Tonight's City Council meeting is shaping up to be a night of perhaps at least one deferral -- the long-outstanding comprehensive plan and zoning change to remove zoning that supported the old Eno Drive parkway from a tract of land adjacent to West Point Park on the Eno. Advocates for a buyout of one property owner's parcel by the state to combine with the existing state and city parks are expected to push for yet another extension on the matter, given that negotiations between the landowner and the state are reportedly still under way.
One item might reach closure tonight, though: the (also long-outstanding) closure of Maxwell Ave. and Sumter St. as requested by Duke as part of its renovation and parking plans for the Smith Warehouse complex off Buchanan.
The matter, which has riled some neighborhood activists in the nearly year-long saga over Duke's position on maintaining neighborhood pass-through rights to Campus Drive, now sees a site plan for the Smith Whse. site that includes committed elements mandating exactly that -- 24x7 "general public access" for cars, bikes and pedestrians along the site. (Duke had originally stated it would offer such access, only for later talk of access gates to raise suspicions within and tensions with the community.)
The current buzz suggests that neighborhood support may finally be in place for Duke to get a nod tonight for the closure of these streets and the transmission of the land to the university for use on its parking project.
Council will also receive a second-quarter summary crime report from DPD chief Jose Lopez.
The consent agenda contains one particularly interesting item: $250,000 in federal Safe Routes to Schools (SRTS) funding for sidewalk improvements (including a sidewalk over an existing culvert) and a "road diet" adding bike lanes on a stretch of the east side of Fayetteville St. to provide better pedestrian access to Fayettevile St. Elementary.
The missing sidewalk corridor is a high-priority project in the DurhamWalks plan from a few years back, and it's nice to be able to do this with federal rather than local dollars. On the other hand, the agenda memo notes that if adopted, the city's staff "will work with residents, businesses, and other community stakeholders to discuss the road diet concept" -- an idea that would shrink Fayetteville St. from Cornwallis Rd. to George St. to three lanes and add in bike lanes.
The staff memo says the sidewalk and bike lane improvements "also appear to support" the Denise and Larry Hester-linked Fayetteville Street Planning Group's goals.
Still, the use of the future tense in one sentence and the statement that the changes "appear" to support the influential group's position on the matter makes one wonder -- what vetting has the idea already gotten from Fayetteville St. stakeholders, many of whom expressed worries about vehicle-unfriendly changes to the street in last year's streetscape discussions?
Most of those discussions centered on wanting to preserve on-street parking and make sure customers could jet in, jet out of businesses.
The Fayetteville St. neighborhood master plan drafted independently by the private planning group certainly discourages any widening of the street, but is silent on the shrinking of the width elsewhere, such as in its four-lane segment. On the other hand, although the EG&G proposals for Fayetteville St. no don't appear for viewing on the City's web site, I seem to recall that they might have also called for a downsizing of the southern end of the corridor.
At any rate, we'll watch with interest as to whether this consent agenda item (which also provides about $10,000 for a smaller gap on Cornwallis Rd. near Rogers-Herr) will get pulled; if so, watch for keep an ear out for what could be an interesting conversation.
By the way, this isn't the only federal funding that might be in the works for Fayetteville St. The City appears to have applied for USDOT TIGER stimulus funding recently for the "Targeted Inner City Neighborhood Key Commercial Districts Streetscapes Project." A range of letters of support (PDF) -- including from the planning group, as well as NCCU, Preservation Durham, the Durham Chamber of Commerce and a range of other groups -- are linked to the late-August application.
One has to wonder if we'll spend a quarter-million of federal dollars on sidewalks on Fayetteville St., only to then go through and get possible federal dollars for the streetscape improvements. Here's hoping they don't have to rip up newly completed sidewalks to do so -- and yes, I'm looking at you, Downtown Trail near the DAP.
Also in the works for tonight: an increase in the minimum livable wage rate in Durham, to $11.40 an hour, an adjustment that is pegged to the federal poverty line wage rate.
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