It’s always fascinating when an elected official must experience the rules and regulations he/she imposes on others. Case in point: Chapel Hill Councilman Jim Ward. According to the Daily Tar Heel, the town’s development process “can take as much as three times longer than that of other similarly sized college towns.”
It was supposed to be a simple approval — a small park, a picnic table and a playground to be located in the existing North Forest Hills neighborhood.
Yet the small project took more than a year to pass through the Chapel Hill Town Council.
Council member Jim Ward, who worked with the Parks and Recreation department to get the project approved, said he was surprised by how long it took.
“First there was a sort of knee jerk response from neighbors as if we were trying to put in a landfill,” he said. “They came up with all sorts of negative responses.”
