The town of Chapel Hill hosted a performance entitled "public hearing" Oct. 19, where the speakers and message were controlled by town officials to make it look like there was little opposition to their back-room deal.

Mayor Kevin Foy's office discouraged folks with concerns about the proposal to speak, except as a single group, while encouraging or allowing those in favor of the proposal to speak in larger numbers for longer periods of time.

I asked to speak at the hearing and was told that I could not. I have been to dozens of county public hearings and cannot recall a single time that the public was not permitted to speak.

You probably didn't know about the hearing because the site being discussed had no sign giving public notice. Not even one of those dinky little yellow rezoning signs. Ironically, there were 30 campaign signs in sight.

According to the back-room deal forged many months ago without any public input, the town intends to locate every homeless shelter and resident drug rehab facility in the entire county in one-fifth of a square mile.

Is it reasonable to place all three facilities into less than a percent of the land in Chapel Hill/Carrboro (0.0005 of the size of the county)? In that same one-fifth square mile is public housing, the department of social services, two preschools and a park. The drug rehab recently underwent a major expansion.

You would have thought that town officials would have learned about triple-burdening a community after the trash transfer station siting debacle in the county.

The town's own comprehensive plan does not allow the shelter. Nor does the ordinance which limits shelters to 25 residents.

Understandably, the shelter makes it quite clear that they house criminals and registered sex offenders as well as substance abusers and the mentally ill. In light of these facts, should this proposed facility be located adjacent to United Church of Christ and across the street from the property of Orange United Methodist Church, both of whom have large preschool and youth programs? Would the shelter be elitist for denying sex offenders? Wouldn't it be better to locate the shelter where it can legally service all homeless folks?

The current emergency shelter kicks the men out during the day. Just 500 feet away from the proposed site, hundreds of children practice soccer, softball, baseball, and swimming every day in the most active park and playground in the town.

ChrisMoran of the Inter-Faith Council strongly stated that what happens outside the shelter is someone else's problem. The unrefuted reality is that the park, the woods surrounding the public housing project between the park and the drug rehab center, the woods around the senior center, and the woods around Orange United Methodist will become a hangout and campground for those who cannot get into the emergency shelter or who are part of the 90 percent of residents who the shelter acknowledges are kicked out for misbehavior.

Whoever architected this backroom deal in the town has cunningly advised the Inter-Faith Council to lay off the original soup kitchen plans on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard until this fait accompli has run through its first act. The next domino to fall will be the expansion into the other 11 acres on the property for the soup kitchen.

I can hear it now: "The shelter is already there, so it makes sense to put the soup kitchen there, too."

The special use permit (SUP) could try to preclude expansion, but SUPs are non-binding. Any future council can do whatever they want with continued complete disregard for equitably distributing social services, just like the amnesia that allegedly occurred for Rogers Road.

Everyone at the hearing appeared to agree we need a shelter. Let's see a site search with a defined list of parameters, just like the revised trash transfer station search. Let's not skip the most important part of the process and jump to the middle.

The lease is 50 years, so any amortized cost of the land is a pittance compared to building and operating the shelter.The town can even lease the proposed site to someone else and use the proceeds to buy the right location for the shelter.

Let's locate the shelter with defined criteria in the open, public process that Chapel Hill residents expect, rather than what has started out as the Easley-esque backroom manner.