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29 <br /> tree care, emergencies services, wood waste management, and employment conditions to <br /> attract the talent we need, the County succeeds in its corresponding environmental, services, <br /> solid-waste-related, and economic goals and objectives. <br /> While this alignment is strong, the directives within the County's Comprehensive Plan are not <br /> themselves entirely harmonious. The Comprehensive Plan recognizes that tradeoffs will need to <br /> be made among its own goals and objectives. <br /> The County has many choices to make in the future. It will need to balance future <br /> development with the need to protect rural character, preserve important natural areas <br /> and water resources, provide a range of housing opportunities, and provide an efficient <br /> level of public services. (Comprehensive Plan 5-9) <br /> The potential conflict at issue for our proposal concerns the Rural Buffer (RB), the approximately <br /> 35,000 acres of rural land that surrounds Chapel Hill and Carrboro where over half of Orange <br /> County residents (our clients) reside.12 Our 10-acre parcel is situated at the near edge of the RB. <br /> These are the specific directives of the Comprehensive Plan about the RB that relate to our <br /> proposal: <br /> 1. "Maintain the rural, low-density land surrounding Chapel Hill and Carrboro Transition <br /> Areas as Rural Buffer land" (LU-2.1). <br /> 2. "Discourage urban sprawl, encourage a separation of urban and rural land uses, and <br /> direct new development into areas where necessary community facilities and services <br /> exist through periodic updates to the Land Use Plan" (LU-3.1). <br /> 3. "Discourage new intensive non-residential land uses, or the expansion of existing <br /> intensive uses, in the area designated Rural Buffer" (LU-3.3). <br /> The first thing to notice is, even if we were to take these objectives as inviolable laws, not one of <br /> them would be violated, strictly speaking, by permitting our rezoning plan S.23 <br /> Second, if the Comprehensive Plan intended to prohibit plans such as ours within the RB, it <br /> easily could have made that clear. A change of wording to LU-3.3 would have done the trick: <br /> "Prohibit all new intensive non-residential uses in the RB, where 'intensive' is defined as...." <br /> 22 "Density is focused in the southern section of the County with fifty-seven percent of the population <br /> residing within the Towns of Chapel Hill and Carrboro." Comprehensive Plan 5-21 <br /> 23 That is, the existing obstacles to rezoning and development in the RB will continue to serve as <br /> discouragement(the costs in both time and treasure of the rezoning application, together with the <br /> uncertainty of outcome, is itself a significant discouragement to development); rural, low-density land <br /> surrounding Chapel Hill and Carrboro is maintained no matter what decision is made about our proposal. <br /> 22 <br />