Carrboro Mayor Mark Chilton and four candidates vying for seats on the town’s Board of Aldermen met Friday night for a forum co-sponsored by the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Chamber of Commerce and the Orange/Chatham Sierra Club.
The forum focused on environmental and economic questions, with candidates answering questions from the organizations and audience members on issues ranging from job creation to
regional transit.
Incumbents Dan Coleman and Lydia Lavelle, former board member Braxton Foushee, and first-time candidate Michelle Johnson joined Chilton, who is running unopposed for a fourth term.
The Chamber of Commerce and Sierra Club have held separate forums in past years but partnered this year because they believe Carrboro needs solutions that help both the economy and the environment.
Check out the candidates responses to a few questions asked at the forum:
Question: Many now agree that climate change is our single greatest environmental concern and
a grave an urgent crisis. Do you agree, and if so what three or four steps should we take locally
to reduce our co2 emissions?
Foushee: “We should provide better safety and more bike lanes, clearly marked and clearly
separated from the traffic, and walking, we need more opportunities to do that.”
Johnson: “We need to encourage people to buy things they need locally.
I am someone who walks to work, and we need to work with regional partners around
transit and be thinking about other creative programs.”
Lavelle: “We had a greenhouse emissions report done for our town, and I recall
out of those reports and general knowledge, certainly transportation is one part, but
secondly, of course, buildings and energies have ways we can improve them. Also
important is our revolving loan, program.”
Chilton: “It’s not so much about reducing our carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions as it is about our consumption of fossil fuels in the first place. This is one that we have a lot of local control over; there’s a lot we can do, and hopefully
sometime in 2012 we can create a true regional transportation system that not only reduces our consumption of fossil fuels, but at the same time is compatible with other ways to reduce.”
Coleman: “I have a ten year old child, and I’m deeply concerned about climate change and his future. It was my urging that led town staff to apply for stimulus funding that led to grants for energy improvements.”
Question: How do you balance economic development and environmental protection priorities?
And which, protecting the environment, or protecting economic development should be the priority for our community at this time?
Chilton: “It’s a false dichotomy suggesting we have to choose between economic development and environment, and where Carrboro is heading as a town is economic development that protects the environment.”
Coleman: “There’s no contradiction between those two goals. This is deeply ingrained in Carrboro culture.”
Foushee: “Both of those go hand in hand, but at the present moment I would put economic development one step ahead, because if we’re going to relieve some of the problems we’re going
to have with the tax base, we’re going to need to bring in large, clean economic development.”
Johnson: “I don’t do dichotomy really well, I feel like economic development and saving the environment go hand and hand as well.”
Lavelle: “We’re constantly balancing, we face this all the time. We’re trying to follow our sustainable goals, but we recognize we have to push our economic development. One way to try
to achieve this is our transit system, which is better for the environment, but also a way we can transport people into town and spend some money.”
To get the day's news and headlines in your inbox each morning, sign up for our email newsletters.
