1-3-24 PB Agenda Packet - Laserfiche WebLink

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tree care, emergencies services, wood waste management, and employment conditions to attract the talent we need, the County succeeds in its corresponding environmental, services, solid-waste-related, and economic goals and objectives. While this alignment is strong, the directives within the County’s Comprehensive Plan are not themselves entirely harmonious. The Comprehensive Plan recognizes that tradeoffs will need to be made among its own goals and objectives. The County has many choices to make in the future. It will need to balance future development with the need to protect rural character, preserve important natural areas and water resources, provide a range of housing opportunities, and provide an efficient level of public services. (Comprehensive Plan 5-9) The potential conflict at issue for our proposal concerns the Rural Buffer (RB), the approximately 35,000 acres of rural land that surrounds Chapel Hill and Carrboro where over half of Orange County residents (our clients) reside. 22 Our 10-acre parcel is situated at the near edge of the RB. These are the specific directives of the Comprehensive Plan about the RB that relate to our proposal: 1. “Maintain the rural, low-density land surrounding Chapel Hill and Carrboro Transition Areas as Rural Buffer land” (LU-2.1). 2. “Discourage urban sprawl, encourage a separation of urban and rural land uses, and direct new development into areas where necessary community facilities and services exist through periodic updates to the Land Use Plan” (LU-3.1). 3. “Discourage new intensive non-residential land uses, or the expansion of existing intensive uses, in the area designated Rural Buffer” (LU-3.3). The first thing to notice is, even if we were to take these objectives as inviolable laws, not one of them would be violated, strictly speaking, by permitting our rezoning plans. 23 Second, if the Comprehensive Plan intended to prohibit plans such as ours within the RB, it easily could have made that clear. A change of wording to LU-3.3 would have done the trick: “Prohibit all new intensive non-residential uses in the RB, where ‘intensive’ is defined as....” 23 That is, the existing obstacles to rezoning and development in the RB will continue to serve as discouragement (the costs in both time and treasure of the rezoning application, together with the uncertainty of outcome, is itself a significant discouragement to development); rural, low-density land surrounding Chapel Hill and Carrboro is maintained no matter what decision is made about our proposal. 22 “Density is focused in the southern section of the County with fifty-seven percent of the population residing within the Towns of Chapel Hill and Carrboro.” Comprehensive Plan 5-21 22 39