CHAPEL HILL - Mary Jane Nirdlinger worked for UNC, helping to craft a plan for Carolina North. Now she's working for the Town of Chapel Hill, helping to make sure her old and new employers live up to the development agreement she helped to write.

Town Manager Roger Stancil hired Nirdlinger as a special projects manager this summer, after she had resigned from her job as a land-use planner at the university. Nirdlinger had another job outside Chapel Hill lined up but opted for a 5 percent pay raise and a chance to continue working on the satellite campus with partners she knows well.

"I would have lost the historic knowledge that I had of these projects, and I would have lost those relationships," said Nirdlinger, who will earn $78,000 a year and filled one of three vacant planner positions in the town's budget.

"I felt like even though the other position would have been professionally rewarding, that this was an opportunity to have an impact closer to home. ... I consider myself a neighbor of Carolina North."

Nirdlinger lives off Piney Mountain Road, within a mile of the Carolina North property. She's especially familiar with her new colleagues in the town planning department, as her job at UNC included shepherding projects through the town's permit process.

Stancil knew Nirdlinger from 10 months of negotiations between the Town Council and the UNC Board of Trustees on Carolina North.

In fact, she announced her resignation at one of those meetings this past spring, and Stancil e-mailed her to express disappointment they wouldn't be working together anymore. The two began discussing her hiring from there, Stancil said.

"I wasn't recruiting people who work for the university to come work for the town," said Stancil. "She was leaving, and I diverted her path."

Along with Carolina North, Nirdlinger helped to plan projects all over the main campus, plus the future employee housing at Carolina Commons in Carrboro and University Square/Granville Towers on Franklin Street. She'll likewise have myriad tasks as a town planner: coordinating the town's oversight of Carolina North; transportation planning for Carolina North and the town as a whole; and crafting rules about tree protection and affordable housing.

In the mid-1990s, Nirdlinger studied international relations at American University in Washington D.C., spending a year at the University of Geneva as a Rotary International Ambassadorial Scholar.

In Europe, she discovered a strong sense of place in the cities and towns and decided she wanted to foster that in the United States. She studied urban planning at the University of Michigan and then planned central New Jersey's first neo-urban development, Washington Town Center, a project similar to Southern Village or Meadowmont.

"Sometimes you realize it's the small or local efforts that make the most difference for people on a day-to-day basis," said the mother of two. "I live here, and I care about what happens in the community, and I care about what happens at the university."