Several people who have been involved with the Chapel Hill 2020 process have written a letter to town leaders asking that the timeline be extended to take the extra time necessary to do a thorough and thoughtful job on the new comprehensive plan. Currently the entire timeline from kick-off to plan approval is less than 8 months, with just two more theme group meetings ahead of us.
The letter and list of signatories will be delivered to the 2020 co-chairs, the town manager, and the town council before the Council retreat at the beginning of February.
If you have participated in Chapel Hill 2020, whether online, at town
meetings or at other community meetings and you agree, please consider
reading and signing the letter (printed below) at:
We, the undersigned participants in Chapel Hill 2020, are excited about the potential of this process to envision and enable a healthy future for ourcommunity. We believe that a high level of public participation will make abetter plan, and we have invested our personal time and ideas in meetings and reaching out to our friends and neighbors about the plan.
We wish to express our concerns about the speed of this process. Other communities have commonly taken 18 months to multiple years to complete plans that are less ambitious than ours. We understand that there is a need to get valuable input for the priority-based budgeting process, but this cannot supersede the need for the plan to be thoughtful, inclusive, and complete.
We ask you to take action as soon as possible to extend the official timeline to end no sooner than February 2013, to commit to dedicating an upcoming Chapel Hill 2020 meeting to a discussion of process and outcomes, and to follow this meeting with changes as may be needed to address some of the big rocks in our way.
We thank you for your time and service to the community, and appreciate your listening to our concerns.