While creating a budget for the upcoming fiscal year, Chapel Hill officials set only one new goal: to update the town’s comprehensive plan.

Mayor Mark Kleinschmidt said the new plan will create a long-term vision for the town and establish guidelines to help the community reach its goals over a 10- to 15-year period.

The plan will address issues like where new development will occur, how to integrate other municipal functions into a changing community and how the town’s relationship with the University will evolve, he said.

It has been more than 10 years since the town has reevaluated its comprehensive plan. Since then, the town has faced dramatic changes.

“Everything is on the table for reassessment,” Kleinschmidt said.

The new issues

Although support for the previous plan was widespread, many officials agree that it fails to address issues that were not foreseen when the plan was created.

“The May 2000 plan is vague and appears to offer few tools which allow either planning staff, council members or citizens to evaluate land use applications,” Chapel Hill Town Council member Ed Harrison wrote in an email.

The changing face of development in the town is one issue that council member Matt Czajkowski said he is concerned about.

In the past few years, Czajkowski said several large, mixed-use developments like Greenbridge have been approved in the face of resident opposition.

“There is this general theory that the only way Chapel Hill is to grow is vertically,” he said. “A lot of people are asking, ‘Is this really the future we want?’”

Environmental awareness has also become increasingly prominent during the past 10 years but is not currently part of the plan.

Gordon Merklein, a member of the plan’s initiating committee and executive director of UNC real estate development, said he hopes the plan will look at ways to reduce dependence on oil.

“As a community, we need to look at different types of development that reduce our dependency on the automobile,” he said.

Development stages

Mary Jane Nirdlinger, assistant planning director for the town, said the new comprehensive plan is still in its early stages.

The plan’s initiating committee, which is made up of 15 residents intended to represent the diverse interests of the town, held its second meeting Tuesday night to begin determining the plan’s development process.

Nirdlinger said she hopes to see the plan adopted by June 2012.

With future conflicts sure to arise, Merklein said the new comprehensive plan should be updated periodically.

“In today’s world, things accelerate so rapidly that we need to look at the plan every five to 10 years,” he said.

Contact the City Editor at city@dailytarheel.com.