Chapel Hill Mayor Pam Hemminger spoke with 97.9 The Hill’s Andrew Stuckey on Thursday, July 14th. This is a transcript of her discussion about what she’s learning at Chautauqua Institution in western New York, Chapel Hill Parks, and the upcoming Putt-Putt Center. Listen to the full interview here.
Andrew Stuckey: We are joined on the phone today by the mayor of Chapel Hill, Pam Hemminger, Pam, how are you doing today?
Pam Hemminger: I’m doing well today. It’s another cool day up here in western New York. I know it’s hot there and I’m headed back home this weekend.
Stuckey: Well, since we’re already talking about you being up there, at the Chautauqua Institution, that was one of the things I wanted to ask about if there were any takeaways from this conference.
Hemminger: This week is about the future of human rights. It’s been totally fascinating about how we’ve had more refugees on the planet right now than we’ve ever had in the past, over a hundred million people displaced. And when you’re a refugee, you have no standing. So what kind of rights do you have in a foreign country, healthcare, water, living, any of those things…education. So, it’s been a fascinating conversation, but pretty scary to be honest with you and processing a lot of that. I just came off of a good conference call with some other cities in North Carolina about having some ordinances on single use plastic banning. The fact that other states are moving forward with this, and our state as a whole hasn’t wanted to take this on…it’s time for the cities to move forward with this kind of initiative. They have got some really productive ways of doing this where plastic bags would be banned, and then the stores would charge 10 cents for paper bags. So, it would really encourage people to bring in their own bags, of course, and then getting all the vendors to do away with single use plastic for takeout and those kinds of things to use compostable. Now we do this as a town for our own food truck rodeo, town events of any kind, all of our town facilities are using compostable products or reusable products of different kinds to try to reduce our garbage. We had zero garbage from the food truck rodeo. It was very impressive, and we want to make that the standard. So the country is really facing a crisis with single use plastics. I know our community is very interested in this topic to figure a way to help lead the path that we were on with Asheville and Boone and Durham County. How do we get this growing statewide?
Stuckey: Do you think that’s something that you’ll expect the town council to take up in the fall?
Hemminger: Yes. I’d like to talk to my colleagues about it this fall, as I get more information. Asheville has crafted some ordinances that they would like to share with folks, and it’ll take a lot more community outreach and things like that, but how do we move forward without getting preempted by the state to shut it all down? So, we’ve talked that through too. It’s an interesting situation. South Carolina has moved ahead on this initiative and other states, California, Virginia, all folks around us and national chains are moving forward on this. So that helps lead the way as well. But, we need to do something because it truly is a crisis.
Stuckey: We’re joined on the phone by Chapel Hill Mayor Pam Hemminger, who is speaking to us from New York where she’s at a conference.
Hemminger: It’s called Chautauqua. It’s a learning Institute and you walk to all the events and lectures and every week has a different theme and there’s different lectures during the day, different classes you can take. And then there’s usually music in the evening, so it works out nicely. And I’ve done this for years. Like I learn all kinds of interesting things that I bring back home and, sort of broaden your horizons, get out of Chapel Hill and learn some new things.
Stuckey: Definitely sounds amazing. Any other takeaways from there before we move on to a different topic?
Hemminger: I think I’m going to need to process some more. A lot of it’s pretty overwhelming because it really makes you think globally about what’s going on instead of just your community. And it does make you realize that we have a lot of things that are really great about our community, but a lot of things we really need to work on as well. Hearing about refugees and equity and rights, female athletes, all this stuff is just fascinating and thinking bigger and broader.
Stuckey: Excellent. Glad you’re able to do that and bring some of those ideas back to Chapel Hill. I wanted to change gears a little bit here and talk about summertime a little bit. The kids are out of school, so a lot of people start making their way to the parks this time of year. I wanted to talk about a possible splash pad coming to Chapel Hill parks that I’ve heard some talk of. Could you clarify what the circumstance and the timeline on that is?
Hemminger: So, we know the community is very interested in this and we were hoping to be further in our ARPA money discussions about this kind of initiative. We’ve been researching different splash pads. We’ve been researching which park facility it would fit best into. So we’ve about finished up the feasibility study and hopefully they’re coming forward to council with some options which council will debate on what to do. Council did approve spending some ARPA dollars now to do a few things, to move us forward in other areas. So, we still have work to do on splash pad, on inclusive playground. People are interested in all kinds of things, and we know the community’s been using our park system a lot more since COVID. They have gotten out and discovered things. And we’re trying to do a lot more things, a lot more family programming as well. For summer activities, the movies under the stars is a very popular event. I encourage people to look at that, it’s over at the Forest Theater. It’s a nice place to go and be with folks, and to see a movie outdoors. It’s free to everyone.
Stuckey: I was talking to Carrboro mayor Damon Seils about parks and rec last week since it is parks and rec month, in fact. I’m actually fairly familiar with the parks in Carrboro and not very familiar with the parks in Chapel Hill. So, I was wondering if you could just pick a park and tell me about a park that I should go visit in Chapel Hill.
Hemminger: Cedar Falls has a lot to offer for everyone. We have rectangular fields. We have the artificial turf over there that needs to be replaced. There’s some baseball fields over there. We have a playground area near the parking lot. We have tennis courts that are hopefully going to be resurfaced pretty soon, and then great walking trails back down to the creek. So again, a lot to offer a lot of different people over there. I love to go to Homestead Park as well. The aquatic center is a big feature there, but we also again have baseball fields, rectangular fields, some playground area and two dog parks over there for big and small dogs. And then you have Southern Community Park with the rectangular fields, a big pavilion for picnics and for people to have gatherings under that as well, and a walking trail back through there that’s really wonderful. We have some smaller parks and the community center park has the wonderful big playground and the community center itself, but it also is the start of two different Greenways. So you can park there or ride bikes over there and go either direction of the Bolin Creek trail or over to the trail that goes up to the Forest Theater. So a lot of fun there. All the parks located on the park locator have all the orange county parks and the different facilities they have on them. So let people check those out. It’s fun and you should go try our parks out.
Stuckey: I definitely will. We are visiting with Pam Hemminger, Chapel Hill Mayor. I also have to ask while we are on the subject of parks, I’m hearing a lot of buzz from the community about what’s going to happen to the old American Legion site. Is there any update on what that situation is?
Hemminger: So council brought that forward for a work session discussion. We’re going to be moving forward with more staff, putting more information together this fall. We had an original layout that was done by our urban designer back when we gathered all the information from some input charettes we had from a task force that we had of just the different facilities people would like to see on this side of town. We do need a park on the east side of town and with all the new housing coming in over there, there’s a lot of apartments and people need that green space. There’s also a great desire by council to look at an affordable housing option, and to possibly sell off a portion for some other housing over there as well. Those items will be discussed, and it will be out in the public for people to make their comments and give input. This fall is the goal as we work towards that as well. It’s a great opportunity. We land banked it when we didn’t know we’ve had any funding to put anything on the park and now we’re going to be taking a re-look to see if there’s opportunities. Now, I would love to have us go out for a parks and rec bond. At some point in the near future, we have to find out what our debt ceiling is after we do our new municipal services building. We do know we want to do another affordable housing bond, but we’d have to know what our debt limit is first. We have to get through that process, but I know that we need to. We’re well aware. We need to update a lot of our parks facilities. We’ve fallen pretty far behind in keeping them updated. And before we add new things, we want to make sure we can sustain the things that we already have.
Stuckey: Right. We’re joined by Pam Hemminger, Chapel Hill Mayor. Apparently, I’m going to be asking you questions from the point of view of my eight-year-old son, because I’m following up splash pad and parks questions with a question about a putt-putt fun center.
Hemminger: Oh, it’s going to be great. They’re going through their permitting process with our staff. As soon as they get the go ahead, they will start. We hope that’s pretty soon. It’ll be up in the Northern part of town. There will be an arcade building as well. The putt-putt and go-karts will be electric. It’ll be a great family venue. The property next door sold as well to a group that does flexible commercial space. I am meeting with them to talk about a possible family-friendly, maybe dog-friendly, brewery up there as part of their flexible space. So a great area for people to come together, be outdoors, go to the putt-putt center because eventually the property across the street, which the county bought to turn into athletic fields will become a place. I think it’s going to be a great destination in the future.
Stuckey: Yeah. Sounds like it’s all happening on the north side of town all of a sudden.
Hemminger: Yeah. Well, it’s really important to think long term, and that’s where line banking really comes in to be helpful when you do those things now. You can plan for the future, but you already have the property. As we know, property is becoming more and more scarce in our community. We feel really proud of the steps we’ve taken towards acquiring parcels for these kinds of plans. And I think you’re going to see more of that coming forward as we figure out how we grow with our new complete communities’ sessions that we’re doing. We are re-envisioning how we grow, what we look like in the future. I did want to share that we’ve gotten some comments recently about our COVID numbers in the community. I want to assure people that we are staying on top of that. We are not looking at putting the mask mandate out there. We know our numbers are climbing, but in checking with the hospital systems, they are not climbing in significant numbers of people from Orange County. We do want to urge people to be cautious. If you have concerns or you have someone who is immunocompromised, please feel free to wear your mask. Tell your friends to wear their masks, but we are not putting the mask mandate out there right now. The numbers don’t warrant it at this point, but we do want to urge caution and let everyone be respectful of everyone’s choices and how they are cautious about this.
Stuckey: Thank you for the update on that. We’ve got about 30 seconds left if there’s anything else you wanted to slide in there.
Hemminger: There are always good things going on in the summer. I know we’ve had some summer storms come through. We are monitoring water levels, those kinds of things. Our staff is always working really hard to make sure our community stays safe and informed. Our construction projects are still underway. We’ve been running a little behind with the weather, but things are still on track for the original finished dates. The Estes Road project, the repaving of West Franklin Street and some other things going on. So, everyone just knows that we spend our summer trying to catch up on some of those projects as well. We’re looking forward to having a rest of a hopefully calm summer.
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