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DRAFT
<br /> 900
<br /> 901 Tom Altieri: And if you haven't had time to look at it yet, please do as you have more questions. I can
<br /> 902 be found pretty easily. Let me know.
<br /> 903
<br /> 904 Whitney Watson: Tom, I have a question, and I was wondering if in the workshops, discussion came up
<br /> 905 about commercial development versus residential development, because a lot of this
<br /> 906 information is oriented toward housing development. And so, one of the questions would
<br /> 907 be, can these community systems be scaled up to the point where they could support a
<br /> 908 commercial or retail kind of setting that would allow for what I've heard, a grocery store
<br /> 909 desert in like northwestern Orange County?
<br /> 910
<br /> 911 Tom Altieri: At the retreats we did not have that specific discussion. Some of the examples that we
<br /> 912 found in North Carolina were serving some shopping centers. So, the short of it is, is yes,
<br /> 913 that technology could be used for a grocery store out in a rural area and some adjacent
<br /> 914 shops. And I'm trying to think of an example we saw that's not too far away. It's to our
<br /> 915 west. Maybe it was Winston-Salem area. Anyway, I could share an example and some
<br /> 916 pictures that I found if you're interested in that.
<br /> 917
<br /> 918 Whitney Watson: Well, I just wonder, because one of the things that seems to come up frequently is the
<br /> 919 development along the interstate corridors makes a lot of sense. Why not put all of the
<br /> 920 warehouse buildings there? Easy access on and off the highway and so on. But there's
<br /> 921 also a question about displacement of farmland, of families who have lived there for
<br /> 922 maybe one or two generations, or suddenly their neighborhood is overwhelmed by these
<br /> 923 giant concrete blocks. So, if there's an opportunity for that kind of commercial
<br /> 924 development to happen further out and be clustered with both residential and commercial,
<br /> 925 because that's the other thing, especially in the fact book, I was glancing through that;
<br /> 926 transportation, if you live in the northwest, northern half of Orange County, you got to go a
<br /> 927 long way to get to some of these amenities or to some of these workplaces. So, I guess
<br /> 928 I'd like to see, as we think about land-use planning, encouraging us to think about
<br /> 929 alternatives, and this is sort of what, I think, Charity, you were leaning to, is this
<br /> 930 opportunity to have lower-cost, less-than major infrastructure for septic sewer and water.
<br /> 931
<br /> 932 Tom Altieri: Right. And I think that's why we, in the preliminary draft and when we took alternatives
<br /> 933 out for input from the public, we had that combination of the rural conservation
<br /> 934 subdivisions and some ideas on where those could potentially locate used in combination
<br /> 935 with the rural activity nodes, which could provide some of those non-residential
<br /> 936 opportunities.
<br /> 937
<br /> 938 Cy Stober: I appreciate the comment, and I believe, if it's not in the fact book, it certainly was part of
<br /> 939 the discussion we've had with the commissioners, is yeah; is it a worthwhile county
<br /> 940 investment of revenues, and in this case, dedicated economic development tax funds, to
<br /> 941 invest. I mean, it's been done for economic development elsewhere for storm water, so
<br /> 942 regional storm water treatment. So, you build large storm water devices, and then you
<br /> 943 can allow the buildings to grow up around that. And you're taking that regulatory
<br /> 944 responsibility off of those developers, and reducing their upfront costs. Same thing to be
<br /> 945 said possibly for wastewater treatment or well access. And is that a direction the county
<br /> 946 wants to go and to activate some of these rural activity nodes so that we reduce the
<br /> 947 carbon footprint and the vehicle miles traveled in these more rural parts, particularly in
<br /> 948 northern Orange County where we have, by the social vulnerability index, our most
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