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For anyone who thinks the Raleigh City Council is serious about doing its job, consider:
At the contentious January 20 public hearing regarding Z-34-25, the wildly irresponsible rezoning application for North Hills, the Raleigh City Council appeared to throw a bone to opponents when it seemed to refer our community’s many North Hills traffic concerns to its Transportation and Traffic Committee (or so we thought). Two weeks later, Council approved Z-34-25, without waiting for the Transportation Committee’s review, mooting anything that might have happened after that review.
It didn’t matter. It turns out that at that January hearing when North Hills traffic was lightly discussed, the referral to the Transportation Committee – which had been previously promised to opponents – was not for any review of North Hills traffic at all but rather for the Six Forks Corridor Project – a dead project that would have provided little if any relief for traffic congestion in North Hills. That deceptive move speaks volumes about the Council’s lack of integrity – the bogus referral was a brazen betrayal of trust by the Council and Committee.
Sure enough, when the Committee finally met last Thursday, (a month late) there was only the briefest mention of traffic congestion concerns in North Hills, followed by ZERO discussion. Staff quickly dismissed the revealing and highly relevant traffic congestion data (Level of Service) in favor of the discredited arguments for using traffic volume measurements taken over the length of the Six Forks corridor. Many facts, figures and unfounded and/or ill-informed opinions were thrown around by Committee members who mostly seemed to be looking for a quick exit.
Following discussion, all the councilors seemed to have bought into their own narrative that although traffic seems heavy in North Hills, it is all in our minds. In fact, they claim, traffic would be much worse in North Hills but for the surrounding heavy mixed used development over the past 20 years. How could they possibly have reached that conclusion given the mountain of evidence reflected in numerous North Hills traffic studies that every signaled intersection in the area is severely congested for many hours every day?
Despite our input, Council continues to define away all the traffic problems in North Hills by pushing spurious interpretations of Annualized Average Daily Traffic Volumes (or Travel Time, the new distraction) on Six Forks between Lynn Road and the Beltline. At this point it’s not that Council doesn’t get it. The fact is it doesn’t want to get it.
Midtowners have suffered from this civic abuse for years now. Our message is not just for Midtown, but for all of Raleigh: the City is now governed by a Council with a single-minded focus to allow irresponsible development in established neighborhoods all over the City – North Hills, Glenwood-Brooklyn, Hayes-Barton, Mordecai, and Anderson Heights. All these neighborhoods are fighting back, pitting city officials against their own constituents.
The People of Raleigh are Raleigh. The City Council is not Raleigh, and it certainly doesn’t understand what Raleigh is, can be, or how to manage it into the future for the benefit of all citizens, not just a few developers. In its ongoing and accelerating pursuit of policies that are not in the best interests of Raleigh, its residents, and our future, Council depends on public apathy, misinformation and a lack of organized and effective resistance. Midtown Neighbors United aims to change that cynical calculus. You can do something to help!
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Read more at our website here: Midtown Neighbors United
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