Commissioners delay big hike in impact fee

By Randall Rigsbee

When Chatham County commissioners convene on Feb. 21, they will consider dramatically altering the county’s impact fee structure, increasing the fee for some and eliminating it for others.

Since October 1999, when commissioners first enacted an impact fee on new construction as a means of helping pay for new school construction, the county has assessed a countywide impact fee of $1,500 for all newly-built residences. The state General Assembly in the late 1980s authorized Chatham to charge an impact fee.

On Monday, county Board of Commissioners chairman Bunkey Morgan proposed a new set of impact fees, which would range from $1,400 for new residential construction in the southeast part of the county to $4,000 for homes in fast-developing north Chatham.

The proposal is to establish a different fee in four county school districts.

In the district within the Perry Harrison, North Chatham and Pittsboro Elementary school districts, the fee would be $4,000.

In the district of Silk Hope and Siler City Elementary schools, the fee would be $2,500.

The Moncure Elementary School district would have a $1,400 fee.

There would be no impact fee on new residential construction within the Bennett, Bonlee and J.S. Waters Elementary school districts.

For apartment building, the fee would remain $500.

more- See Thursday, February 10 paper: Vol 85, No.11

Briar Chapel vote possible next week

By Randall Rigsbee

Next Tuesday, Chatham County commissioners will undertake Briar Chapel, the largest-ever development proposed in Chatham and the subject of years of planning and debate.

Commissioners will devote a Feb. 15 meeting solely to consideration of Briar Chapel. The meeting will be held in the Superior Courtroom in Pittsboro at 7 p.m.

California-based developer Newland Communities is seeking the county’s authorization to develop the 1,589-acre, 2,389-home Briar Chapel in the Baldwin and Williams townships, bounded by US 15-501 on the east, Andrews Store Road on the south, and Mann’s Chapel Road on the west and north.

Although Newland’s first version of Briar Chapel was rejected by county commissioners when originally proposed several years ago, a revised version submitted for county consideration last summer cleared the first hurdle towards approval last month when the county Planning Board, which advises commissioners on planning matters, recommended in a 7-2 vote that commissioners approved a conditional use permit for the large mixed-use development.

In earlier sessions, the Planning Board recommended to county commissioners an amendment to the county Compact Communities Ordinance to include an additional parcel of land southeast of US 15-501.

more- See Thursday, February 10 paper: Vol 85, No.11

Civil protest nets jail term

By Randall Rigsbee

Dan Schwankl may be the last person you’d expect to see sentenced to serve time in a federal prison.

The 31-year-old Siler City native is a polite, athletic, well-spoken and well-educated former public school teacher.

He lives and works in a Catholic Worker house in Silk Hope which offers shelter to homeless women and families.

His family (his father is Dr. James Schwankl, a local pediatrician; mother Anne-Marie is a nurse) is well-known in Chatham County and well-regarded.

Dan Schwankl’s is hardly the profile of someone you’d expect to see before a federal judge, let alone someone contemplating a prison sentence.

But Schwankl was sentenced on January 24 to serve three months in federal prison and pay a $500 fine.

His crime, a misdemeanor, was a non-violent act of civil disobedience.

He was one of 14 defendants who last November scaled a fence at Ft. Benning, Ga. during a rally to seek the closure of the U.S. Army’s Western Hemispheric Institute for Security, which was formerly known as the School of the Americas.

The School of the Americas Watch, a grassroots organization founded in 1990 which conducts a demonstration at the main entrance of Ft. Benning every November calling for closure of the facility, describes the government facility as a “combat training school for Latin American soldiers and police.”

Schwankl first became aware of the school in the mid-Nineties, when he was teaching English in Belize.

more- See Thursday, February 10 paper: Vol 85, No.11