Elizabeth Sharp, candidate for Chapel Hill Town Council
Chapel Hill will elect a new mayor and four Town Council members this year, giving voters a chance to check or continue the town’s current management and growth.
Council member Amy Ryan is the only incumbent seeking re-election. Council members Michael Parker and Tai Huynh will vacate their seats in December.
Council member Jessica Anderson’s seat is also open, as she runs against Council member Adam Searing to replace outgoing Mayor Pam Hemminger. Searing is supported by a bloc of four council candidates who have pledged to reverse some town decisions about housing and development.
Searing will remain on the council until December 2025 if he loses the mayoral race.
The Searing-aligned candidates — David Adams, Renuka Soll, Elizabeth Sharp and Breckany Eckhardt — are competing against Ryan and five others — Melissa McCullough, Jeffrey Hoagland, Erik Valera, Theodore Nollert and Jon Mitchell — to fill four council seats.
Early voting in the nonpartisan Nov. 7 election starts Oct. 19 and runs through Nov. 4..
To find polling places and full details on early voting, visit co.orange.nc.us/1720/Elections or contact the Board of Elections at 919-245-2350 or vote@orangecountync.gov.
Name: Elizabeth Sharp
Age: 45
Occupation: Restaurant owner
Education: Bachelor of Arts in English Literature, University of Virginia; Master of Arts in English Literature, Tulane University; Associate in Occupational Studies in Culinary Arts, California Culinary Academy.
Political or civic experience: Activism and volunteerism with Lillian’s List, Neighbors on Call, and Planned Parenthood. School PTA President, School Improvement Team member, and school fundraising. I am also a small, local, brick-and-mortar business owner who understands the needs of these kinds of businesses in our community.
Campaign website: elizabethsharp.org
What do you think the town’s top three priorities should be? Choose one and describe how you will work to address it.
▪ Re-adjust our budget priorities to make sure maintenance of core services like our police and fire departments and parks is never neglected.
▪ Push developers to give us well-designed spaces that incorporate affordability, address the needs of small business, and is actually better than what was there before.
▪ Work with the university to address our town’s housing needs.
The university is our biggest employer and a major landowner, but the fact that they pay no property tax to the town leaves a major hole in our fiscal resources to fund things like permanently affordable housing. They MUST play a larger role in providing housing for students, faculty and staff.
What do you think the town is doing right to create more affordable housing? What would you do if elected?
Because I believe that we have to address housing affordability OUTSIDE the market, I think the best thing the town currently does is work with nonprofits like EmPowerment, Habitat for Humanity, and the Community Home Trust. Our efforts should be concentrated on organizations like those and other non- and limited-profit solutions. If the structure of the town’s recently passed single-family zoning text amendment was applied solely to organizations like these, so that it would guarantee an increased supply of affordable, workforce housing, it would have been a good measure. As it is, it will only provide more market-rate student housing that is out of reach for the people who need it.
Do you support keeping Orange County’s rural buffer, where the lack of water and sewer limits growth? How do you see the town growing with or without the buffer?
I am very much in support of the rural buffer’s goal of limiting sprawl and preserving green space. In the 40-plus years since it was enacted, however, our housing needs have changed dramatically. I think in the future we will need to find a middle ground, where we allow water and sewer access for dense housing to be built along well-serviced transit corridors, in conjunction with regulation to restrict suburban sprawl. However, that should be secondary to measures to densify land already served by our existing utilities with affordable housing options.
Would you consider a tax increase to pay for rising costs and delayed public projects? If not, what specific changes to the town’s budget would you support?
Chapel Hill has the highest taxes in the region and has just approved a historically high tax increase. I don’t oppose tax increases, but we should be seeing more value for our money. Neighboring cities have lower taxes and better amenities, and their core services are in better shape. You wouldn’t build an addition on a house if you couldn’t pay the mortgage. Similarly, we absolutely need to ensure that we are stabilizing our basic town needs, like emergency services and road maintenance, before we attempt to fund other projects, as much as we might want to solve the problems those projects address. We just have to take care of the basics first.
How can the town bring people together who have different viewpoints to find workable solutions?
Our elected town representatives need to be a model for compromise. They must listen to and genuinely try to understand the needs of the residents who come before them without judgment. Right now, our established majority is entrenched in their own specific ideology and goals. Leaving the question of “rightness” aside, it’s imperative to understand that everyone’s different perspective comes simply from their own life experience. If we can be gracious about that, we might be able to explain ourselves, understand each other, and arrive at mutually beneficial solutions. Stonewalling and vilifying gets us absolutely nowhere.
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