Letters regarding position of impact fee - VII-A - 3-21-95

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�7,�� 11 1 -'21� -�//V - My husband and I have lived in this community for the past twenty-five years. We presently have a fifth grade child at one of the many overcrowded schools. For the past seventeen years my husband has made a daily commute of ninety miles so that we could live and raise our family here and enjoy the benefits of this excellent community, including the fine school system. We've seen the "village" grow into a bustling small city, Carrboro become a dynamic town, and Hillsborough benefit from growth and development. The growth has provided jobs and a healthy economy even during times when the rest of the country suffered recession. One of the primary growth industries has been residential housing, as more people flock to this area, noted and promoted for its many amenities, among them one of the state's flagship school systems. Well,folks, the flagship is taking on water and slowly sinking. With all the growth in residential housing one variable seems to have been left out of the equation: providing schools for the hundreds of new students the school system is gaining yearly. When our daughter was born in 1984 I thought, "It's been more than a decade with no new elementary school; surely by the time she's in kindergarten...........wrong! Adding mobile units will never ultimately remedy the problem because there are physical limitations such as land, optimum capacities of libraries, cafeterias, gymnasiums, art, music, resource and health rooms. Transportation-and safety issues also exist. For example, we were notified in October that our child cannot even have a friend ride home on the bus with her because the bus was "at capacity."