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More than 40 people came out to Carrboro Town Hall earlier last night to give the Board of Alderman their thoughts about a proposed Carrboro Arts and Innovation Center downtown. The project, a joint effort of The ArtsCenter and Kidzu, would consist of a center with three performing arts center and kids museum located at at the intersection of Main and Roberson Streets.

The two partners propose raising half of the $15 million cost, with the town paying for the other half. They argue that the costs on the public side would be covered by tax revenues from a new hotel on the current ArtsCenter site that would also be part of the development. The town would own the new building, and the two non-profit partners would form a new organization that would raise funds for operations and manage the facility. That organization's new board will be appointed by the town. The partners estimated the economic impact of the project at around $320 million over the next 25 years.

It’ll be a quite a busy week for the Chapel Hill Town Council with four meetings scheduled covering a wide range of subjects including a new ETJ, Chapel Hill 2020, Obey Creek and the future of Southern Village. The Carrboro Alderfolks will hold a public hearing on a proposed downtown arts venue, while the county commissioners will discuss what to do with the unassigned general fund balance. The Chapel Hill-Carrboro School Board will hold a development meeting, while the county school board and Hillsborough Town Board take a break.

Here’s the full summary:

CARRBORO BOARD OF ALDERPERSONS

• Public Hearing: Monday, January 19, 7:30pm @ Carrboro Town Hall
  • The Board will hear from the public about a proposed arts venue downtown

CHAPEL HILL TOWN COUNCIL

Researchers at the UNC School of Government recently released the results of a survey (PDF) they conducted about Chapel Hill’s Central West Small Area Plan process. You might have seen some press and spin about this survey and the comments participants provided in the survey. But before we start extrapolating from these data, it’s important to make sure we understand who provided feedback on the Central West process and how those individuals compare to our community at large.

Making this comparison is particularly important to assess and understand the effectiveness of public participation efforts in our local government. After all, if public participation is primarily coming from specific groups of people and other groups are being left out of the process, that’s not true public participation or engagement -- it’s the privileging of certain groups at the expense of the rest of our community.

So let’s take a look at the demographic data of the Central West survey participants compared to the 2010 Census data for the town of Chapel Hill. Here’s what the age and race data look like: