Carolina North
Last night, UNC's department of environment, health and safety held a public meeting on the latest plans for the hazardous waste clean-up at the Horace Williams property. I was unable to attend and am hopeful that a report will be made publicly available.
Some of Director Peter Reinhardt's comments, as reported in the Herald, were disturbing.
Reinhardt said he doesn't expect the work to create much disruption to the surrounding neighborhoods.
"It's so far away from any house that I can't imagine anyone will be able to hear it," Reinhardt said.
The buried waste will be excavated and removed from the site by hazardous material trucks.
Fencing will be erected around the site for safety reasons and to mark the area's perimeter, Reinhardt said.
My concern, having listened to the din when Horace Wms was the staging site for the power plant upgrade, is not the noise. Rather, it is what might enter the air and affect lungs, skin, or eyes.
This is the question on many minds as UNC says they want to work together with the town on Carolina North, while simultaneously attempting to block a pro-active initiative of the town to re-zone the Horace Williams tract to OI-2, which realistically reflects the current capacity of our public infrastructure and the lack of any formal proposal for the land from UNC.
The process of trying to zone this land in a way that allows the University to innovate, while mainataing the health of the surrounding community has a long history. In fact, the Council considered re-zoning this land to OI-2 back in 1994, and spent subsequent years trying to develop a custom mixed-use zone for UNC, which was ultimately rejected..
Once again Chapel Hill is moving toward a rezoning of UNC's property according to the Herald Sun.
Joyce Brown and I tried valiantly to rezone Horace Williams to O&I-2 back in the mid-1990's, but we were shot down at the time. Will it be any different this time? Sounds like it might. The Herald-Sun said the council voted unanimously to consider the rezoning.
We'll see . . .
I loved this article in the DTH last week. It says that UNC administrators will not review or respond to any of the reports of the Chapel Hill's Horace Williams Citizens Committee. The HWCC (of which I am a member) is the Town's opportunity to develop our own vision fo rthe prpoerty that will someday be the home of Carolina North. We just finished laboring over a point-by-point analysis of the latest hints we have from UNC (they have not submitted a plan to the Town). We compared UNC's concepts to our previous report (PDF), which laid out the Town's objectives for the Horace Williams property in great detail.
Right now I'm listening to Jim Heavner's WCHL-sponsored "forum" on Carolina North featuring Jim Moeser, Roger Perry, Kevin Foy, Bill Strom and Michael Collins. What a bitch fest! What began as a relatively civil conversation has devolved, yet again, into a cacaphony of whines. Moeser is bragging is about how someone somewhere gave the folks from the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Center a standing ovation (deservedly, I have no doubt; FPG is something the university can be proud of); how I pray that Chancellor Moeser could channel more of the dignity and fairness and progressive attitude of Frank Porter Graham, at least on this issue. Chancellor Moeser has taken a conversation that began with the intent of talking about development at Carolina North in a direct and forward-thinking way outside conference and hearing rooms, and has spent the better part of an hour pointing the finger at the town about its process.
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