Sally Greene, Chapel Hill Town Council

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Sally Greene, a research attorney, came to Chapel Hill in 1987 to enter the graduate program in English at the University of North Carolina, earning a Ph.D. in 1996. She has taught in the English departments and law schools at UNC and the University of Virginia. An adjunct professor at Elon University School of Law, where she teaches legal writing, she has published widely on literary and historical topics. Her edited collection of essays Virginia Woolf: Reading the Renaissance was published by the Ohio University Press in 1999. In November 2007 she convened, with UNC law professor Eric Muller, a symposium, "The Perils of Public Homage: State v. Mann and Thomas Ruffin in History and Memory," with keynote presentation by constitutional scholar Sanford Levinson. Her essay on State v. Mann was published in the March 2009 issue of the North Carolina Law Review.

Since her election to the Town Council in 2003, she has taken a special interest in issues of affordable housing, homelessness, environmental conservation, neighborhood preservation, historic preservation, and public art. She is chairing a task force on inclusionary zoning, whose work is expected to lead to the passage of an ordinance that will strengthen the town’s requirements for affordable housing. She was instrumental in bringing about a community conversation on homelessness, which by spring 2007 had evolved into Orange County’s 10-year Plan to End Chronic Homelessness. She is chair of the executive team charged with implementing the plan.

As a member of the Town Council committee on open space preservation, she worked to create the Morgan Creek Preserve, a 92-acre natural area along Morgan Creek recently placed under permanent conservation easement with the North Carolina Botanical Garden Foundation. As liaison to the Planning Board she has been involved with the creation of four neighborhood conservation districts: Greenwood, Kings Mill-Morgan Creek, Pine Knolls, and Mason Farm. She introduced a proposal that led to the granting of a permanent conservation easement to Preservation North Carolina for the 1960s-era public library building designed by Don Stewart. She was a member of the consulting committee for the public art contextual master plan.

Additionally, she was on the Council negotiating team for the Downtown Economic Development Initiative's contract with Ram Development Corp., which will result in a $75 million residential and retail complex on town-owned property (Lot 5) in the downtown district. She also serves on the steering committee of the Orange County Family and Drug Treatment Courts; she is on the Downtown Outreach Committee of the Downtown Partnership; and she was on the Council committee that drafted and recommended Chapel Hill's voter-owned election program, the first such program for municipal elections in the state.

Before her election to Town Council, Greene served as vice-chair of the Chapel Hill Planning Board. She was, and remains, on the steering committee of the Morgan Creek Valley Alliance, a group of citizens concerned with monitoring and conserving the Morgan Creek watershed. Prior to 2003 she was involved with various issues before the town, including the deliberations that led to the passage of the 2003 Land Use Management Ordinance and the establishment in 2004 of the Northside neighborhood as Chapel Hill's first neighborhood conservation district.

She came to Chapel Hill from Washington, D.C., where, after earning her J.D. from George Washington University in 1984, she was an associate general counsel for Electronic Data Systems Corp.

From 1998 to 2003 she was research attorney for Becton, Slifkin and Bell in Raleigh, where most cases involved representing plaintiffs in personal injury or medical malpractice lawsuits. The work also extended to environmental and land use issues, including the representation of landowners in partial condemnations by the Department of Transportation for highway widenings. For citizens of Greene County, N.C., she helped to write appellate briefs that successfully kept a regional landfill from being built. Since 2003 she has been on her own as a consultant lawyer specializing in performing legal research and writing appellate briefs for clients around the state.

Greene, a native of Gilmer, Tex., is married to Paul Jones, founding director of ibiblio.org and professor in the schools of Information and Library Science and Journalism and Mass Communication. Their son Tucker is a junior at the North Carolina School of Science and Math.