Full name: Cristóbal Palmer
Party affiliation: Democrat
Campaign website: https://palmerforcarrboro.com/
1) In 300 words or less, please give our readers your elevator pitch: Why are you running? Why should voters entrust you with this position? What prior experience will make you an effective member of the Carrboro Town Council?
I envision a Carrboro where we have grandparents, their grandkids, the kids’ teachers, and the nurse aides who visit the grandparents all living, working, and happily playing inside Carrboro. I envision a Carrboro with more and better access to green, shady spaces for everyone. I envision a Carrboro where more of our residents can share in the joy of our quirky town.
2) What would your priorities be as a member of the Carrboro Town Council? Please identify three of the most pressing issues Carrboro currently faces and how you believe the town should address them.
(a) Equitable Transportation, (b) Climate Justice and Action, (c) Building Better Housing, and (d) Anti-racist Learning and Practice. Each of these is linked to the others, and we cannot address our housing shortage in isolation from our transportation and climate goals, nor can we right the wrongs of our past without naming and acknowledging the urgent need for anti-racist work.
3) What’s the best or most important thing the Carrboro Town Council has done in the past year? Additionally, name a decision you believe the town should have handled differently. Please explain your answers.
I can answer both of these with the same vote: our budget. We have made historic investments in affordable housing and weatherization for homes of low-income residents. At the same time, other necessary structural changes we made have caught our residents off guard coming in the same year with a county tax revaluation. It’s easy for me to look back from 2025 and know what 2023 and 2024 Councils could or should have done to communicate the needed changes or avoid the need for them, but I cannot claim that I would have done better knowing what those councils knew at the time, and in the milieu of intense inflation and hyper-partisan misinformation about what was needed to properly respond to the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. I can only say that I will do my best to bring my knowledge and experience to the task of avoiding repeating the errors of the past.
4) President Trump is working to ramp up deportations and curtail visas. At the same time, the state legislature has passed laws requiring agencies to cooperate with ICE. What do you think Carrboro can or should do to ensure safe, welcoming communities for immigrants in light of these policies?
We have ample evidence that our federal government is acting outside the law and using immigrants as a scapegoat to attempt to consolidate the power of a king under the current president, and that their abuses are both incredibly unpopular across our nation–not just here in Carrboro. The good news is that when communities stand together to protect our rights and respect for the law, federal agents back down. Our founders had the wisdom to ratify the Bill of Rights in 1791 because they remembered the abuses of King George III, and it is a testament to Carrboro that we proclaimed ourselves a 4th Amendment Workplace this past May, acting as a model for local businesses and other municipalities. I am proud to have worked with my colleagues to bring that Proclamation forward. Carrboro cannot do this alone: every one of your readers has a role to play in upholding our civil rights. Do not accept kings. Do not accept mass arrests or kidnappings off the street. Look to the faith leaders, community organizers, and neighbors who are working to protect your community and ask how you can help, because now is the time to act. They are weaker than they seem, but complacency now will mean a loss of your freedoms tomorrow.
5) The town has prioritized climate action and climate resiliency, but historic flooding from Tropical Storm Chantal shows that the town and its residents continue to be vulnerable to these disasters as climate change leads to more intense rainfall. How can Carrboro best help impacted residents and prepare for future disasters?
Firstly I want to say that the dozens of people in Carrboro who were displaced the night that Chantal hit are my top priority, and making sure they have support through the long process of repairing their homes in the case of the homeowners is work that is ongoing. That work is necessarily in partnership with County, State, and Federal officials, and I am particularly grateful to Orange County, the SBA, and NC DOI for staffing a response center at the Drakeford Library Complex in Carrboro. If any of your readers are Carrboro residents impacted by Chantal and do not feel that they have been heard, I want to hear from them. I would also encourage residents to look for a report on lessons learned from our emergency manager, Fire Chief Potter, in the near future.
You are so right that climate change is leading to more intense storms, and Carrboro is facing that challenge on multiple fronts. Firstly I would point to Bolin Creek Watershed restoration work that we funded in our 2025 budget. Watershed restoration is prevention work, and an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Secondly I would say that our stormwater utility rate structure should be revised to incentivize building up instead of out. In Carrboro we have had a pattern of single family home rebuilds where the first floor square footage grows considerably after the rebuild, which increases impervious surface and runoff challenges without a net gain in housing. We need a review and revision of incentives around runoff, retention, detention, and infiltration tools so that future growth is compatible with both our housing needs and our climate goals.
Thirdly, while Chantal was a major blow that will lead to difficult budget choices (such as where to locate our Public Works), it also presents a major opportunity to update our fleet of town-owned vehicles to massively reduce our own emissions as a town. I look forward to a presentation from staff on that this Fall.
Lastly I would point to our historic climate deception lawsuit as an important part of our overall plan. Towns like Carrboro can’t effectively budget and plan in an environment where large and powerful entities continue to engage in deception around climate change. There is no law or regulation that allows for deception, and we don’t have the time or resources to waste. The time to act was decades ago, and the next best time is right now.
6) As with most places in the Triangle, Carrboro is grappling with a shortage of affordable housing. How effectively has the town helped address rising rents, particularly for low-income residents? How effectively has the town helped homeowners who were hit by this year’s property revaluation? What more should the town do to address housing affordability in the next few years?
The availability of both for-purchase and for-rent units in Carrboro and Chapel Hill have not kept pace with demand for too long, leading to an ever-intensifying housing crunch that has already reached a crisis point. Carrboro’s roughly six and a half square miles are bounded in a way that means that we face challenges to growth not faced by many of our neighbors, but that doesn’t mean we can’t learn from their successes and act.
We need more housing types that support the population we have and welcome the growth that will keep our community livable and vibrant. This includes maintenance workers, teachers, home nurse aids, and many others who currently need to get here and can’t afford to live here, or what they can afford here doesn’t meet their needs. These folks may want any of several different things, including triplexes, duplexes, cottage courts, ADUs, or other housing types. We need more of these.
We have two parallel processes that are ongoing that should make building better housing radically easier. One is the Downtown Area Plan Project, which should come before Carrboro Town Council this Fall for adoption. It will give potential developers much clearer guidance on our priorities for dense housing development downtown. Folks can read more about that project here: https://engage.carrboronc.gov/carrboro-downtown-area-plan.
The second is an extensive project to both reorganize and modernize our Land Use Ordinance (LUO), which was one of the first comprehensive sets of municipal land use ordinances in the state, into a new Unified Development Ordinance (UDO). We should see more presentations this Fall, and I look forward to working with the CodeWright team to identify ways to incentivize and speed up redevelopments that provide the types of housing our residents want and need. Your readers can read more about the UDO project at https://engage.carrboronc.gov/udo .
Our 2022 Carrboro Connects Comprehensive Plan emphasizes Race Equity and Climate as foundational, and I agree. As we revise town code to incentivize better housing, we must be sensitive to the risks and concerns of Black residents, Latino residents, and other minority groups who have historically been displaced by redevelopment efforts.
7) How should the Town of Carrboro encourage more walking, biking, and public transit use?
I have been working hard over the past year to identify and eliminate barriers to the completion of the projects we already know we need. A good example here is the hours of meetings and reading of documents I have done to get up to speed on the NC DOT project (BL0044) to add three pedestrian-activated stop lights at three points along NC HWY 54, two of which are in Carrboro. That project will bring much-needed safety improvements for the residents who can be seen any given weekday dashing across four lanes of fast traffic to get to bus stops.
I ask INDY week readers to review the Carrboro Bike Plan and the NS BRT project and then keep calling and writing to us until we get the projects done. We know what needs to be done, and now we have to do better about staying on schedule. Much of that work is local, but I would also encourage readers to push for change at the State and National level, because current NC law massively over-allocates funding to highway projects, penalizing projects that actually meet our climate goals unless they can identify a specific highway safety component. That’s not right.
8) From cancelled grants to layoffs, federal funding cuts this year have hit the Triangle particularly hard and local government officials are having to make difficult decisions about what to fund and how. How should the town council prioritize competing funding needs? What role, if any, should the town play in supporting Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools in light of federal funding pressures?
To answer the last part first, I’m a passionate advocate for public schools, and my eldest just started kindergarten here. As an individual, I donate funds and I would encourage others to do the same as they are able. Putting on my Council hat, we have to look at how we partner with the County around the replacement schedule for our aging schools, because our current role is that of property owner of the land on which the County has built several schools in the district. I’ll just give one example: a future school rebuild might receive some town funding, and in exchange some recreation space such as a gym, courts, or a track might be available to all residents outside of school hours. This is the sort of budget decision that has big and long-lasting impacts, so it’s one that merits deep discussion and consideration, whether as a task force or through a Citizen’s Assembly.
Speaking more broadly about the impact of federal cuts, I will say that I personally know people who have lost work, and it pains me that I cannot, either individually or as a member of council, give each and every one of them a job. What they need is jobs, and I’m angry at the wanton abuse of federal power that got us here.
When I look at the tools available to Council, what this tells me is that our Downtown Area Plan and UDO project are incredibly timely, because they will make redevelopment more predictable and affordable, which should help with future housing costs, and along with the skilled and diligent work of our Economic Development office should help attract jobs to Carrboro. I look forward to working with colleagues on both of these.
9) If there are other issues you want to discuss, please do so here.
The 2022 Carrboro Connects Comprehensive Plan has twin pillars of Advancing Racial Equity and Climate Action. In my platform I add Equitable Transportation and Better Housing. These are strongly-held values that are broadly shared, and we are not walking away from them no matter what happens at the State and Federal level. I’m Cristóbal Palmer, and I would be honored to have your vote in this Fall’s Carrboro non-partisan Municipal Election. I look forward to working with my neighbors to tackle the work ahead.
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