After living here for nine years, now we hope our family will be here for the next ninety! There are so many things that we love about Chapel Hill – as does everyone who lives here – and we don’t want them to change. But as Kevin Foy has said, the population in this area is projected to double. The challenge we all face is how to manage that growth in a way which makes Chapel Hill an even more special place and at the same time retains all that we love about it today.

Having followed the many debates and decisions which have occurred over the last decade or so it often appears that the current approach to managing growth is to obstruct it for as long as possible. That is certainly a widely held perception. I deeply understand that sentiment – but if we have a vision of a Chapel Hill which is even more dynamic than it is today – a Chapel Hill which is making a significant contribution not only to the issues it faces itself – but also to the daunting larger regional, national and global issues – we can use the inexorable forces of growth to make us a dynamic contributor to a far larger stage.

To achieve this we need to significantly strengthen cooperation with the world class, leading edge research being conducted at the University and the community of entrepreneurs and funding sources that have the tools to take inventions out of the lab and implement them on a broad scale. This is not a pipe dream – but it does require that we believe we can achieve it; that we are committed to doing so; and most importantly that we do so through collaboration.