the datasets it uses are exportable. So, Google owns the tool, not the data.
Our planning department should be creating GE or NASA Wind World representations of Chapel Hill as a matter of course – it would help both them and the community create a common visual-based framework for development discussions.
The Rogers Road community has taken it in the chin for way too long. The promises extended these residents when the landfill expanded into their backyards have never really been fulfilled. Decades old problems with sewage and other infrastructure continue to persist.
Finally, a structured process is being developed to deal with some of Chapel Hillian’s closest neighbors:
11/30/2006 — The public is invited to an open house from 6 to 9 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 7, at the Faith Tabernacle Oasis of Love located at 8005 Rogers Road to discuss planning for the Rogers Road area.
In the coming months, the Town of Chapel Hill will launch the discussion to begin the process of drafting the Rogers Road Small Area Plan, which is expected to involve intensive community participation. The plan would provide a vision and guidelines for the future development of the area, including the Greene Tract, and take a detailed look at the impacts of providing public services, especially sewer, and of developing an affordable housing site.
The Greene Tract is jointly owned by Chapel Hill, Carrboro and Orange County. In 2002 the Chapel Hill Town Council adopted a concept plan for the Greene Tract which stipulated that about 18 acres of the 170 acres in the Greene Tract would be set aside for affordable housing and about 86 acres would be set aside for open space.
The Chapel Hill Town Council is soliciting residents to serve on the Rogers Road Small Area Plan Task Force. The composition of the task force, to be approved by the Chapel Hill Town Council, will include residents from the Rogers Road area, elected officials from Chapel Hill, Carrboro and Orange County, non-profit housing representatives, and other citizens of the greater community.
Planners anticipate that the Town Council will appoint members to the task force in January 2007, with the first meeting to be held shortly thereafter. The process to develop the Rogers Road Small Area Plan may take approximately 17 months to two years. Residents interested in serving on the task force are encouraged to call the Chapel Hill Planning Department.
Anyone unable to attend the open house may contact the Town of Chapel Hill Planning Department to express their views, to gather more information, or to apply to serve on the task force.
Contact Frost Rollins at (919) 968-2728 or e-mail frollins@townofchapelhill.org.
How could the negotiations team done a better job informing the public throughout the process?
Here’s two examples from Greensboro’s District 5 Council member Sandy Carmany covering their coliseum issues, this one from a year ago and this one from November.
Sure, she wasn’t hampered by reporting on material potentially shielded under NC’s open meetings laws, but, then again, not every decision or thought process going into RAM’s “new” deal was by necessity shielded.
The only Council member directly involved in the negotiations, Sally Greene, has done the best informing the public of her thinking process on Lot 5 though nothing I read prepared me for such a right turn.
Original post:
Council had an excellent opportunity over the last week to answer the critics of the new Downtown Development Initiative Lot #5 deal.
Over the Summer, the public’s investment in the deal ballooned 15-fold, from $500K to north of $7.2M (with additional revenue hits, etc.). The Wallace Deck portion excised. Public space diminished. Boutique shops up, affordable commercial space missing. $385-$415 per square foot property, slated, as one critic pointed out, probably for affluent student housing.
What, over the Summer, caused the deal to change so radically for what I, other downtown business folks, two Kenan-Flager business school professors and many other concerned citizens consider the worse?
Council could’ve released more information – to provide a solid foundation for the public’s understanding of “the deal”. I’ve followed this deal quite closely. I agreed to “bite my tongue”. to not criticize the problematic elements of the original deal, to wait on the “new deal” which would correct the more egregious of the public’s concerns.
I’ve spent hours trying to pull together all the whispers, hints, etc. that incidentally wafted the public’s direction over the course of the Summer. But what I have is not enough.
The Council has the responsibility and obligation to fully disclose the details, to the fullest extent
allowed by law, of this deal.
Mr. Manager, Mayor and Town Council,
Thank you for being more timely this week and publishing the RAM development agenda item before close of business. Unfortunately, the agenda item is fairly light on the background of the “new deal”.
Would you please publish the remaining reports, discussions notes, comments, etc. that went into forming the “new deal” over the Summer?
I know that there’s some legal issues involved in releasing all of the notes – legal issues that will become moot after you sign the deal – so I’m not asking for ALL the information now (though I will be exercising a citizen’s FOIA prerogative ASAP).
I’m asking that you release everything you can prior to the meeting, including information not protected under the confidentially agreement but also not,to date, publicly disseminated.
For instance, would you please provide details of your consultations with the Local Government Commission (LGC) on financing?
This would include notes, reports, detailed analysis, etc. Please be thorough in your disclosures.
I’m interested in the LGC’s take on leveraging the secured debt, effect on our town’s debt ratings, thoughts on the quoted interest rate, etc. Essentially, I imagine, the same kind of financial analysis that a private business uses in evaluating the risk-rewards of taking on debt.
Finally, the main conduit for publishing this data has been the DDI website which hasn’t been updated since Spring. I’ve asked the Council to update the information on the RAM deal in a timely fashion. Several folks told me to “hold my horses”, that I needed to wait until the “final” deal was set.
Well, the final deal is set and the public still doesn’t have those details. I was hoping that this issue would be addressed over the last 9 days but it hasn’t.
The public has one weekend to review these critical additional details.
Please, if you can’t update the website, then submit them to the citizenry directly. If emailing or providing paper copies is easier, that’s fine.
I’ll make sure they get into the public domain over the weekend.
