Monday night’s Chapel Hill Town Council meeting stretched into Tuesday morning as members, residents and protestors discussed controversial topics ranging from Northside to the Yates building raid.
After months of discussion and planning, the Chapel Hill Town Council passed the Northside and Pine Knolls Community Plan on Monday.
The series of land-use ordinances, which were adopted to preserve the character of the neighborhoods and make housing more affordable, includes a parking restriction that limits the number of parked vehicles to four per property. The limit will be enforced with written warnings and $100 per day fines.
The parking restriction will go into effect Sept. 1 while the rest of the ordinances will be enforced starting in February.
Several residents said they support the restrictions and hope they will reduce the amount noise and pollution in the neighborhoods, which they said often comes from student renters.
Pine Knolls housing services manager Loryn Clark acknowledged that the plan has some flaws.
“We still need to work out the details of the enforcement piece,” she said.
Notable
Several members of the Occupy Chapel Hill movement were present at the meeting. Many occupiers showed up beforehand to protest outside town hall in response to the town’s review of the Nov. 13 police raid of the former Yates Motor Company Building.
UNC researcher Ginnie Hench said an independent review of the raid in addition to the town’s internal review is necessary to maintain a system of checks and balances between town government bodies and the public.
“The occupy movement around the nation needs to be bigger than the protesters against the police,” she said.
Quotable
Council Member Jim Ward said he wants an improved relationship with University to obtain student addresses in order to ensure no more than four people live in each single-family residence.
“We don’t want to have to get their blood type and observe their comings and goings for a week to figure that out,” he said.
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