Earlier this evening town staff briefed the public on the results from the Future Focus sessions held last week. The meeting followed a pretty basic format. During the first and last 30 minutes, participants were free to roam around five different rooms, one or each of the special study areas that town previously identified. In the hour between, Mary Jane Nirdlinger, the town’s assistant planning director, gave a presentation synthesizing the results while taking questions from the audience.

On Wednesday and Thursday of this week, the town of Chapel Hill conducted charrette-style Future Focus sessions designed to understand how town residents would like to see Chapel Hill grow from the urban design perspective. The overall event was split into three sessions, one on Wednesday evening and two identical sessions on Thursday. The first session included several presentations on town growth and an urban design exercise where participants were asked to rate 50 different images on their favorableness for fitting in downtown. The second and third sessions were map mark-ups for five study areas along key transportation corridors (i.e. MLK, 15-501 and 54).

Tonight’s theme group meeting took a different form from those past (see my post on the first and second theme group report outs). After the usual introductions and settling down, Rosemary Waldorf, one of the two co-chairs of the 2020 process updated the participants on the timeline and outlined some results of discussions from the Town Council Retreat that took place over the weekend.

As my past posts have indicated I’ve had a growing frustration with the Chapel Hill 2020 process over the past couple of months. This evening’s transportation Tavern Talk has at least begun to change my mind. Unlike many other Chapel Hill 2020 events, the night was unstructured. And I think that was part of what made it such a success. 

January marks Chapel Hill 2020’s fifth month, and if the schedule of planned events is any indication it will its busiest by far.