Changing Paradigms

This week we saw the 'messiness' of appointing someone to a position that should have been filled through election. The public debate of the Carrboro Alderman was painful, circular, and at times appeared to be downright, heavy-handed bullying. For a while there was two groups on the board, publicly defined by the individual that group was supporting for the open seat.

The ideological differences between those two groups is of critical importance for members of the community to understand. Too bad those different positions were so singularly attributed to representation for the annexation area, to be referred to as northeast Carrboro from here on out (thanks for the suggestion Mark!). Certainly that was a consideration, but I think it was masking the deeper divide on issues of growth.

On one hand, there is the 'go slow, minimize change' group. Those individuals are working to maintain the status quo of Carrboro as a small, funky bedroom community of Chapel Hill. In many ways, this is the group I most closely identify with. At least, it is the group that has my emotional support. The other group is working from the assumption that future growth within the urban services boundary will take place in Carrboro and that we need to acknowledge the inevitability of change and to plan for it. While I don't like the way change is destroying the small-town, close knit community feeling of Carrboro, I also intellectually understand that denying this position will force development outside the urban services boundary and result in sprawl/environmental degradation.

Donella Meadows says that 'If you want to understand the deepest malfunctions of systems, pay attention to the rules, and to who has power over them.' (Rule 4 of Leverage Points) What do we know now that the 'no/limited growth' group has control of the rules?

• Environmental regulations within Carrboro zoning control will become stricter. On the surface this is hardly objectionable. And yet, we don't live in a bubble. What happens to growth that is kept out of Carrboro? We certainly won't stop it from occurring, so we should assume it will go where there are fewer restrictions, such as Chatham County. They may be downstream from our waterways, but their traffic certainly flows northward.

• The stock of affordable housing will increase. Again, hardly objectionable. And yet, focusing on supply through zoning ordinances/policy is tied so closely to development of luxury housing that we should be prepared for the current trend of decreasing proportions of low-to-moderate income residents to high-income residents to continue, creating a more economically bifurcated population.

• Taxes will most likely continue to increase. I'm not a no-government supporter. I don't object to paying for taxes that provide valuable human services and environmental protection. I do mind wasting my hard earned money on unsustainable infrastructure and administrative services. I definitely object to the impact annual tax increases is having on the composition of the community. Gentrification and out-migration of Carrboro's African-American population will leave this community looking more like Cary than Carrboro.

• The cultural divide between old and new Carrboro will turn local government into a war zone. The repercussions of the appointment process will have a significant and detrimental long-term impact on old Carrboro. There's no way to predict whether appointing someone from the newly annexed northeast Carrboro area would have smoother over the transition, but there is no doubt in my mind that the failure to appoint someone with a legitimate claim to representing those who were not able to vote will have a major impact on the 2007 election. Fortunately the residents of northeast Carrboro do have a strong environmental and social justice ethic, but they will change us in other ways.

Up until now, local growth has been caught up in a series of postive feedback loops ("any place where the more you have of something, the more you have the possibility of having more"). The more growth we see, the more pressure is placed on local government and human service agencies, the higher the taxes go, the more we need development to support the burden of growth. The reputation of our school system contributes to those growth pressures. The better our kids do on national tests, the more development occurs to support wealthy families who want their kids to go to school here.

What steps/policies will the new majority on the BOA undertake to break the growth cycle? Will they be successful or will they create more turmoil? Will they acknowledge the complexities or fall back on positions they've shared in previous contexts? And how much pressure will they feel to act quickly before the 2007 election? Will they dance with the system or try to control it?

The question that can never be answered but which we should never forget, is how the use of appointment rather than election impacts everything that happens over the next couple of years. Yes, I know there was no way around appointment. But the appointment could have been made on the basis of the last election by appointing the 4th runner up. That one little decision may be the one flap of a seagull's wings for Carrboro.

And where does Dan Coleman fit in all this? Without his participation in the electoral process and having been subjected to the intense questioning of groups like the Sierra Club, we really don't know but we might have a clue. In one of his pre-campaign season editorials, he speculated about a candidate of the future: "In the future, Carrboro may find itself on the horns of a dilemma: On the one hand, a marvelous case study that small really can be beautiful; on the other, a small town facing the challenge of trying to affordably meet the expectations of an increasingly affluent population....Some future candidate might posit a merger with Chapel Hill as a way to resolve this tension."

Where's my crystal ball? Certainly sounds like a campaign issue that would get him traction with Carrboro's newest neighborhoods in 2007.