CHOCVB Board Meeting Minutes 111721

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DocuSign Envelope ID:79E7E065-C620-41EB-8AD8-976C333559A7 • Matt Gladdek—Executive Director, Chapel Hill Downtown Partnership - We are holding outdoor holiday markets the first three Sundays in December. - We are working with Laurie and the other towns to have businesses put lights in storefronts to help bring some interest to the downtowns over the winter, past just the holidays. - Seafood Destiny is opening up at the old Lotsa Stone Fired Pizza location at 100 West Franklin Street on the corner southwest corner of Columbia and Franklin. - A lot of other leases that are getting signed so we should have more news that will come out by the end of the year. - Thanks to the Mayor's leadership and all the great projects that are under construction right now. - The Mayor and The Downtown Partnership have petitioned the Town to study taking over Franklin Street, which we see as vital to be able to maintain the extended outdoor seating and finding a better solution than the North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT) will allow us for bikes and pedestrians in downtown. We are really excited and have gotten good feedback on this so far but are hoping the price tag doesn't scare anybody off. We have never seen so much interest in downtown, over the last decade, as in people coming and eating downtown. Some of our restaurants have had their best summer, in thirty years of existence, this past summer,thanks to the expanded sidewalks. So,we are really excited for the future! Currently, NCDOT owns Franklin Street which means anything that happens on Franklin Street has to meet their requirements. NCDOT's main interest is getting cars from point A to point B, not the experience along the roadway. We want to be sure that we can design Franklin Street to be great for pedestrians, diners, and visitors and not just for people who need to travel through our downtown to get places. In addition to that, NCDOT takes care of the storm water on Franklin Street,which I think we all know that storm water still floods parts of Franklin Street because NCDOT has not maintained the storm water infrastructure as it should because they don't have the money to do it. This would give us a lot more local control and ability to make Franklin Street the street that we want as a town and not just as a modern day highway. Mayor Hemminger added that this would allow the Town of Chapel Hill the ability to change out the orange cones,the planter boxes,to bump out the sidewalks to make crossings shorter. Those kinds of things we can do. We have been having these discussions with NCDOT and they are a little loathe to put a planter box in the middle of a crosswalk in the road. But if it works for our transit and our cars, we want the ability to try help keep pedestrians safer and make it prettier downtown. We also want to stripe it ourselves rather than, like Matt said,to get cars from point A to point B. The grab and gos, the loading zones, and all those things we have been trying out with the pandemic experience,we want the opportunity to continue to do that. Franklin Street is scheduled to be repaved and restriped this summer so my guess is we would wait until they do that before taking it over so that that expense is borne by NCDOT. It wouldn't be for all of Franklin Street, it would be just from Henderson Street to Merritt Mill. •Tanya Moore— Associate Vice Chancellor, UNC-Chapel Hill - PlayMakers is back in action and performing again. - UNC had a Mental Health Summit this week and heard from over 700 students,faculty, staff, and parents. It was very candid and people shared their struggles. We are going to be partnering with the Jed Foundation to bring more resources to campus to help our community. We will be adding wellness days. We are going to, at least, bring one in in the spring and as we 5 Page CHOCVB BOD Meeting November 17 , 2021