Carrboro Mayor Damon Seils spoke with 97.9 The Hill’s Brighton McConnell on Friday, June 10. This is a transcript of their discussion of Eliazar Posada being sworn in to the town council, the passage of the Carrboro Connects Comprehensive Plan, and more. Listen to the full interview here.
Brighton McConnell: Carrboro Mayor Damon Seils joins me in the studio today. Happy Friday Damon, how are you?
Damon Seils: Good. And I’m glad to be back in person.
McConnell: Yes, it is great to see you again. And we have a whole bunch to catch up on because it’s been one of those weeks where it’s clear we’re hitting the summer stretch and there’s just tons of stuff going on. And that includes the Carrboro Town Council. I pulled up the video from Tuesday’s meeting and was like, oh my goodness, four and a half hours. It was the quintessential meeting of so much stuff to get through as the town council was looking to wrap up agendas before a bit of a summer break. So I’ll say dealer’s choice. What highlights would you like to hit first from Tuesday’s meeting?
Seils: Well, I have to say the highlight was our welcoming a brand new council member to the town council, Eliazar Posada, who was elected a few weeks ago in the special election during the primary season. Eliazar got thrown in at the deep end there. We celebrated him joining us, had some time to welcome him, and then we got to work.
McConnell: Yeah. And no surprise that he was ready because Eliazar seems always prepared and is so plugged in that he was ready to make some informed decisions.
Seils: Yeah. The other highlight for me was the town council finally coming to the point of adopting the Carrboro Connects Comprehensive Plan. And coincidentally, Eliazar was a member of the planning board before joining the Town Council and was also a member of the steering committee for the Carrboro Connects process. So it was a nice way to round out the end of that two-year or more process by having him cast one of his first votes on the council in support of Carrboro Connects.
McConnell: Yeah, it was great timing. I’m hoping that you can speak to the value of having a perspective of a younger community member like Eliazar on the town council? I think we’re seeing this a little bit in Chapel Hill too, with Tai Huynh being on the council there, but what kind of benefits are brought to an elected body and specifically local government when you have a younger community member get elected and join the ranks?
Seils: Well, both Carrboro and Chapel Hill are remarkably diverse when it comes to age, race, ethnicity and socioeconomic status. We have really an amazing diversity of voices to be represented in our elected bodies. And that just makes it so much more important to have voices like Eliazar’s. Especially when it’s not simply the communities he represents as an individual and his own personal identities that he talks about in his work, but it’s also the fact that he brings a lot of experience in the community. He has worked with young people throughout his career in nonprofit service with El Centro and other groups and in particular LGBTQ youth. He has worked extensively with local and regional Hispanic and Latino communities. So he brings to the table not just his own voice, his own identity, but also the fact that he’s been doing community organizing work and community building work in those communities for a long time.
McConnell: You mentioned Carrboro Connects, figured talking about the Comprehensive Plan would be on the agenda today. But how does it feel to know that this incredibly long-term project has now officially come to fruition, but it is also kind of a living document and there’s a lot of growth for the town to do since this is just the framework for that eventual goal?
Seils: Right. It’s a guiding document, a framework kind of document. And therefore it has to be a living document and it’s meant to guide decision making over the next 20 or more years. But it’s more than the two years that we spent as a community working on it and that our staff, in particular, spent leading it, but also the many years before that that are reflected in other adopted plans and policies of the town council that now fall under the sort of unifying umbrella of Carrboro Connects as a comprehensive plan. So it’s hard to overstate how important it is as a document and as a sort of a guiding star for the town and for the community.
I had a chance to talk briefly with our town’s planning director after the meeting ended on Tuesday night. I think she was both excited about the fact that we were at this point of finally adopting the plan, but also recognizing that now we actually have to implement it. And there’s a lot of work to come for that. So our responsibility as a town council is to make sure that our town manager and our staff have the resources they need to actually implement the plan.
McConnell: It’s a pretty impressive document. If you go through the list of the plans that the Town of Carrboro already has in place that will now need to be updated with some of the goals and framework from the comprehensive plan, like the climate action plan and racial, racial justice equity plans, it’s pretty impressive and it is definitely an achievement for it to be passed.
Seils: Well, I think one of the things that any comprehensive plan does, and certainly what Carrboro Connects aspires to do is it recognizes implicitly that all of those other adopted plans and policies are intertwined with each other. You can’t have a comprehensive bicycle transportation plan and a set of public transportation goals and policies and a set of policies around affordable housing and climate action and racial equity, all of which are these important goals for our community, without recognizing that those are all connected. You don’t advance racial equity without advancing affordable housing. You don’t advance public transportation and growth and residential development without advancing climate action, right? So these are all related and Carrboro Connects recognizes that at its core.
McConnell: I think that there was something just a little bit later in the meeting that does a good job of overlapping and reflecting some of that decision making, which was the town council deciding during a public hearing of the budget, which is not yet finalized, that you want to try and set aside some funding to help out the IFC shelter on West Main Street yet again, correct?
Seils: Right. We did hold a sort of final public hearing on the upcoming town budget. Normally with a public hearing, we wouldn’t give formal direction to the staff. It’s really meant as a time to hear from the public and then we let the staff go ahead and do their work to bring back a decision item for the town council. But the council did take that moment to recognize that we had been asked by the IFC to help Chapel Hill and the county support the work that they’ve been doing on behalf of all of the local governments to provide emergency shelter services for people experiencing homelessness. So we will see that reflected in our budget and next week’s meeting will be a work session of the council to finalize our decisions and our priorities around the budget so that we can adopt it in a couple of weeks.
McConnell: We already have just a few minutes left. It seems like it’s flown by. And we haven’t even gotten to some of the exciting stuff that happened over the weekend! We had the Pride Promenade that was both Chapel Hill and Carrboro and a house dedication the same afternoon Saturday. Do you want to talk about either of those?
Seils: Well, Saturday was a great day. It was a beautiful day weather-wise of course, but also we did kickoff Small Town Pride, which is Chapel Hill and Carrboro coming together once again to celebrate Pride with a series of fun events and celebrations throughout the month. There was that promenade on Saturday in Chapel Hill, a lot of fun. Some of us from the Carrboro side of the line then went back home to join Habitat for Humanity to dedicate four new homes to Habitat families that have been finished being constructed. It’s a really important project for the town because the town actually provided a large grant from our affordable housing fund to complete that project.
The four homes already have families who are moving in so it’s really exciting. They were all there for the day. We had several town council members there, several members of the community folks from habitat volunteers who actually helped build the homes. And it was a great celebration. We have a lot more Pride Month celebrations coming along this month, too, including this Saturday which is Latinx Pride which is a celebration of the LGBT community in the Latino community. That’s on the town commons on Saturday afternoon and evening, and then more to come after that.
McConnell: It feels like it’s just a hopping time of the year for both towns. Thanks so much for the time and hope you enjoy your weekend.
Seils: See you next week.
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