Full name: Danny Nowell
Party affiliation: Democrat
Campaign website: dannynowell.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 first ran for Carrboro Town Council in 2021 because I want to make our town more accessible to families like mine. We were drawn here for the reasons many people are—the cultural vibrancy, the proud activist legacy, the natural beauty combined with walkability. But the affordability crisis we’re seeing throughout the Triangle threatens those elements of our character, and makes it harder for more people to share the life I feel so lucky to have here. In my first term, we’ve taken major steps toward building a more economically diverse and accessible community, but the work isn’t done. It’s vital we continue to refine our land use policies to increase housing supply and affordability, improve our connectivity and climate resilience, and implement community safety practices that meet the problems of our current moment with care and compassion. I’m proud to have been a leading voice advocating for these changes as we’ve hired key leaders to new positions, adopted our first-ever Comprehensive Plan, and begun the revision of our town Land Use Ordinance. We’ve built a lot of momentum toward carrying out priorities that I think a lot of Carrboro shares, and I want to stick around to make sure we’ve got the results to show for it.
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.
The largest priority I have in the coming term is the adoption of a new Land Use Ordinance. We need to codify an approach to development that accomplishes several crucial objectives: we need to add more housing at different price points to make it possible for more people to enter our housing market; we need to balance density against stormwater management, cooling, and green space preservation to maximize climate resilience in our community design; we need to increase the amount of businesses and build the density those businesses need to survive. All of this needs to happen while we use every tool legally permissible to construct affordable housing in market conditions that make it a steep challenge—in addition to incentivizing affordable units in our zoning approach, we need to be putting dollars into land banking and gap financing structures that allow us to have more transformative outcomes than we’ve been able to achieve through zoning alone. Ultimately, we know that we’re swimming upstream to help make dignified housing, which is a human right, available in a market and policy structure that has commodified it, but we can get more imaginative and aggressive to take a bigger bite out of the problem than we’ve been able to thus far.
I’m probably violatiing the spirit of the question by continuing to go on here, but we’re also very close to making strides with community safety practices built around mental health care and social service rather than armed police response, and we’ve put a lot of effort into streamlining our bike and pedestrian infrastructure project delivery, which I think will bear fruit over the next four years.
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.
Beginning the process of entirely revising our Land Use Ordinance is a massive, massive step for our Town. Given the fact that development decisions comprise the vast majority of what towns in North Carolina are responsible for, our land use is the biggest single thing we can control to see our values implemented.
In the last year, we explored some paid parking policies that I think I could have helped lead a more productive community discussion on. Ultimately, we’ve paused plans to pursue paid parking, and I think it’s a decent outcome that gives us a chance to consider the right order of operations to achieve the connectivity, transit usage, revenue strategies, and climate resilience we want. But I think the way we approached community for feedback—notwithstanding the efforts of our always-excellent communications staff—could have benefited from more framing that I failed to provide. Parking is a good synecdoche for the kinds of difficult trade-offs we have to consider when we look at values-driven polices at the local level: everybody appreciates what easy access to our downtown does for our businesses and arts communities, but road safety and eliminating Vehicle Miles Traveled are priorities I hear about constantly from Carrboro residents. I wish I’d taken a more active role to facilitate a broader, deeper discussion that built trust and mobilized more people into these considerations. While our staff did an excellent job gathering input and equipping Council to make deliberate decisions, I think I can do much better as a leader the next time we consider where we want to go on these policies.
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?
This is an area where people don’t often think about land use, but it’s a good issue for demonstrating how absolutely vital it is that more people can afford to live in Carrboro. The inclusivity and acceptance in our town is an active practice for many of our neighbors—as we’ve learned over and over in the past decade, nothing is safer than a strong community. But if people can’t afford to access communities that prioritize our values, we’re not as able to protect them as neighbors. An economically diverse town is a more racially and intergenerationally diverse town, and offers more opportunities for immigrant families to put down roots in a welcoming community. Otherwise, we’re in constant communication with leaders closer to the fight throughout the state to make sure we’re offering the most appropriate, proportional, and strategic help we can in our official capacity—such as when we adopted our 4th Amendment workplace resolution in partnership with Siembra NC.
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?
Our incredible Fire Chief and Emergency Manager Will Potter is already doing a great job helping to educate community members about the best ways to prepare at the individual level, so I think a lot of this work is underway, and we just need to continue to expand our outreach to make sure as many residents can get this information as possible. Outside of our official town offerings, I want to make sure as a leader I’m connecting with nonprofits, businesses, and grassroots organizers to form the less institutional community resilience that I think is a vital component for keeping us safe in the first 48-96 hours after these emergencies.
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?
Hopefully my extremely long-winded earlier answers cover a lot of what I think we can do better, but I do want to say briefly that I’m pleased that we’ve been able to assist the vast majority of tax-burdened residents who applied to our relief program. Another reason we need to increase our development of every kind in Carrboro is because our status quo places the entire burden of our town revenue on the backs of homeowners, which is increasingly untenable. As we increase our housing supply, explore novel and more impactful roads to subsidization, and expand our commercial tax base, we should be doing everything in our toolkit to slow the rise of rents, help more folks who need it find a home at lower than market rates, and slow the rate of expense on longtime property owners.
7) How should the Town of Carrboro encourage more walking, biking, and public transit use?
Would you believe that I think we need to add more housing, especially to our downtown area? The highest return we can get in terms of reducing car dependency is to make it possible for people to live where they need cars less, and at present our downtown area includes precious little housing, which our LUO and upcoming Downtown Area Plan should go a long way toward rectifying. Separately, we’re exploring some new tactics to make our bike and pedestrian projects more achievable—we’re really scrutinizing our workflows and considering the way we design and bid projects to make them more competitive for what state and federal money there is. Finally, an additional consideration for adding housing is that we need to add density to increase public transit service; Chapel Hill Transit is an incredible fare-free resource for a town like ours, but in order to make more service make more sense, we’ve got to make it possible for folks to live where the buses can serve. As we’re in partnership with Chapel Hill and UNC, who both naturally contribute more to our transit partnerships with their larger footprints, we need to build the density that makes it viable for us to increase our transit investment.
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?
While I’ve spent a good deal of ink and inches elsewhere lamenting the fact that Carrboro is so economically dependent on property taxes, perhaps the sole benefit our otherwise suboptimal economic composition provides is that we, as a town, are not dependent on federal funds in our regular operating budget. We do need to consider the scarcity of resources available for road, transit, and bike/ped projects, and I think the efficiency improvements I mentioned above to the way we fund the design phase of projects should help us to deliver the projects we can in this environment. As far as the schools, we’re incredibly invested in the success of CHCCS, and we’ll continue to be partners in the direct places we’re able—like the Safe Routes to School plans we coordinate on—but the scale of our operating budget and the separation of responsibilities from the County and the Board of Education mean that direct assistance beyond our residents’ contributions will probably not be in the form of revenue. As an individual leader, I’ll continue working with Board of Education members to stay responsive, flexible, and creative, to help Carrboro be the best partner we can feasibly be.
9) If there are other issues you want to discuss, please do so here.
My experience in my first term has been eye opening. I have spent a great deal of this questionnaire talking about land use because I think it’s vital that we use the tools of every office to get the results those tools can provide. But of course I recognize that these are somewhat limited answers to what most of the INDY’s readers are feeling in our increasingly frenetic, isolating age of rising fascism. I was extremely proud to be the first candidate endorsed by Democratic Socialists of America to win office in North Carolina, and I believe using the specific tools of my office to reduce capital’s influence in eroding our democracy is the best way I can serve working people in Carrboro and beyond. But it is not enough. The North Carolina General Assembly has been gerrymandered to such an extent as to functionally disenfranchise most of the INDY’s readers. Courts at every level have been packed with conservative activists, corporate apologists, and in the case of the North Carolina Supreme Court, literally the son of the North Carolina Senate President Pro-Tem, himself an instrumental figure in the gerrymandering in the first place. I note these conditions not to despair, but because I think anytime we consider electoral roles like mine, we need to consider their place in a vast power structure that needs everyone who reads this to get organized for the results they can get where they are. Join DSA—it is one of the few truly member-led democratic political organizations working across labor, climate, electoral, racial and gender solidarity issues. Organize your workplace—right now, white or blue collar, public or private sector: you are holding power that we need to put into the fight. If you need help, my contact info is on Carrboro’s website, and I’ll connect you however I can.
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