Maintaining Momentum

My first term was full of firsts for me and for Carrboro. We adopted our first ever Comprehensive Plan. With the Drakeford Library Complex, we completed the town’s first new building in decades. We took important steps to modernize and stabilize our governmental organization and hired critical leaders to advance our priorities of climate action and race equity. To make sure we keep building momentum, we need to continue refining our approach to land use, reimagining our approach to public safety, improving our connectivity and delivery of bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure, and showing the region what it means to be a town fighting for progressive values in today’s political climate.

Land Use, Affordability, and Our Approach to Housing

During my first term, our Council began the process of revising our Land Use Ordnance to make sure new building better reflects our community values and creates a sustainable, accessible supply of housing and economic vitality. Over the coming eighteen months, we will workshop and finalize the new Land Use Ordnance, which will be a critical step to creating more and more affordable housing. We need to add units at every part of the housing market: apartments, townhomes, duplexes and triplexes, and more thoughtful single-family housing are all sorely needed to keep pace with demand. And while we know that increasing supply can have beneficial effects on the market, we also know the market will not provide affordable housing at the scale desperately needed to do right by all of our neighbors. As we continue to use our zoning strategies to secure affordable units, we also need to pivot to a more aggressive strategy of land acquisition and gap financing, using town resources to meaningfully enable transformative projects for lower income residents.

Balancing these priorities does not mean sacrificing character—in fact, I believe it does the opposite. As we seek to build denser and often taller projects, we will engage extensively with the community to codify aesthetic guidelines that feel like home in terms of materials, scale, and design. We will codify stormwater best practices that prioritize thoughtful footprints, minimizing impervious surfaces and prioritizing native vegetation. We will connect development with alternative modes of transportation and infrastructure to reflect our pedestrian-friendly character and climate priorities. Carrboro’s character has always been dynamic, and preserving that character means reflecting our values in the ways we grow our town together.

Care-first Public Safety

One of the most important developments of my first term was our convening of a Community Safety Task Force, which brought together residents with public safety expertise, lived experience, and longtime community knowledge to research how municipalities are reducing negative impacts from public safety and policing while putting care and well-being at the center of our approach. Over the next four years, we need to continue increasing the resources we put behind these recommendations—we’ve made initial hires of social workers within our Police Department, and we need to continue to shift resources to non-armed, non-uniform crisis call diversion, care response teams, and care navigation.

Connectivity, Street Design, and Bicycle/Pedestrian Infrastructure

Carrboro has a longstanding reputation as one of the best places to walk and ride a bicycle in North Carolina, but we have a lot of work to do to realize our connectivity goals with infrastructure that is safe for residents from 8 to 80 years old. We need to implement NACTO guidelines whenever possible in our new construction, building roads designed for safer access to non-vehicular modes of transportation and making our shared spaces more human-centric. We have to put resources behind our Safe Routes to School plans and the Carrboro Bicycle Plan, both of which have projects that need prioritization in coming budget cycles. As our town’s representative on the Triangle West Transportation Planning Organization, I’ve been a tenacious advocate both for the importance of these projects and of improving the efficiency with which we build them. Going forward, we need to develop strategies for delivering these vital projects as our state resources are badly strained by Hurricane Helene and our federal government restricts resources for sustainable and accessible community projects. 

Carrying Carrboro Values Forward 

It’s no secret that higher levels of government are creating new challenges for putting Carrboro’s ideals into practice. We need to stay flexible, creative, and proactive to find ways to guarantee we remain a community where LGBTQIA+, Black and brown, and immigrant neighbors can thrive. We need to put town resources into organizing efforts that empower our citizens to build truly democratic institutions, and bring new and underrepresented voices into leadership both inside and outside of our government. We need to consider more innovative tactics like the suit our council brought against Duke Energy for its role in climate deception, seeking damages that can implement our climate policies at the expense of the corporate polluters contributing to the planetary crisis we face. Just as with our housing, our safety, and our infrastructure, modeling our values in our region and broader political systems will require us to find new tools to turn our town structures into an organizing force for the safety and dignity of all our residents.