Agenda - 05-04-1987 - Laserfiche WebLink

Browse Search

O5t 2 County Planning Director. At the close of his presentation citizen comments would be heard. P_ - - I • • I • t . . . I - , • _ 1 u- 1 • 1 • g - . - . I am very pleased to be able to speak to you on behalf of the group that attempted to negotiate solutions to a number of conflicts that have come up. I am also very pleased that we have such a large crowd in attendance tonight because I believe this is one of the more important issues that governments of our three jurisdictions will work on. I believe that it is important not only because of the substance of what we are going to be talking about here tonight but also because of the process that we went though to try to come to this agreement. To my knowledge. this is the first time that the three governments have engaged in such a long negotiating process in which we attempted to recognize the interests of each community as well as our joint interests and put them together into a unified set of agreements. During the past four months. an eight member task force of elected officials from Carrboro. Chapel Hill and Orange County met six times and a three person subcommittee held another dozen meetings to work out an agreement dealing with a number of related issues concerning further watershed protection and joint planning. The group prepared a 13 point agreement in principal designed to deal with these issues in a coordinated manner. The agreement has been adopted by each of the three governments and will be discussed tonight at this public hearing. I think that it should be stressed that this was put forward by representatives of each of the three jurisdictions. but it is by no means an accomplishment of any one person. In order to put this public hearing in context for your I would like to speak briefly about the major issues that we worked on in that negotiation process. Only two of those issues are going to be discussed in detail here tonightr but they are related to the other issues. I think it is important to understand the whole package in order to understand the two matters that are being heard tonight. The first issue is that not enough is known about the capacity of our water supply watersheds to tolerate development without harming the water supply. Growth is occurring in the watershed. The proposal made by the group was to commission a study of the carrying capacity of University Lake and Cane Creek watersheds. The alternative to that proposal would be to continue to rely on existing local government development standards. that is the standards of Orange County and Carrboro in these watersheds. The second issue is that Carrboro desires additional space for growth. but the residents of Calvander and other rural areas want to maintain the status quo. This has brought a conflict. The proposal that the committee came forward with is to redirect Carrboro' s growth away from the University Lake watershed where it historically has held extraterritorial jurisdiction to the Bolin Creek drainage basin to the north where public gravity sewer can be provided and where future developers will not endanger the water supply watershed.