About a hundred of Orange County’s movers and shakers are in Athens, Georgia, this week for the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Chamber of Commerce’s biennial Inter-City Visit. Every two years, the Chamber leads a three-day visit to a city similar to Chapel Hill: attendees meet with town leaders, tour the community, and draw lessons about how other towns do their business and solve their problems.

This year’s ICV began Sunday (with a brief stopover in Greenville, SC) and runs through Tuesday. WCHL’s Aaron Keck is there.

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Dispatch From Athens: Part I | Part II | Part III

The idea behind the Inter-City Visit is to tour a city and really examine it in depth. But because of our unique schedule, today was our only full day in Athens. So we had a lot of information thrown our way today.

How do I begin to make sense of it all?

The short answer is: I can’t. See, all I can do is tell you one story. But the truth is that everyone here – and there are a hundred of us – is drawing different lessons, remembering different points, focusing on different things. (This is how it’s intended to be, by the way.) So now, at the end of our one day, we have some folks thinking about how to bring a convention center to Chapel Hill, like Athens’ Classic Center…we have some folks thinking about Athens’ parking-deck policy (free for the first half hour, and you can add time on your smartphone)…we have some folks admiring the investments Athens is making in its public schools…and still other folks are talking about how they can use the Athens experience to make Chapel Hill/Carrboro a more bike-friendly place. And then there are 95 other people with their own ideas.

So no, there’s no way I can tell you the whole story.

But a couple big overarching points are emerging.

The first is manufacturing. Two years ago the ICV visited Bloomington, Indiana, and I was struck then by the amount of light-industrial business they had. Same deal here in Athens, where UGA is still the biggest employer but 13 percent of residents work in manufacturing.  (We heard from Ryan Moore, the town’s economic development director – and his entire presentation revolved around how Athens was pulling in light industry. None of this how-to-bring-in-a-Costco talk.) The new hotness is Caterpillar, the construction-equipment manufacturer, which just moved a plant to Athens from Japan – a $200 million investment that’ll bring about 1,400 jobs to the community.

And the second point is form-based code. By now, if you follow Chapel Hill politics, you get the gist: in a form-based code system, rather than forcing developers to get special approval for each individual project, the community sets guidelines and parameters in advance – “here’s what we want to achieve in this part of town” – and then developers can build as they please, provided the project’s specifications meet those pre-established guidelines. (As Mark Kleinschmidt put it, the idea is to “be clear about our rules – and then get out of the way.”) In theory, at least, it’s a way to streamline the approval process, reduce the onus on developers, and make the town-developer relationship a little less adversarial. Chapel Hill is trying this now in one segment of town, Ephesus-Fordham, and even within those limits it’s extremely controversial – but in Athens, form-based code has been standard operating procedure since 2000. (Said county planning director Brad Griffin: “it was the desire of the community, in 2000, to adopt a set of standards and let them work.” That’s been the state of things ever since.)

Based on what I’m hearing here, can I say that form-based code is the future in Chapel Hill? Well – it’s worth remembering that the Chamber of Commerce is hosting this tour, so it’s bound to be a business-friendly affair no matter what. And even our most gung-ho proponents of form-based code don’t insist it’s the right approach everywhere in town. (Plus, it was a little easier for Athens to implement the form-based approach: the process was already fairly streamlined, and they didn’t make too many changes to what they were already demanding.) But there certainly does seem to be a lot of support for it, and that support extends to business leaders, elected officials, and everyone in between. There were cheers from our people when the Athens folks discussed the process, knowing murmurs when the Athens folks mentioned their contingent of naysayers. (Not everyone was quite that audible, but you get the idea.) I double-checked with a couple people whose work focuses on social justice, people who’d be the first to raise the red flag if they felt our values were being railroaded by development – and they seemed fine with it too, at least to a significant extent. We’re still waiting to see how this experiment plays out in Ephesus-Fordham, but these Chapel Hillians are largely on board with form-based code, and our meetings with the Athenians are only reinforcing that view.

So how does this play out in practice? In Athens, once a proposal comes forth, it takes about nine days for the various departments to review it for compliance with the code – then another period of revision before approval. Members of the public can sit in on the meetings, but there’s no public comment (since the public already had its say back when the guidelines were set). All told, it takes about 3-6 months from initial proposal to final approval – much much shorter than in Chapel Hill, where it often takes years. Result: in 2012-13, seventeen big projects got approved – including Caterpillar and several big mixed-use downtown projects – totaling $295 million in value. (For perspective’s sake: Greenbridge was a $50 million project; 140 West was $40 million.) It’s a pretty big deal.

And for serious, I can’t overstate how quickly our folks livened up when the topic was raised. They – like – this idea.

And perhaps with good reason. Yesterday I wrote about our trek through Greenville, South Carolina, a very nice town that struggles to remain affordable. We’ve got the same issue in Orange County. How do we address it? One economic development official reminded me today that “affordability” isn’t just a question of cheap housing: it’s also about holding down the cost of transportation; keeping taxes at a manageable level; and creating good-paying jobs, ideally close to town so employees don’t have to shell out for gas to get to work and back. Achieving all those things requires new developments – multiple new developments – and that in turn requires a more friendly, less adversarial relationship between public and private interests. (Set the basic parameters, he said, and then give developers some flexibility to create a plan that works for them.) “And if we spent less time poring over every development,” he said – I’m paraphrasing – “we’d have more time to focus on the social justice issues we care about.”

Fair point. Is that how it plays out in Athens? Yes, to a degree. We were all wowed this morning by Philip Lanoue, the superintendent of schools here in Clarke County – who’s made huge strides in eliminating the district’s achievement gap by leveraging sales tax dollars, forging public-private partnerships, and (most importantly) setting clear and high expectations for all kids across race and class lines. They provide tablets and laptops to students; they’ve established a dual-enrollment program with the local community college, Athens Tech; they’ve spent $400 million on needed repairs and upgrades (CHCCS is asking for $160 million); they’re providing health insurance and healthy food for kids who need it – because “if you’re going to close the achievement gap you have to have healthy children” – and in the process they’ve raised the graduation rate among African-Americans from 35 percent to 70 percent in 10 years’ time. This in an extremely poor district, where the poverty rate is 34.9 percent, the per capita income is less than $20,000, and 82 percent of students – 82 percent! – are on free or reduced lunch programs. Amazing things can be done. (Based on tours of the Clarke County schools, CHCCS folks are heading home with a renewed commitment to fix their infrastructure, and there are already conversations with county commissioners on how to make that financially viable as a long-term project.)

But even with all those positives, the image of Athens that’s beginning to emerge is one of missed opportunities. That’s not the official narrative, of course – as you’d expect, we’re getting a very rosy picture from all the Athenian town leaders. But we’re noticing things. The big new mixed-use downtown developments are all geared around high-end student housing, less so for workforce housing. As far as we’ve seen, there’s no African-American representation among any of the town leaders, and this is a town with a near majority black population. The poverty rate is quite high, 35 percent; efforts are being made to address it but there’s little indication that things are improving. Some of us are hearing less-than-ideal things about wage levels at that Caterpillar plant. And perhaps the most striking thing, that we’ve all noticed: there don’t seem to be any students anywhere. Or anyone at all, for that matter. We’re staying right in downtown Athens, UGA’s right there – on a comparable night in Chapel Hill, Franklin Street would be packed. Here in Athens, the sidewalks are empty. We can’t make heads or tails of it.

All of which is to say: Athens is a great town, but we’re heading back to Orange County with our heads held high. We have our foibles – and they’ve still got one more day to knock our socks off – but right now I think most of us would say we’ve got Athens beat.

But Athens also has us beat on certain levels as well. Greenville too.

So the question is still open:

What happens if we take Athens’ streamlined development process, Greenville’s focus on public-private partnerships, and apply them to a town with a real commitment to social justice?

Judging from our group’s reaction to the form-based code in Athens, we may well be spending the next few years finding out for ourselves.

(Then again, I remember folks toasting the imminent end of the drawn-out development process two years ago in Bloomington too. So it may not be riiiight away.)

Column originally posted September 23, 2014, 3:43 a.m.