Orange County NC Website
Browse       Search
APPROVED 4/6/16 <br /> <br />Craig Benedict: Yes. Estimated birth rates and in migration. 278 <br />Paul Guthrie: I say that because we tend to have a younger county than many. 279 <br /> 280 <br />Craig Benedict: I think it’s going to be split. We’re getting some growth in 281 <br />Hillsborough and we’re getting some younger families in. Not showing up in the 282 <br />schools yet. But, it very well could. There’s a hot residential market in Hillsborough 283 <br />and yet in the last couple years now we have more people over 60 than we have 284 <br />children in school. 285 <br /> 286 <br />Paul Guthrie: This excludes Chatham, right? 287 <br /> 288 <br />Craig Benedict: We have some Chatham information that is part of the MPO analysis 289 <br />area. 290 <br /> 291 <br />Paul Guthrie: Because eastern Chatham, if everything goes according to plan is 292 <br />going to make any growth in Orange County look like a picnic. 293 <br /> 294 <br />Craig Benedict: That’s true. And people may decide even where there is demand, the 295 <br />demand might be stronger there and it could diminish what occurs in our area. There’s 296 <br />a planner, Randall Arendt, that usually writes about how to build in rural areas but he 297 <br />has this new initiative that he’s noticed a lot of the planners coming out of school. The 298 <br />professors that may be teaching them too analytical and too numerical with their job. 299 <br />And so they get stuck in the numbers and they don’t see what we’re calling the reality 300 <br />behind those numbers. They look at the population projections and all the numbers, 301 <br />and so Randall called me about the new interns coming out of college and asked if 302 <br />they were getting the internship, are the understanding on how to apply these 303 <br />theoretical and too idealistic concepts, and are they getting more into the pragmatic, 304 <br />what do you do with these populations? The whole idea with the comprehensive plan 305 <br />was do a population projection and in 30 years from now it’s going to take us over to 306 <br />this level. Are we ready for that? That is a conscious political decision and a 307 <br />community’s decision, and if you don’t want it to grow to this amount then there are 308 <br />policies to slow it down. And there might be some places that say, “Hey, we like growth, 309 <br />how do we make it go up faster?”, that’s what planning’s about. And if you do, 310 <br />everything else falls into place. If you predict higher populations then you better have 311 <br />the infrastructure, the roads, the services, you better know the tax value and the 312 <br />expenditure side. So, this is an opportunity where the populations will be, what they 313 <br />are. One of Orange County’s large difficulties is only 35,000 people live and work in 314 <br />Orange County, and then there’s 25,000 that come into Orange County to work and 315 <br />there’s another 25,000 that live here and migrate out. It’d be great if we could build 316 <br />commercial here and manufacturing and have the people that live here already working 317 <br />the places. There’s another study done that said the triangle has some of the worst 318 <br />traffic. The commuting time is high here, about 24 minutes. That’s a whole other study. 319 <br />But, the triangle has some difficulties with the pattern that’s there now. If you look at I-320 <br />85, I-40; you see traffic of an equal amount going both ways. 321 <br /> 322