Mayoral challenger Pam Hemminger thinks collaboration, innovation and standing firm on community values will put the town on the right path to the future.
Chapel Hill needs to work more closely with the county, UNC and other partners, she said, but the minority voices with “incredible” ideas also should be encouraged to participate. Inclusivity is what makes the town special, she said.
“That’s where I think a leadership style coming in and being collaborative” is needed, she said. “I want to hear what you think we’re doing wrong. I want to hear what you think we can do better, instead of saying we’re doing it this way, you get over it.”
The former Orange County commissioner and Chapel Hill-Carrboro School Board member is challenging Mayor Mark Kleinschmidt in the Nov. 3 contest. Challenger Gary Kahn also is on the ballot. Early voting starts Oct. 22.
Hemminger sat down with the Chapel Hill News recently to talk about the issues:
What led you to run for mayor?
I just really got frustrated.
I was working with the Rogers Road Community Center. I wanted to make sure it succeed, and I was just saddened that the town found a way to get out of their obligation. That was about the sixth task force I knew about for that community. It’s not right.
We talk about social justice values here in Chapel Hill and how we’re all for them, but we didn’t walk the walk on this one. We didn’t follow through. All they needed was tables and chairs and some funding and some counselors out of their own neighborhood, and it wasn’t right.
The county came through, and Carrboro even came through with their funding. They applied for the outside agency funding from all the different entities and the county picked up not only their utility bills, but also gave them $20,000 toward programs there, and Chapel Hill only gave $5,000.
We say we’re all about it. We say we’re going to get to it, we’re doing it for the water and stuff, but all the community hears is no, and you’re not valued. That’s what they hear. That’s not right.
And this big disconnect between what we say we value in Chapel Hill and what we’re doing – the choices we’re making. … We’re not making decisions that reflect who we are, and I’m seeing it in all the development that’s going on. We know we need to diversify our tax base with more commercial projects, yet we’re approving highly dense residences in the spots that would actually be good for commercial, so we’re limiting ourselves on what we can do commercial-wise.
I’m in the commercial real estate business, and I know, I like development and redevelopment. We’re going to have a lot.
We chose to have an urban services boundary, which was a good decision, which means we have to get more dense, which means we’ll be developing dense projects, but those projects need to include environmental standards and more affordable housing, green spaces, how about energy efficiency – why aren’t we requiring that?
The kicker is we’re building into the stream buffers. We’re even talking about piping the stream at the Edge. We’re Chapel Hill. We used to set the state standards.
I still chair the Upper Reuse River Basin Authority Group. I kept it as a commissioner, because I wanted to see it succeed. That’s something I think I bring to the table. I stay with a project. I want it to be successful. I stay hands on, and we’re making great strides.
I got to speak at a national water conference. It’s important work and its going to be more and more important, especially as Chapel Hill becomes more dense, we really need to be protective of our stream buffers. We need to make sure that we have the green spaces. If we built everything up, and don’t make room for the green spaces or plan them or make them a priority, then they’re not going to be there for the future.
I worked on that green way project. I was on Green ways for six years and Parks and Rec for six years. We’re putting the Dumpsters and the recycling bins and everything facing the green way. That could have been a space for those residents to enjoy the green way and the people on the green way to enjoy a more garden setting or patio setting. Instead, they’re going to be looking at trash bins.
Development shouldn’t be the only topic on the table, she said.
“We’ve got some social justice issues going on … and I guess my biggest, biggest concern is we’re becoming less diverse, and that’s one thing I love about this community is the wonderful diversity of people – cultural, race, socioeconomic, just opinions, just the difference.
All this – the high taxes, everything expensive, the luxury apartments – are pushing people out, and I think we’re going to become this homogenous crowd. … I found the Chamber’s numbers disheartening that there’s less than 10 percent African-American.
When I was on the school board, it was up in the 13, 14 … the Latino population, and we struggled with where are our kids going. We’ve got the achievement gap and kids are leaving.
You’d be surprised how many people I’m meeting now, and they came for the good schools, and they’re just staying to get their kids educated, and then they plan on moving, and that breaks my heart. I want a community that’s not so transient.”
“We have extremely high taxes and we have high real estate prices, and people make the choice to come here.”
“We can’t work in isolation. Chapel Hill is part of Orange County. Residential properties to a certain level require services, and at a certain level, that may not compensate for the amount of taxes that they bring in. …
That’s one of the things that I’m really strongly advocating. My style is collaborative. We need to be reaching out. I know how the county operates. I know how the school system operates. We don’t do a very good job of talking to each other and working on these problems together.
Whenever we bring in more residences, the county has to provide services, too, and, ire., the tax bill goes up for everybody, because there are more services needed. Its interesting, people in Chapel Hill don’t think they’re part of the county.
And contrary to that, anything that happens in the county – commercial development-wise – is good for everyone. We all get a piece of that. That’s helpful for everyone, so we shouldn’t be competing with the county; we should be working together.
That I-40 corridor, it’s a great place for commercial locations, and there’s all these fascinating new things going on with commercial businesses, even to the point, there’s something in Greensboro, they’re actually growing produce in office buildings hydroponically. It’s a new program. They’re copying something down in California, so that the produce is actually closer to the market and the people who are going to buy it.
They’re trying it just with herbs right now. They need less water resources, less soil. And there’s all this nanotechnology coming in. We don’t have places to put those things. They have them in Raleigh at N.C. State, and they have them at AT Greensboro, but we don’t seem to have a spot here for them to do that. I think that’s what Carolina North was supposed to be, it’d be really cool.”
“I’m a developer. I get it. You have to work the numbers. The numbers have to make sense, but there are some other options. There are some options that work out for … just the long-term planning.
We have the incubator Launch, which I helped from the county side. They get to be there for six months – great – spinoff – but where do they go after that?
There’s nowhere for them to go. We need some Class B office space. They can’t afford Class A. We need some flexible Class B (low-cost) space, and we need to be proactive in that, not hoping someone else is going to take care of it.
We also don’t have large commercial spaces. We have small, and we can’t attract any larger companies. No one’s going to go through that whole process – the SUP review, years – we need to find better ways of doing that.
I think we have some good ideas, but the implementation is where we fall short.
The form-based code – great idea – we needed to set standards. There’s no design in there. We didn’t accept anything from the Planning Commission or the citizens groups that came forward. There’s no design guidelines. We missed opportunities there to be inclusive. We needed to say what we wanted versus just we want an easier process. Yes, we need an easier process to make it more attractive, but without guidelines, we’re going to get projects … and those projects are not inclusive affordable housing, they’re not protecting environmental standards, they’re not even being … that’s mostly residential again. It’s very little commercial space. Where’s the green space?”
That’s part of the problem too. With form-based code, there’s no protection. The East gate BP people are up in arms about them being asked to … I know that was a management decision of the landlords, but the town has no right to intervene, the way they’ve set it up, to advocate, to help. We’re losing businesses.
When I was on the county commission, I reached out to Mayor Foy, at the time, and talked about we need to be at the table for the trash discussions. It’s going to affect Chapel Hill’s budget. You need to be here, we’re having the discussions and you guys need to be included. And so he participated.
But then it switched over and we were told no we’re not interested, we’re going to make our own decisions, and it was at the 11th hour that they’re finding out that their trucks won’t haul the garbage, because they need bigger axles to go onto the highway … Those conversations need to happen in collaboration, they need to be worked out together, we need to be talking to the university more.
We’re a college town. We are building student housing and pulling kids off campus. The university has empty dorm rooms – over 800 of them. It’s hurting them financially. Is it helping our economy to have the students in town? I don’t know. We’re not having the discussion. We’re doing this, so they’re turning their dorms into conference housing. Is that going to hurt our tourism industry and our hotel stays?
We’re not having any conversations about it. And what’s the future. Are we going to keep allowing more student housing projects? Does the university want to do their own? We need to be part of their master planning process. We need to be having those conversations.
That collaboration piece is key for working together, better solutions in working together. …
The same thing with the Northside community and some of our historic districts that are more affordable. We’re trying to work it out, but we’re not all coming to the table.
I went to the housing board advisory meeting … This new project, the Grove, that’s going in, which was going to be condos and now it’s going to be apartments. So now they don’t have to comply with the affordable housing component … but the housing board asked them to anyway, and they all met, and they came up with something that works. …
What I’m looking at, since I’m the Habitat vice chair and I was with Community Home Trust, I understand how complicated affordable housing is. What we don’t have is a goal. Are we trying to do a percentage of the number of residences be affordable or are we trying to hit a certain number of residences. It’s so piecemeal. We get a few here, a few there, but what do people want?
The Affordable Housing Coalition understands this and can tell you what the needs are – the wait lists are huge, but in what areas and what do we need to be doing? Without a goal, it is piecemeal.
Yeah, we might get some, but we didn’t include it in the Ephesus-Fordham … we have didn’t opinions on what affordable really means.
What would you consider an affordable home price or monthly rent?
There’s different levels. Are you talking about affordable homes for teachers Are you talking about people who are the cafeteria workers and the custodians and the hourly wage people?
If you’re a family coming in and you want to be here for the school district, you’re not supposed to spend more than 30 percent of your income on your housing costs, that’s inclusive. If you put in that, then you can work out the details. If you’ve got somebody making $60,000, what are they going to want to spend annually. We have some homes, they’re very small. Do families want to live in apartments? Some do, some don’t, some families want to have a yard, or green space. They want green space for their children to play and ride bikes.
Habitat, we do a good job, but we too are facing some new decision points because dirt is so expensive here. The single family home is too pricey now to build so attached family housing, town homes… I went to Charlottesville for a trip, they’re doing something unusual with Habitat there; they’ve got a whole multi-family complex – both rental and owner and they take Section 8 vouchers.
Habitat’s having to change their model too so its time for the town to look at, other than the Ephesus-Fordham area, and we’ve got three apartment complexes in the Ephesus Church Road that are very affordable and a lot of families live there, and we have a lot of diversity at our school from families living there. I don’t want to see those go away. Yes, we can build. So we could say we would like to have denser affordable apartment units there – not luxury – but affordable. Those need to be redeveloped.
They need to be updated. They could be made more dense. It could be three story or four story, but they could be affordable and leave some of that green space. … Working on the stormwater issues and saying we want this to stay affordable family housing. … There are families that have lived here for generations that are being driven out by the high cost and the high property taxes.
There’s other things going on – the reason I stepped into the race. Everywhere I go, I hear from citizens that they are feeling that their opinions are not valued. They’re not incorporated into the decision making process, but they’re not even responded to and that’s what’s hard. I’ve had people tell me they’ve brought petitions to the council – the council listened, took it and did nothing. …
These problems are complex – don’t get me wrong – if they were easy, they’d all be fixed by now. But we need to bring the different voices and the different opinions to the table in order to find the best solutions, and it’s a collaboration inclusive process; it’s not a thanks for your time. I’ve heard from members for the Compass Committee for Obey Creek how they spent years on the data and information and presented a report and it was never discussed, never incorporated, and they weren’t saying don’t build it, they were saying build it better, do a better job, and I think that’s where we’re stuck – the light switch on development was off for so long, I feel like we just turned on the glaring headlights and we’re going full steam ahead without thinking about the long-term effects.
Our progressive college town atmosphere is our calling card and what makes us valuable, and if we lose that, we’re losing a big piece of what makes us Chapel Hill. …
I like diverse opinions … it’s not reaching out. It’s reaching in. I like having conversations with the people you’re trying to help the most… going into Northside and actually having conversations to say what works here, what’s going on, finding that out, having the university at the table, having the schools at the table. When I was school board chair, I met with Kevin Foy, who was the mayor, and we planned out the next three elementary school sites. … The town’s building residences, we’re trying to plan schools, it’d be nice to fit them in together. Land’s at a premium now, but also once a school goes on a site, it comes off the tax rolls. That needs to be part of the planning process, and if you do it collaboratively, then everybody is usually supportive of the idea, we shouldn’t be fighting each other, we shouldn’t be competing against each other. We should be working together.
How can the town provide or encourage more affordable housing?
We need to say that’s what we want, and I think the Ephesus-Fordham area is a great place to do that. Its time to really get down and plan out what’s happening at the Greene Tract. We’ve been saying for a long time that that’s a good spot for affordable housing. We need to make that plan and figure out how many units –is it workforce, is it going to be 30 percent of income, 50 percent, 60 – what is the definition of affordable for that area.
I still think we can make it happen at Ephesus-Fordham. I have talked to developers who are interested in doing those kinds of projects (but) going through that SUP process. Now that we have form-based code, it won’t be quite as difficult. Having a true clear definition of what the town wants and what the standards are, not having to have a permitting process that takes so long.
I’ve been through the permitting process as a homeowner, as a representative for the Community Center, and as a business person, and we were treated like we were the enemy in every case. It took months, not days, not 44 days … and cost a lot of money, and I’m a small developer. It’s really difficult to say we are encouraging development and businesses, and you’re not going to get competitive developers because they already know our process is onerous and expensive.
I wanted to be in Chapel Hill … my builder won’t come back. The crew was sitting around for weeks on end, waiting for the next inspection, hoping it was today with no notice. Is he coming today, tomorrow? He can’t run a business that way either. He’s got other projects to get to, he doesn’t want to come back to Chapel Hill either.
It’s the whole culture down in that office. I don’t know if it’s because they’re overworked, I don’t know, but to walk into that office. We got threatened. I understand it better now. When they threaten that if you complain one more time or take this higher up, we will fail you on the next inspection, because I had another project coming up, you understand the game then.
I’m getting the same opinion about other things in town. I don’t think this is right. This is not the way I want Chapel Hill to be. We are losing our diversity, and I came here because of the open attitude here. My husband and I wanted to be in an environment that embraced open ideas, environmentalism and an ability to speak up and have a different opinion. Right now, it feels like your opinions are either right or wrong. We used to value different and incorporated all that. … Having diverse perspective on anything is going to yield a different solution, and it just makes me sad that we are becoming this homogenous, expensive bedroom community.
I’ve been holding listening sessions and asking why people don’t come to Chapel Hill anymore. Parking is the No. 1 reason. The parking is too complicated to figure out, not that there’s not enough, but they cant figure it out, and the fear of getting towed.
What if we copied what Wilmington (did), they were having the same problem and decided to come up with the idea of an annual parking pass for citizens. You could buy an annual parking pass for $35, display it on your windshield, and you could park anywhere that was a town lot after 5:30 p.m., and your car wouldn’t be towed … and it was easy. It works because people feel more confident about coming downtown; two, they want to get their $35 worth.
We have some good ideas. Our implementation and the details is where we fall short. The decisions we’ve made are costing us more money than they are yielding in productivity. I work with nonprofits in helping them become financially sustainable. I listen, I work with them, they’ve got their mission, we work on a budget that gives them long-term sustainability. …
The goal is to bring more people back downtown – to shop, to eat – we need more events downtown. I think that’s a win-win with the university, more events at Memorial Auditorium or lecture series. … That’s a working relationship. … Businesses downtown cannot exist if the majority of people living downtown are students. That’s what we’re building. We’re saying let’s build more student housing, and then, when we’ve built more student housing, we’ve taken away prime spaces for commercial sites and for family housing. Yes, we need more dense housing downtown, and yes, there’s some redevelopment opportunities, but it needs to be thought out long term and it needs to be multi-family.
(Amity Station) should not be … We want to say we value the historic nature and the history of Northside, yet we’re willing to put a structure like that right next to it. The light pollution alone is going to be annoying … Then you have a good project, the A.C. Hotel. They worked with the neighborhood, found out what neighborhood concerns were. They moved the entries to the side streets so it wouldn’t be off Rosemary, they’re doing four stories, they’re doing a green building, they set it back off the sidewalk a bit because of the neighborhood, they’re getting local art, they’re going to hire local people. They wanted to fit into the community, instead of changing the community. That’s what we need more of. … I’m sure profit-wise, their investors would have loved a 10-story hotel, but they wanted to be good citizens, they wanted to fit in, and we could have more projects like that.
How should the town change in the next 20 years?
I really see opportunities for office parks and taller buildings on the major corridors, like the Eastowne area. The Edge should have been a commercial office building space – instead it’s going to be highly residential – that’s a good fit. I can see us having more of those and benefiting the town and being places to work that our own citizens who live here could work there. Until we get some of those spaces, we’re not going to attract any companies. We’ve had companies leave here.
We elected to have the rural buffer, which means we want clean water and we’re going to grow more dense. Human scale buildings fit well into the communities like Ephesus-Fordham. More dense, taller buildings are coming downtown, but I don’t know, are we just going to assume that Rosemary Street’s going to be more parking and high-rise buildings or is it going to be a complement to Franklin Street. I don’t want to be the next little Manhattan.
Human scale is four to five stories done well, three to four to five. If it’s set back from the road, you can go taller. Again it’s what the feel is, and downtown’s probably the more appropriate place for taller buildings but not losing that town atmosphere as well.
Greenbridge was built green. It’s for families. It has some public space and it provides some public benefit with some parking. I like the concept. Not crazy about the look of the building, but they were trying to be a good fit in the area.
140 West, same kind of thing. It looks good but I’ll be honest with you, I don’t think that was financially a win for the town. They bought some businesses in, but we’re going to be paying a premium for those parking spaces for a long time. We used to make money on that lot. Now we’re in debt on that lot. The numbers I have seen do not suggest that was a win for the town.
… Look at the one in Carrboro. It fits in, people use it and like it. They park there and walk everywhere. We need to do more things like that. The public I don’t think has figured out the 140 parking spaces yet.
You don’t really know it’s there. I know we have an app. Not everybody knows how to use apps. Not everybody driving around has time to use the app while they’re driving. If you see a parking deck, you know that there’s parking. You can figure it out. It takes the confusion away. …
We can’t piecemeal these projects. 2020 was a good concept, but it didn’t go far enough, and we’re not following some of the small-area plans that we had with these projects, so where are we going? That’s what concerns me. Overall traffic concept, where are we going. All the new transit questions. Things have changed in five years, and things are going to continue to change for the next five years of shifts in traffic and people, especially with some of these really dense projects.
What do you think about town decisions on:
Ephesus-Fordham: I don’t understand how the on-street parking and the bike lane and all that’s going to work in that blind curve (in front of Village Plaza). And, again, if that had been a four or five-story office building, I would have been all about it. We could have made it attractive from the road, it would have had some public benefit to the tax base and the traffic patterns would have been opposite.
That’s a more urban feel and … urban feels belong in the urban center, not out in …
I guess I’m feeling and other people have told me they feel like there’s a philosophy going on with the council in the way they’re making decisions that people don’t agree with. It’s a supply side economics. I’ve heard the concept of if you build enough apartments, it will break the rents around here and everything will come down in price. Raleigh is proving that wrong every day. National studies prove that wrong. People always move to the newest thing, so if you’re going to break the rents, you’re going to break it on the small landlords of the older buildings. That’s who’s going to lose out. We’re picking new investors over existing business people here.
People come into our district for the good school system and what they perceive as the progressive attitude, college-town feel. If they wanted more urbanization, less progressive, bigger place, they’d move to Cary. I don’t want to be Cary. That’s not a college town. That’s not Chapel Hill.
Obey Creek: Frustrated by Obey Creek. It could have been a better project. They didn’t even look at other options. They went full scale – 1.6 million square feet, the size of Southpoint, right across from a huge development, Southern Village, and a park-and-ride lot. I don’t know what benefit this is for the town.
The Planning Commission gave them a list (of improvements), the Compass Committee gave them a list of things to consider. I think it could have been a smaller more manageable project, the public benefits would have been better, and I think the developer still could have made a good profit.
From what I was understanding, the numbers of 900,000 to a million square feet were given out as options to consider. And with the topography of that property, that’s probably a much better fit anyway.
I think we could have gotten something for the schools. While it’s great to have dedicated parks and open land, that was not developable anyway, and now it comes off the public tax rolls. So public benefit, yes. Loss of revenue, yes. A choice, right, and it’s great, but it’s wetlands down there and it’s a nice piece of property that’s being donated to the town. They’re trying to tout that as the big win – we didn’t get anything for schools. Out of southern Village and Meadowmont, we got something for schools.
Again, we said we reached out to schools. Well, we didn’t have a conversation. We said, hey, you want some money here? I got to work on the Meadowmont project and the Southern Village one when I was Parks and Rec and Greenways (committee member), and we came up with a list of recommendations, and the council accepted them and incorporated – not all of them, but it became a better project because of that.
The soccer field for the school, that was part of the discussion. The greenways throughout there, the connectability. The walkability was a big piece of that, to the town center from just about anywhere, and from Dogwood Acres. We wanted walkability for them to come in, because they would be using schools and the town center. The town listened to that and incorporated those kinds of things.
Again, we brought people to the table, and we held forums and got input to say what do people want down here and how does it work and what are we missing in the rest of the town. So it became a better project.
And I helped fight tooth and nail for the school at Meadowmont, to make sure that they had a gym that the town could use, and it’s great. Every elementary school should have a full-size gym.
It ended up being a win-win. It’s a great school site, we got two soccer fields out of it we got a full-size gym. …
When you’re in the minority on an issue, you never get your way. Majority always wins, so that means your ideas are never going to come forward, and that’s not right. Some of those ideas are incredible, and they would be the solution and they’re workable, but majority outvotes, so I try to do more of a collective building process, than a straight-out vote. It’s what made Chapel Hill special that we used to encourage those different ideas, and like I said, it’s not just right or wrong. It’s a different way of looking at it.
The Edge: We’re considering piping the stream? Seriously? Should have been a commercial site, it’s a perfect location for it. Could have been a high-rise office building. It would support that there. Its an area that would be visible.
We need to be protective of our stream. Piping it should never be a question. It’s not right. We know that daylighting a stream is one of the things that works, so why would you put in something that you know is a negative.
Adding intense residential at that corridor – wasteful choice is not the right thing – a perfect spot for commercial, new technologies. Interesting enough, the hospital’s diversifying its facilities – they’ve got the one up at Waterstone, they’ve got East 54, they’re putting one down in Chatham County – so that means they’re sending their people out. They’re having patients and employees not come (to a central location) anymore. Do the same with a commercial project up there. The Edge should have been commercial.
Those corridors are good corridors for commercial business. The hospital picked up on that, and they’ve put them in strategic commercial corridors. They’re not in residential areas. They’re in commercial corridors. We could do the same thing. We have the benefit of the 15-501 corridor, the MLK corridor, the 15-501 south (corridor) now, we just did Obey Creek residential. That’s where I would like to see the commercial spaces go, on those big corridors. Easttowne could be redeveloped. Blue Cross and Blue Shield building could be redeveloped into an office park. It would be fabulous. We could encourage new technologies, there’s some fabulous things going on in commercial spaces now. Flexible office space doesn’t have to be Class A anymore. You can build it out as warehouse type … they don’t want fancy lights, the industrial look is fine. That’s what you get in downtown Durham. I know they had existing old mill buildings, but they haven’t put in granite countertops. It’s space that’s for trying experiments. Buildings with space like that that incubator companies and startups can move to that’s not the granite countertop, security guard at the front door with the lovely fountain going on. You pay for all that.
Ephesus Fordham: I live there. The fact that the council didn’t implement design standards. They needed a real designer, we needed to say what the priorities were. We missed the opportunity to … this was a strategic place to put affordable housing into the conversation. Real affordable housing, real numbers of units, make a real difference. Commercial development in there.
Form-based code, great idea, but we didn’t implement the final (pieces). Stormwater, we’re going do it later. What? We really struggle over in the Ephesus-Fordham area with flooding. It’s a big issue. Everyone wants to know that it’s going to be taken care of, it’s going to be a forethought and not an after-thought.
Where was the planning, where was the traffic (study) … Why did they cede their authority, I guess. Why did they give it away without having standards?
I just watched the Grove (project on MLK). I just watched it happen. Because a collaborative conversation was had, the developer and the committee agreed on an affordable housing component.
(if a developer balks) then you don’t accept his project. We can wait for the projects we want to come forward, we can say what we want, we can be choosy, we should be protective of the public benefit. That’s what the elected officials are supposed to be, protective of the public benefits. We can wait.
No one understands why we have to go 90 miles an hour down this 30 mile an hour road.
There’s some other parcels. Central West was approved but there’s some tweaking. Ephesus Fordham was approved with the form-based code, but it could be tweaked. There’s going to be more redevelopment. There’s going to be infill and redevelopment. We can define what that looks like. We don’t have to take every proposal that comes along.
Like 1609 (the East Franklin Street hotel proposal). I know the neighborhood is quite distressed about it. We’re looking at mortgaging town hall, we’re looking at moving our fire station. We’re doing stuff and I want to know where are we going. What is the grand plan? What is the destination? Is it about the journey?
Are taxes too high? What would you do?
The combination of (town, county and school) taxes is too high. We need to determine what our priorities are and how much we’re willing to pay for it. The bond referendum’s out there. They’re saying they won’t need to raise taxes to pay for it. I’d like to know that that’s for real. I don’t want to get into the bond, two years in, and say, whoops.
I want to work toward a sustainable budget. I don’t have access to all that information yet. I have to dive into it, but there are ways to make things work. Transit is one of the big ones. It needs to be looked at completely. Are we doing a good job? Are we moving our citizens around? Are we getting compensated enough for the university students and employees. What are we doing, how are we doing it and how much is it truly costing us? Federal money is drying up, state money is drying up for transit. It’s not good financial policy to replace your entire fleet at once. It should be staged. They’ll say, oh, economies of scale, getting a better rate on the leasing. No. Every governmental agency combines with some other governmental agency to get that discount. You don’t do all 42 buses at once. That makes no sense. You wouldn’t replace all your cars in your family at once, because you’ve got to do that again at the end of seven to 10 years. You’ll be doing the whole scenario over again. Not good strategy. We need long-term planning. So our taxes are very high and unfortunately, we’ll be gong through another revaluation). I have a feeling some of our prices are going to come down – I could be wrong – which means in order to stay revenue neutral, the taxes will have to go up. Then our taxes will be way too high, because it will affect the lesser expensive home owners more than it’s going to affect the expensive home owners. If you go down by percentages, the less-expensive homes go down less and have to pay more taxes.
I don’t know, it could be that it could come back neutral. I just don’t think so. Houses are not selling for the prices they’re listed for and not for what the tax bill says they’re worth. If we go through reval and the prices come down or the valuations come down, in order to stay revenue neutral – revenue netral is not for the citizen; revenue neutral is for the government – the tax rate will have to go up.
We’re going to have to take a hard look at costs for a lot of our programs and a lot of our services. I don’t like to make guesstimations on that, but there have got to be cost savings. I know at the county, we were constantly refinancing our loans, so that we would get a better interest rate. I don’t know if there are options still available. I don’t know what the town’s doing. That’s something that’s usually done in the accounting department with the blessing of the council.
There is delaying certain infrastructures – although we’ve delayed a lot of things already – but that’s how we chose to get through the 2008 downturn. We delayed things.
I would suspect that most of our costs are in staff. I don’t know how that works … as a person on the outside looking in, but this is what I work with, so once I get in there, I can give you a better estimate of what could be done.
I think that is something we’re not doing. This particular leadership does not like to look at the details, and we need to examine the details.
They’re looking at a new police station. They’re considering a developed commercial site already. No. You’re going to lose the revenue income from this already approved – it’s a pad at VilCom – that should be a commercial site. We should not take that off the tax rolls. It’s a prime commercial site. There’s got to be better options.
What changes would you like to make?
Some things are already in motion. I’d like to look at Ephesus Fordham and see what standards we could put into that, see where it could be tweaked. Tweaking not wholesale change. I want to look at the budget to see if there’s any opportunities. I want to collaborate with UNC more and figure out where we can work together on some issues, especially with their master plan review going on … or work with the school system. I know we need another elementary school. That’s the next project. I know that they’re going to convert Lincoln Center, and that’s what they’re looking at … we already know where our middle school is going, we already know what we can do for high school. Elementary is the next big question. That needs to be a joint conversation. We need to work with the county. Are there projects going on in the county that are going to help us all that we can be a part of. Is there space to move our startups into a county-owned or managed facility? Can we offer them that? Can we work together on those kinds of things?
We need to take things further. Again, we have some good ideas. We need to bring in… there are resources in our community and at UNC – there are great resources at UNC that can help us with these complex issues –and what I want to do is bring in those resources and have those conversations about the complex issues and see. I know there’s better ideas. I want to bring those better ideas to our town.
Talk about the fare-free bus system.
I like the concept of the fare-free bus system. I think its time to look and see if it’s working for us. Again, a conversation, bringing the parties to the table and saying … Justice United is out there surveying people on the buses right now. They’re asking them where they’re coming from, where they’re going, who they work for, how much they make, why they’re using the bus system, and is it working for them. We’re going to have real information about the real people. Right now, we just have numbers. This many get off, that many get off, like a math problem, but not really understanding who we’re transporting to where and why. I’d like to know that information. We have this hub and spoke system that brings people from outside straight downtown. Is that truly what works the best for people? Are we going to build more park-and-ride lots? We understand that 70 percent of the workforce of Chapel Hill comes from outside the district. Should our citizens pay for that? I don’t know. These are the questions that we need to ask ourselves. Or should they be paying? I’m not suggesting. I’d just like to see the difference in the numbers.
Would charging a dollar a ride be revenue positive for us, or would it be a negative? Would people quit using it? There’s other studies out there. We have resources to ask these questions. Could be we look at all this, keep fare-free, and but increase the rate of the park-and-ride. I don’t know the answers, but there’s definitely conversations and expertise to find those solutions.
There’s definitely a tipping point. People I think expect to pay something, to pay in a park-and-ride lot now. It’s become more what people do or know about. So there’s a tipping point. How much is it before you drive them out? If we’re not paying living wages at some of these places and people can’t afford to pay for parking, we need to figure that out too.
We have numbers of people that we’re bringing in. We need to look at that and determine if we implemented a fare for coming from outside the district into the district, would they use it? Are we servicing citizens within our community? I don’t know.
I do know if you live in Rogers Road, it’s really difficult to get into town, and if you work at Eastgate, you spend two hours getting six miles across there. Are there other opportunities that work better? Are we having a conversation with the hospital, if they truly are decentralizing, what is that doing? Are we adjusting for that?
Be strategic in your planning and your choices. That’s what I would want to bring in: Be strategic in looking at making no assumptions, being inclusive, collaborating and coming out with best strategies.
There have been some good decisions. That hotel, we have an economic calling card of university town, people come to UNC, UNC uses us as a calling card to say we have a great school system here for your kids and we have this wonderful, progressive college town atmosphere to live in. You can work at UNC and live in this wonderful park. You don’t have to live in Durham, you can live here. And if we change all that, they lose their economic driver to bring in good people as well. My husband’s department is always bringing people in from all over the world, and they try to sell not only their program that’s really good, but they sell these families to come here for the good school system and the ease of getting around, because it’s a town not a city. If we kill that off for each other, what happens?
What has the town gotten right?
The penny for housing. I think that was a good move. There’s some development projects that are good, that they incorporated, our standards and our values, I like the thought of trying to bring families downtown so Central West, great idea, great concept, not good implementation. So I think some of the concepts are good. Streamlining the development review process with form-based code, I think was a good idea. The implementation, it’s like we just didn’t take it one step further.
I want to see more downtown activities that are reflective of who we are – the art, the music, the lecture series on campus, but those have to be a joint collaboration.
I am so glad we fought Amendment One. I was so proud of this town. I was proud of this town for coming out to the polls, for speaking their minds, for saying even after Amendment One passed, we don’t care, we’re still going to give … our employers said we’re still going to give benefits to …I like the fact we stood our ground, and Orange County, too. We said we’re still going to give benefits to couples, families.
140 West is a good development. …The development itself, family friendly. It fits in, It’s got the retail on the lower level – it’s not all filled – it’s got the opportunity for retail growth, and it’s got the public space there. I like that. I like that a lot.
I don’t know what we’re going to see across the street, as far as the public space. Retail, apparently that’s been wiped out. I like that we’re trying to figure out how to preserve Northside and Pine Knolls. I’m not sure again if the implementation of what we did was … we didn’t listen to the community and see what they wanted to do, but I like the fact that we’re trying. We’ve got good intentions; weak on the follow-through.
The occupancy (limits) I think that was a wise move on our part to try to help preserve neighborhoods.
I think it’s good that we’re putting forward the ideas of more walkability and greenways in this bond package. I think that’s a good thing.
People are kind of shocked by the Charterwood project. Again, I think probably … the implementation of it. A good place to put it, but the way it was done and the amount of greenery (removed).
It depends on what you value here. If you’re working here or you want your kids in the schools here or you’re connected to the university somehow, then you want to stay close. If not, you’re willing to move. If you don’t work here and you don’t have kids in the school system, it’s a pretty expensive place to be.
What should the town have done differently?
I would like to have seen us really step up to the plate on the Rogers Road Community Center. I would have like for us to have had at least a work session with our Planning Commission and compass committees and all those. I’d like to see those work sessions happen where there’s actually discussion about why those committees … citizens that we appoint to those committees and ask to serve – we need to be having discussions about why they came to the recommendations they came to. We need to study it in great detail. The council is asking them to do this work because they are trusting that they are going to understand the depth and come back with recommendations, so I’d like to see work sessions on those things before they are just brought to council or you just have one person stand up for three minutes and say … That’s what I’d like to see us do differently. Have a work session where you have a real dialogue with that commission, even with a compass committee, whatever it is, that never happens. I don’t think that’s good.
When I was with the county, we had a policy that if a petition came in or a request came in, sometimes through email, we met in leadership and said this petition came in, is it something we can do something about, can we do some research, what staff person can we assign to this, or do we just say I’m sorry, it’s a great idea, but there’s nothing we can do about it. We logged in the response of where it is. All the commissioners would see that at every meeting; it was a spreadsheet of those things, and it would stay on there even after it was handled. Handled could mean that we wrote them an I’m so sorry letter, or it could mean going to staff before the review and an estimated date of when it was coming. We kept track of all this. You wouldn’t see a petition come in that wasn’t dealt with or responded to, and I’d like to see our government respond when people bring petitions to council. People want to feel heard, valued. They are the citizens that elect the bodies. They should be part of the conversation.
I know people hate the word “task force,” but they really work. Task force to study something and bring back … We work in isolation. We didn’t always, and we had people willing to serve. Look at your Planning Commission right now, people don’t want to renew their service, because they know their time is not valued. When you work so hard, and you turn in a report or you turn in recommendations, and they ignore every one of them, why would you want to serve? You’re not going to get a professor or a noted authority on a certain subject or even… they’re not going to waste their time. So you lose your expertise.
That’s the kind of strategic planning we need to be doing. Things that are going to benefit us for the long-term sustainable future. We cant keep building our way out of a budget deficit. They say our budget is balanced. It’s trying to balance itself on permitting fees. That’s where I think we could make use of our partners and stakeholders, we have expertise right here at this university, we have other entities willing to help.
We don’t create (commercial) spaces. We’re taking up the valuable spaces by putting more residential, limiting where we can put future commercial, so where is that strategy. We need to say, no, this is reserved for commercial, we want a commercial project here. Instead, we’re saying well all we can get is residential here now. That’s the only thing the market will provide right now.
I know I can do a good job at this. I know I can bring the voices to the table that need to come, and I don’t bring my own ego and agenda into the room. I want to find solutions. There are people with better ideas than I have for sure. … when a group of citizens feels that passionately about something, you should be paying attention to what’s going on. If maybe a conversation had been had early on about what is the driving force, we wouldn’t have this. We’re polarizing each other instead of figuring out what we can do to work together. That’s where I think a leadership style coming in and being collaborative, saying I want to hear what’s upsetting you. I want to hear what you think we’re doing wrong. I want to hear what you think we can do better, instead of saying we’re doing it this way, you get over it.
Meet the candidate
Name: Pam Hemminger
Age: 55
Address: 108 Boxwood Place, Chapel Hill
Online: pamhemminger.com; @PamForMayor
Occupation: Owner/manager of commercial real estate management company Windaco Properties LLC
Political experience: Orange County Board of Commissioners, 2008-12; Chapel Hill-Carrboro School Board, including as vice chairwoman and chairwoman, 2004-08; former member, Chapel Hill’s Greenways and Parks and Recreation commissions
Community service: chairwoman, Upper Neuse River Basin Association; vice chairwoman, Orange County Habitat for Humanity; vice chairwoman, Triangle Land Conservancy; treasurer, Strowd Roses Foundation; treasurer, Rainbow Soccer Association; chairwoman, Historic Moorefields Foundation
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