With less than a week until Election Day, The Daily Tar Heel spoke with the Chapel Hill Town Council candidates to discuss major issues facing the council. Election Day is Nov. 5.
Harrison emailed his comments to The Daily Tar Heel.
Candidate Name: Ed Harrison
Age: 62
Daily Tar Heel: What is the biggest issue facing the town of Chapel Hill?
Harrison: As a community, having our residents accept enough land use change and development to ensure a steady stream of revenues for an increasingly expensive local government, in the form of both property tax and sales tax. As of the June 2013 budget, the town manager had cut as much as he could without removing all possibility for employee raises and without cutting back transit service, to cite a couple of needs important to me. (Cutting transit service actually loses us federal and state funding.) As someone who votes against development applications for good reasons every so often, I am sympathetic to the arguments of folks who are concerned about growth pushing too hard into where they have lived for a long time, as my household has had the same experience.
DTH: Last month, Wake County reached out to outside experts for help with transit woes, essentially ignoring TTA’s plans for a light rail that connects Orange, Wake and Durham counties. Does this change your opinion on the light rail project? Do you think this project is viable without Wake’s support?
Harrison: As a four-year member of the Triangle Transit Board of Trustees, and now vice chair, I’ve played a significant role in the agency’s Regional Transit Program, which actually consists of three different rail projects.
Only one of them, the Durham-Orange Light Rail Transit project, involves Chapel Hill, and it is not affected by the recent actions of the current Wake Board of Commissioners, controlled by Republicans and allied to many of that party’s leaders in the current General Assembly.
