Notice I did not put “Hand Wringing” in the headline. That’s not what Chapel Hill 2020 is about.

This Thursday, December 1, at 4:30 pm, the Chapel Hill 2020 stakeholders will meet to begin setting goals for the new comprehensive plan for our community. If you have not yet participated in this visioning and planning process, please join us Thursday at Frank Porter Graham Elementary School.

Here’s the framework for this Theme Group Working Session. We will all meet together for a presentation by Town Manager Roger Stancil on the Fiscal State of the Town — the budget, costs of various services, projections. The information will be easy to grasp and very helpful to all Theme Groups planning the community’s future.

Then each Theme Group will repair to a separate classroom and the co-chairs/facilitators will ask the groups to begin the goal-setting process. Some draft goals will be on the table, based on comments from all the earlier meetings. They are meant to kick off discussion. The floor will be completely open to suggested goals from stakeholders. If a goal passes the “Why?” test, it moves on to the “How?” test.

Back to the subject of Big Rocks… At our November 19 meeting at Chapel Hill High School, we discussed the importance of the big issues and major themes. One Big Rock we identified is the town’s fiscal challenges.

Like the US government, the NC government, many businesses and many distressed homeowners, the Town of Chapel Hill has its own “new normal”. Chapel Hill is a municipal corporation with mandated duties and a legal requirement to balance its budget annually.

Yet we also have felt the recession through reduced sales tax revenue, and we may face a decrease in property values. Federal and state support to cities and towns is uncertain and likely to decline. Our transit system, for example, would be vulnerable to a federal funding shift.

In the next budget year, 2012 – not 2020 – the Mayor and Council will face the choice of raising taxes or reducing services. This fiscal challenge is at our doorstep.

In setting this citizen-based comprehensive planning process in motion, I believe we have already bypassed the hand-wringing stage. We know we may have to prioritize town services. But we are actively engaged in identifying both challenges and opportunities. Faced with this “new normal,” we are searching for innovation in the way we do things to make our community as vibrant and healthy as possible, in all respects.

Hope to see you Thursday.

p.s. If you missed Mitch Silver’s talk on demographics and planning, you can catch it for the next two weeks at the following site: http://chapelhill.granicus.com/ViewPublisher.php?view_id=9

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