The Town of Chapel Hill’s ongoing negotiation with UNC Health concerning the redevelopment of Eastowne carries many challenges for our community. The terms of the Master Plan now underdevelopment will affect the broad outlines of the negotiated contract that will follow. This is a very large project, rivaling the size of Carolina North, with potentially serious off site impact on traffic congestion in the area. This is the first time that UNC Health has built a project of this magnitude away from the central hospital complex in Chapel Hill.
The new UNC Health Campus is located on the Eastowne Office Park site across from the new Wegmans on 15-501 and near the I-40 interchange. Initially, UNC Health described a state-of the-art Medical Campus of under 2 million square feet of medical clinics. More recently at a November joint meeting they proposed a project as big as 3.3. million square feet, not including structured parking for 7000 cars.
At a recent negotiation meeting UNC Health brought a game board pictured above with with blocks on a simple map to represent the land mass and buidings they say they require. When the blocks (each block represents a 6 story building) were put on the site, there was no room left for small parks or pleasant places to sit outside and enjoy lunch.
There is no current transportation strategy for moving a large number of employees and patients to and from the site — only a plan to build parking decks for all those employees to drive to work or clinic appointments and park in those decks. The campus when built out will have large inpact on out community and our Council negotiators will need to ensure each one is addressed. The limitations of 15-501 is this more serious constraint on the size of the project. The Traffic Impact Analysis will yield important information about the limits of the capacity of the already crowded 15-501.
While the existing office park is peppered with modest-sized office buildings, it retains a wooded character of gently rolling hills and streams. Imposing a grid of streets filled with dense high buildings will strain the carrying capacity of the land and alter the hydrology. In the November joint meeting UNC presented several grid maps showing the location of building. The joint committee has not yet explored the environmental constraints maps that Chapel Hill staff presented at that time.
UNC Health would prefer to build on a 20-acre site that has been left untouched containing a valuable old-growth oak forest and deemed ecologically significant and worthy of conservation “by any means feasible” by the North Carolina Natural Heritage Program.
The Town’s own traffic projections, which do not include the additional traffic caused by this new UNC health campus, indicate that traffic on 15-501 will slow to a crawl for even more hours a day within three years.
At the most recent joint meeting between the Town government and UNC Health, traffic experts presented current and likely future traffic conditions, and laid out a process for revising the Traffic Impact Analysis for the 15-501 area. The results will tell the negotiators how much congestion to expect in the future. During the public meeting, the public asked for data for 2025, 2030 and 2035 and well as 2040. UNC has pushed back on paying the cost of the study which is customarily paid for by the developer. We are very glad that the Town is going forward with important data that much be known before key decisions are made.
