The busy summer travel season is officially here. And if you're planning to fly out of Charlotte Douglas this holiday weekend, get ready for long lines. The airport says it's expecting 437,000 passengers over Memorial Day weekend. That's an increase of about 8% from last year. For more, we go now to Tony Mecia of the Charlotte Ledger Business Newsletter for our segment BizWorthy.
Marshall Terry: So Tony, of course, the airport says "get there early," and I'm doing air quotes here. Just how early Tony?
Tony Mecia: Marshall, the recommendation is for a domestic flight to show up two hours ahead of time and for an international flight to show up three hours ahead of time. Everybody's preferences on that are going to vary based on your risktaking. Some people like to slide in right before the plane leaves, but they are seeing an increase in air passengers. So you want to leave yourself plenty of time. Airport officials said this week, you know, the parking also sometimes gets tight during peak travel periods like the summer. Some of those lots fill up. The airport advises to go ahead and reserve that parking ahead of time. Parking is a big source of airport revenue, you know, incidentally, So they're managing that. You can also check into your flight earlier online. That could speed some things up. There is some construction going on in the terminal, so that's going to remove some checkpoints around. There could be long lines at checkpoints. So there's a number of things you want to be mindful of if you're flying out of Charlotte airportthis summer.
Terry: Now, you report that one thing passengers will not be able to grab in the terminal anymore is a copy of The Charlotte Observer or the Wall Street Journal. What's going on with that?
Mecia: Yeah, we had heard from some of our readers that you're no longer able to get a newspaper at the airport, and that's a ritual for some people. The airport is no longer selling newspapers. And the airport told us that The Charlotte Observer decided to stop servicing the airport. The Observer also distributes a lot of national newspapers. We did reach out to Observer editors and we did not hear back. So we don't really know specifically what's going on. We can sort of speculate and say, well, you know, newspapers are kind of moving away from their print editions. They're going more online. It's costing money to deliver the paper to different places. It certainly would seem to be fitting in with that trend.
Terry: On to some development news, now. Charlotte City Council voted to direct staff to explore changing the Unified Development Ordinance, allowing duplexes and triplexes in neighborhoods zoned for single-family homes. The UDO is set to take effect in just a week. So what's behind this last-minute move, and could we see that provision changed?
Mecia: So this involves one of the more controversial parts of the Unified Development Ordinance in the 2040 Comprehensive Plan, which the city council passed last year. A lot of neighborhood leaders were concerned at the time that this would alter the character of their neighborhoods. It would lead to higher housing prices, locally, gentrification. But housing advocates prevailed and said we need more housing in the city to keep prices from going up as quickly as they have been. Since the council passed that last year, there were four new council members elected and three of them voted this week to go ahead and reexamine those rules on duplexes and triplexes. We don't know where it's going to end up. It could just be they're looking at it and they make no changes. But we should know a little bit more in a couple of weeks about where some of these City Council members stand and whether they're going to make any changes to that provision.
Terry: Well, how does this fit in with some of the other things that we're seeing the city get cold feet about, like restricting drive-thrus in busy neighborhoods? Is the big vision of the UDO being chipped away at?
Mecia: I don't think the big vision of the UDO is being chipped away. The big vision is to overhaul and consolidate and make more simple the city's development rules, so there's certainty for developers and neighbors. Now, how that plays out exactly like with anything new that is introduced, you don't always know what that's going to look like. The city has always said that it would make changes to the Unified Development Ordinance as it learned new information and as things popped up. So you could say this is part of that evolution as opposed to a dismantling of it. The ordinance is hundreds of pages long, covers a whole bunch of different things. And this is just one piece of it, although certainly one of the more high-profile pieces.
Terry: Finally, you report Charlotte could be getting a new pro sport. Which one?
Mecia: Ultimate Frisbee. This is a sport that's popular at colleges. It's kind of like football, but with a Frisbee and of course, not as rough. There is a professional league and the commissioner of that league says an investor group is forming to try to start a professional Ultimate Frisbee team in Charlotte. Now, Marshall, this is not big money. The pros in Ultimate Frisbee do not earn the kind of money that new Panthers quarterback Bryce Young. It's probably going to earn, it's more in the range, you know, a few hundred or a few thousand dollars. So the players keep their day job. So for example, they could host morning radio during the morning and then have time in the afternoon to practice and play in the evening.
Terry: I played Ultimate Frisbee once, just once. I couldn't keep up. All right. Well, thanks, Tony.
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