Cristóbal Palmer has watched Carrboro grow into a vibrant community since enrolling in the fifth grade at Carrboro Elementary School in 1994.
His mother, Maria Palmer, became a key voice for Latino immigrants, becoming the first Latina to join the N.C. Board of Education and serving on the Chapel Hill Town Council from 2013 to 2017.
This fall, Cristóbal Palmer will be on the ballot for Carrboro Town Council, competing to fill Mayor Barbara Foushee’s unexpired council term through December 2025. His opponent is Isaac Woolsey, an advocate for better transit and opportunities for people with disabilities.
Early voting in the Nov. 5 election runs Oct. 17 to Nov. 2. Find more information here .
Palmer, 40, is a UNC-Chapel Hill graduate who works as a systems administrator and technical director of ibiblio, a digital library and tech lab at UNC’s School of Information and Library Science. He is also active in the Democratic Party and a member of the Triangle Linux Users Group and the Carrboro Bicycle Coalition. He occasionally writes for the grassroots Triangle Blog Blog .
As a renter for 10 years, and now as a homeowner and the father of two preschool-age children, Palmer told The News & Observer he has a diverse perspective on Carrboro and its future. Here are excerpts from that conversation:
Why should voters elect you?
I’m deeply invested in doing the work to help us meet the challenges that we face now, (and) I’m interested in doing work that will outlast me.
I’m mindful that this is a special election to fill a vacancy, and it comes up again the very next year. I have some notions of the ways that I would like to participate, if I only get that one year, but I (also) have a vision that extends well beyond that. What are the kinds of things that need to be true for Carrboro to still be thriving (in the future)? Those are infrastructure investments, those are policy investments that are going to take time to work out and do correctly.
What is your top priority?
Every morning when I’m going to daycare with my kids, I’m driving in a car ... on (N.C.) 54 and I see people standing in the median or standing on the side of the road waiting to dash across at a place that’s not a marked crossing. I want to make it safe for them to cross where they want to cross, because they’re crossing to get to bus stops.
Chapel Hill Transit doesn’t have the authority to make those safe crosswalks happen, and Carrboro can’t do it alone. We have to work with the state, because it’s a state road.
I’m going to look at crossings all across Carrboro, especially places like right in front of or right near schools. — if there are neighborhoods that are within what should be that walk zone for a school, but people aren’t walking because they don’t feel safe.
Where have previous councils fallen short?
We recently got this new Carrboro Connects master plan for the town, and we’ve got some stuff like our greenway that I was involved with back in 2009, and it stalled out for a long time.
I think part of what I would praise the recent Town Council for is a really better level of public engagement, and the town staff deserves a lot of the praise for that. I’m excited about a future Carrboro, where we see more grandparents with kids on bikes . … Completing that network of greenways is a big step in that direction.
They also added equity questions. So I think those just asking those questions each time something comes before the council leads us in a better direction ... just asking, how will this impact people differentially by race? Being anti-racist means supporting anti-racist policy through positive action to change the future, so that the future is less racist, the built infrastructure we’re in is less racist.
What about the move to paid parking downtown?
I want to emphasize that that’s an expensive and noxious towing experience where someone walks off a lot next to Weaver Street Market, and in less than two minutes, there’s a tow truck there, and they’re paying 300-plus dollars to get their car back. That’s gross, but that’s not the town. That’s a private party that’s into a private contract that is producing that. And the town does have a role to play in making sure that things are predictable in private lots, but has much less power there.
We got a lot of feedback specifically about paid parking, and the council decided to punt on that, and personally, from a climate perspective, that’s disappointing. But this will take a lot of work.
We should be more strongly considering paid parking in town-controlled lots on our border with Chapel Hill, because that’s where we are essentially subsidizing Chapel Hill and Chapel Hill businesses by providing free parking. … I don’t know anyone on town staff who’s interested in doing (parking) enforcement, and I don’t know ... that we should prioritize hiring town staff to do parking enforcement.
Where and how do you see Carrboro growing?
That’s challenging, because we have very, very few undeveloped lots in Carrboro, and our vacancy rate is pretty low, so that’s part of this conversation around how we update our land-use ordinance.
I think this is about changing policy, so that as redevelopment happens, it happens in a way that people feel like it fits and makes sense. And so in some places, that’s going to be duplexes and triplexes, and other places, that’s going to be two-story buildings. In some places, it’s going to be four-story buildings, but it’s also dependent on other stuff, like what happens at the state legislature.
I would circle back to the downtown area plan, which is going to be the first major project that’s an implementation of the Carrboro Connects master plan . Not everybody who’s coming out to vote is going to read the whole Carrboro Connects master plan, but I’m a fan of it, and I would encourage people to go look it up. I think they’ll find it’s a pretty good blueprint for what we should be doing.
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