CHAPEL HILL-Wednesday night, Chapel Hill’s mayoral and Town Council candidates spoke out about the growing trend of overcrowding in Chapel Hill-Carrboro schools—a trend that threatens to halt housing development in Chapel Hill and Carrboro in 2013.

Overcrowding is on track to hit a threshold that would prevent the district from issuing a Certificate of Adequate Public Schools—a necessary precondition for any housing development in town. That problem will be alleviated with the construction of Elementary School 11 in the Northside neighborhood—but Orange County has yet to budget the funds for it.

At Wednesday’s candidate forum co-sponsored by the Sierra Club and the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Chamber of Commerce, mayoral candidate Tim Sookram offered some interesting solutions.

***Listen to Sookram’s remark.***


None of his fellow candidates went along with that, but nearly all of them—including incumbent mayor Mark Kleinschmidt—agreed that it was better to continue enforcing the requirement, even at the cost of a temporary moratorium on housing, rather than allow overcrowding to continue.

“We put that in place after long negotiations with the town, Carrboro, and the county, to make sure that our school system remains the best one in the country,” he says. “I don’t believe we should undermine that by packing more students into schools, and I believe that’s what would happen.”

Many of the Town Council candidates agreed, including challenger Lee Storrow and incumbent Matt Czajkowski, who said a moratorium on new housing might not be the worst thing in the world.

“The SAPFO cap is just the starkest wakeup call for Chapel Hill and Orange County,” he says. “It effectively says that the only development we’re going to be able to approve unless we modify SAPFO is commercial development. In some regards, I think that’s a good thing, because it’ll get us even more focused on commercial development.”

Incumbent Donna Bell added that the growing issue proves the need for controlled growth—and not just in population.

“We have to keep our development moderated to limits where we can use our resources, whether it’s water or schools,” she says.

Nevertheless, the problem of overcrowding is immediate—and inescapable, at least until the district receives the funds to build another elementary school.

Several candidates, including incumbent Jim Ward and challenger Jason Baker, said the responsibility for resolving that issue rests now with Orange County. Here’s Baker.

“How can you quickly allocate the money to get the construction going for elementary school number 11?” he says. “I was hoping we’d see that project start sooner.

And challenger Laney Dale suggested that developers themselves should bear some of the burden.

“I’m wondering why we don’t require developers to put in a school,” he says. “For instance, if you want to build Meadowmont, put in a public school to cover it.”

Wednesday’s forum was sponsored by the Sierra Club and the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Chamber of Commerce; every candidate was in attendance, save mayoral candidate Kevin Wolff.