November 2011 – The Naked City Blog

Did rogue columnist hit, or miss, in Charlotte critique?

Reading the happy Tweets out of Charlotte this afternoon, as the Chiquita headquarters announcement came through, I stumbled on a link from former Charlotte Observer business editor Jon Talton, who decamped years ago for Phoenix and Seattle. Talton always had an astute, if acerbic, analysis on Charlotte and its civic pride (or boosterism, take your pick).

After Talton (@jontalton) sent out this Tweet: “Chiquita: Say goodbye to world-class symphony, museums, architecture in #Cincinnati. Say hello to Waffle House,” he started getting some replies from Charlotteans who didn’t like seeing their city reduced to a Waffle House stereotype.

“That’s kind of a harsh statement. Have you actually been to Charlotte?!” asked one Charlottean. Talton, of course, had lived here for years, though he confessed he rarely went outside the uptown beltway, because that gave him the “fantods.” And his comeback to critics who said he was offending them and their city: “Oh, hell, I’ve been offending Charlotteans for years.”

But Talton had an insightful, if gloomy, assessment of the relative merits of Chicago and Charlotte, in this 2009 piece, “Tales of Two Cities: What Chicago and Charlotte Say About The Future Of America.” It contains a wonderful quote from Pericles, “All good things come to the city because of the city’s greatness,” and one characterization I’d take issue with. The Bank of America Corporate Center was not built in “one of downtown’s most blighted areas.”

But is Talton too gloomy about the long-term prospects of Charlotte and other postwar, Sun Belt cities, built as though 1965 and its gas prices would last forever? I fear he’s right. And I hope he’s wrong.

What’s up with the federal courthouse?

The majestic federal courthouse on West Trade Street, while stilled used by the federal courts, is owned by the City of Charlotte now. Monday night the City Council unanimously OK’d a change to the city’s agreement with Queens University of Charlotte, which has an option to purchase the building.

The previous agreement was for Queens to use the building as a future law school. Now that the for-profit Charlotte School of Law has opened, Queens requested a change in the agreement to give the school more leeway in what it could use the building for.

The Charles R. Jonas Federal building, built in 1917 and expanded in 1934, is not a local historic landmark although by most definitions of the term it should be, given its role in such historic federal cases as Judge James McMillan’s Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 1971. And the building also holds the only remaining courtroom that looks and feels like a courtroom. Whatever happens, let us hope Queens honors its history and ambiance.

Here’s a link to the council’s agenda packet. The courthouse section is agenda item 18.

The U.S. General Services Administration plans eventually (I am not holding my breath) to build a new courthouse at 500 E. Trade Street, over in the part of uptown that has been steadily deadened with courthouses, the Federal Reserve building, the government center and the jail. Not much room over there for many uses that will help create lively sidewalks along East Trade or Fourth or Third Streets, other than Occupy Charlotte at Old City Hall (which if you take the long view is temporary) and the occasionally excellent people-watching in front of the new Mecklenburg County Courthouse way down at McDowell and Fourth streets.

Charlotte area snags $5 million regional grant

Rebecca Yarbrough of Centralina COG, with check

It was just a bit of horseplay at Monday morning’s announcement that the 14-county Charlotte region won a $4.9 million federal grant for sustainability planning. But it was a metaphor for one of the historic hurdles that the initiative may at last be able to overcome.

As always a Big Fake Check was on display for photo opps, and after the ceremonial presentation, Charlotte Mayor Pro Tem Patrick Cannon made a jokingly fake attempt to stash the $5 million check in his coat pocket. Martha Sue Hall, the Albemarle City Council member who chairs the Centralina Council of Governments, the lead agency that pulled together the grant application, wrestled the big check out of Cannon’s grasp. Everyone laughed at the light moment.

But of course, even if inadvertently, it exemplified the fear communities outside Charlotte have: that the region’s big city will take most of the pie, leaving smaller places with just a few crumbs. [Never mind that on a per capita basis, many state and federal expenditures give large urban areas short shrift.] That fear, and the lack of trust that resources will be shared judiciously rather than snatched and hoarded, is one of many dynamics that make attempts at regionalism tough, no matter where you are. My article last week for Citiwire.net, “Regionalism: Wonky but Real,” explores the issue of urban regions more thoroughly. A longer version, with more Charlotte and N.C. information, ran on the website of the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute, where I work, www.ui.uncc.edu. ~~(That site is down for tinkering today and tomorrow. Check it out later this week.)~~

The grant dwarfs the $1.6 million each won last year by two other N.C. regions, the Piedmont Triad (Greensboro, Winston-Salem, High Point) and the Asheville-area Land of the Sky. Other N.C. grant winners announced Monday were the Wilmington region, $1.1 million, and the City of High Point, $240,000 for a new downtown plan. The only larger grants than Charlotte’s announced Monday were $4.9 million to the San Francisco Bay area and $5 million to a 13-county area in northern New Jersey.

Unless you’re a regional planner, by now your eyes are probably glazing over at the idea of a “regional plan” among 10 N.C. and 4 S.C. counties. It all probably seems remote from what you do every day. But it isn’t. Think about it. Throughout the Charlotte region people routinely cross city, county and state lines in the Charlotte region. We all drink water from rivers that flow through many jurisdictions and that sometimes hold cities’ treated waste water. The air we breathe flows invisibly (we hope!) across the landscape. People live in one place and work in another – if they are lucky enough to have jobs.

In other words, plenty of things that affect all of us daily – jobs, our water and air, farmland preservation, traffic congestion and the availability, or not, of transit or walkable/bikable routes – need to be approached regionally, not city council by city council or county board by county board.

The grant won’t solve all those problems of course. But the intent is to build on some work that started in 2007, which you probably never heard about. A 17-county bi-state group began hashing out a series of regional goals in the areas of economic development, the environment, growth, education, and so on. They include aiming for well-managed growth; for improving air and water quality and protecting wildlife, trees and rural areas; for improving social equity and inclusion, for collaborative approaches to economic development; for collaboration on educational initiatives, etc.

Those goals are laudable, but essentially they are just the result of a lot of conversations among a lot of people over several years, i.e., not backed by specific data. The grant will translate that large vision into an implementable plan, using yet-to-be-devised performance metrics. In other words, as the COG’s Rebecca Yarbrough put it, they’re now switching from anecdotal evidence to getting metrics for what represents sustainable growth for the whole region. It isn’t implementing anything, but trying to continue the difficult work of getting a lot of different people with different interests to pull together on common goals, using commonly shared and trusted information.

The grant is from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities, a partnership among HUD, the EPA and the U.S. Department of Transportation. The partnership works to get the three branches of the U.S. government to working together instead of, as sometimes happens, at cross purposes.

(Disclosure: The the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute, where I work, is a partner in the grant, and will get $179,000 for research to provide those metrics. The UNCC Metropolitan Studies program, which houses the institute, will get $253,000 for a regional affordable housing market study. The UNCC Urban Design Program in the School of Architecture will get $46,000 to help provide urban design guidance to the plan.)

More than 100 public and private sector partners will work on the process, but the core partners on the grant are: the Catawba Regional Council of Governments, UNC Charlotte, The Lee Institute, Urban Land Institute, Mecklenburg County CONNECT council, City of Charlotte CONNECT council, Charlotte Housing Authority, Regional Workforce Alliance, Charlotte Regional Partnership CONNECT council, Johnson C. Smith University and Winthrop University.

Why cities need Republicans

When a Wake County district school board election is being hailed nationally as evidence that the whole Tea Party movement is defunct, as in this not-at-all-objective piece from the Huffington Post, you know the hyperbole is hyper, indeed. Should the Charlotte City Council election be considered another piece of evidence that Republican power is withering nationally?

I am not at all sure it should be. Nevertheless, it’s still worth pondering the implications of moderate Republican Edwin Peacock’s loss in a Democratic sweep of all four at-large positions. In addition to Mayor Anthony Foxx, Democrats will have a 9-2 edge, with district representatives Andy Dulin (District 6) and Warren Cooksey (District 7) the council’s only Republicans.

I sought the thoughts of a well-known local political observer, Bill McCoy, a political scientist who handily for me is the emeritus director of the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute, where I work. “I don’t remember anything like a 9-2 split on City Council,” McCoy said. “I was totally surprised that Peacock lost.”

He went on to say this, about such a heavily Democratic council: “Although I might fall in the category of a yellow dog Democrat, I believe a balance among the parties is a good thing, particularly when the other party has a person like Peacock – a great role model for what a moderate Republican should be like.” Whether a “balance” has to be 6-5 or could be 7-4 or even 8-3 is debatable, he said, but 9-2 is beyond the pale for a “good balance.”

Charlotte has become more Democratic-leaning in recent years, although Mecklenburg County commissioners are less so (5-4 Democrat-Republican). The legislative delegation is also mixed: 6-4 Democrat-Republican in the N.C. House, and 3-1 in the N.C. Senate, or 3-2 if you county Tommy Tucker, whose district is mostly in Union County.

McCoy’s point is one I heard articulated in slightly different form at a roundtable discussion last month in New York, where the topic was urban regions and their relationships – political, economic and otherwise – with state governments. Sitting next to me was Joe McLaughlin, a former lobbyist, former adviser to Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell and now director of Temple University’s Institute for Public Affairs in Philadelphia. As we all chewed over the issue, McLaughlin said that one overlooked need cities have is, as he put it, “rebuilding” the Republican Party in urban areas.

He elaborated on his thinking to me this week, sharing a 2003 paper he wrote which said, “Particularly in a competitive two-party state like Pennsylvania, Philadelphia benefits from having two viable parties; many big cities do not.”

That reminded me of the oft-told story of how then-Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory, a Republican, and then-Mecklenburg County commissioners’ chair Parks Helms, a Democrat, teamed up when they visited Washington to lobby for transit funds. McCrory courted the Republicans, Helms the Democrats.

In many states, large cities are viewed with suspicion or jealousy at the state level. Georgia legislators have been known to compare Atlanta to Sodom and Gomorrah. Last year two former presidents of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, ex-Mayors Manny Diaz of Miami and Greg Nickels of Seattle, told me they knew of no U.S. cities whose relationships with their states worked well. And of course we know the derisive term, “The Great State of Mecklenburg,” has not vanished from the halls of Raleigh.

So it’s important for urban regions to be able to speak with a unified voice on important topics such as transportation, economic development and the environment. If suburban jurisdictions are Republican-dominated and city ones are Democratic, that poses one more hurdle to a region’s effectiveness at the state and federal levels.

Depending on how one defines “moderate,” Peacock may well be the last of the moderate Republicans elected to a partisan office from Charlotte, a tradition that includes, among others, former Gov. Jim Martin, former U.S. Rep. Alex McMillan, former county commissioners Carla DuPuy, Tom Cox and Peacock’s father, Ed Peacock, and former council members Velva Woollen, Lynn Wheeler and John Lassiter, to name just a few. (Whether some of today’s conservative Republicans might be more moderate if the Republican Party itself hadn’t veered strongly to the right is essentially unknowable.)

Finding ways for Democrats and Republicans to find common ground in solving common local problems remains important. But it’s likely to get a lot harder.

Voters oust GOP, raise their own taxes

Durham County voters OK’d a transit tax Tuesday

Tuesday’s municipal elections in Charlotte and across the state offered some unexpected results, especially if one considers that the state legislature is dominated by conservative, anti-tax Republicans. Voters in four N.C. counties voted to tax themselves, with Durham voters opting for two new taxes, one for transit.

In Charlotte, voters re-elected Mayor Anthony Foxx, a Democrat, over a conservative Republican and political newcomer, Scott Stone. That wasn’t unexpected. But voters swept into office all four Democratic candidates for at-large City Council seats, ousting moderate incumbent Republican Edwin Peacock III in favor of Claire Fallon, a planning commissioner and neighborhood activist, and Beth Pickering. Pickering had never run for office and just arrived in Charlotte five years ago from Denver, Colo.

That gives Democrats a 9-2 council majority, which I believe is more than at any time since the council went to districts in 1977. (Are any political historians out there to confirm or deny this?) The two lone Republicans, Andy Dulin and Warren Cooksey, didn’t have Democratic opposition in their districts; Cooksey dispatched a Republican opponent in the primary.

But across the state, voters in four counties made a kind of history by agreeing to raise their own taxes, something that conventional political wisdom has said isn’t likely during an economic downturn, or in a state that just last year sent to the General Assembly a slew of conservative Republicans.

A quick rundown:

– Durham County voters approved (about 60-40 percent) a half-cent sales tax for transit, making it the state’s second county, after Mecklenburg in 1998, to do so. Voters in Orange County (Chapel Hill) and Wake (Raleigh) are expected to face similar ballot measures next year, with Orange voting in the spring and Wake sometime later. That should finally give the Triangle area a funding stream hefty enough to start building a long-awaited rail transit system of light rail and commuter rail.

– Durham County voters also OK’d (57 percent) a quarter-cent sales tax for education.

– Orange County passed a quarter-cent sales tax for school building improvements and economic development infrastructure. The county voters rejected the tax a year ago. This year it passed with almost 61 percent of the vote.

– Buncombe County voters approved a quarter-cent sales tax increase to pay for renovations and new buildings at Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College.

– Montgomery County voters also approved a quarter-cent sales tax, for buildings at Montgomery County Schools and Montgomery Community College.

The N.C. Association of County Commissioners’ website tally shows a clean sweep for those taxes for this year, with Cabarrus voters approving one in May, Halifax County in February. Compare that to 2010 results. The same quarter-cent sales tax was on the ballot in 23 counties at various times throughout that year. Of the nine votes before Nov. 3, seven were successful. Of those Nov. 2, all lost, including in Orange and Montgomery counties. Does this mean the Nov. 2, 2010, anti-tax fervor was a one-time blip? Or was Nov. 8, 2011, the oddball election?

Sales taxes, of course, are an easier sell to most taxpayers than other types of tax. Suzanne Leland, a UNC Charlotte associate professor of political science, tells me voters usually prefer sales taxes over income or – the most hated – property taxes. Sales taxes, as Leland and many others point out, disproportionately hurt low-income households, where a higher proportion of income has to go for necessities such as housing, transportation, food, etc. Nevertheless, many voters consider them a more fair way to assess a tax.

The problem of pedestrian crossings

After a customer at an Elizabeth neighborhood bar was killed while crossing Seventh Street, the bar’s owner is trying to begin a campaign to add safety measures to the street. (The Observer ran a moving article today on the life of the victim, an Air Force veteran who was engaged to marry.)

A safer Seventh Street is an excellent goal, but the problem is not just for one street in one neighborhood. In another accident late Tuesday, a 14-year-old boy was killed when several cars hit him as he crossed W.T. Harris Boulevard.

The city, to its credit, has been working hard to add sidewalks and tame traffic on many neighborhood streets and thoroughfares. But those measures, by themselves, aren’t all that’s needed to make conditions comfortable and safe for people traveling on foot. Pedestrian crossings are essential. Charlotte doesn’t have enough of them.

In my possession is the 2008 draft of the City of Charlotte’s Pedestrian Plan. It remains unfinished, and thus unadopted. One of the most interesting maps in it shows the distances between signalized intersections (click here for a larger view. If the link doesn’t work, we’re working on that.). Segments greater than a half-mile (a 10-minute walk) are shown in purple, those greater than a quarter-mile (a five-minute walk) are in brown.

Except for a nugget in the center of the map (uptown) the map is a snake-pit of brown and purple squiggles. And I know, from driving around and checking the odometer, that many signalized intersections are farther apart than a half-mile.

For instance, yesterday I used the odometer to check distances between signals (where one could safely cross) on heavily traveled Eastway Drive, North Tryon Street and University City Boulevard, all of them bus routes. I frequently see pedestrians perched on tiny concrete medians as cars whiz past, or crossing in front of cars, typically to get to bus stops on the other side. My findings:

Eastway Drive: From Central Avenue to Kilborne Drive, no signal for crossing for .9 mile. I saw two pedestrians in the median.
From Kilborne to Shamrock Drive, one-third of a mile between traffic signals.
From Shamrock Drive to the signal at Sugar Creek Road, at Garinger High, .4 mile but no pedestrian crosswalk at the light.
Sugar Creek to The Plaza, .4 mile.

North Tryon Street: From Old Concord Road to Tom Hunter Road (served by two bus routes), 1 mile.
From the newly opened I-85 Connector Road to University City Boulevard, a stretch served by two bus routes but with huge gaps in the sidewalk network, .5 mile.

University City Boulevard: No sidewalks from the light at North Tryon to the light at the Target near W.T. Harris Boulevard, no way to cross for .4 mile.

On first glance you’d say a five-minute walk to go 1/4 mile to a signal isn’t so bad. But consider that you have to walk to the light, then back again if, for instance, you’re trying to get across a busy street to get to a bus stop. Humans are not prudent, and most people resist walking 20 minutes out of their way just to cross the street. If the street looks clear, they will cross where they can.

I know trade-offs exist. The more pedestrian lights you have the slower traffic will flow. In spots where motorists aren’t expecting to see a light they tend not to stop, even if the light is red. Pedestrians who believe they can safely cross might get hit. (Update 6:48 p.m. 11/4/11: One unfortunate example took place Thursday night, when a Davidson professor was badly injured when he was hit while in a pedestrian crosswalk.) (Update Nov. 13: The injured man died Nov. 11.)

I ran much of this past Malisa Mccreedy, the pedestrian program manager for the Charlotte Department of Transportation. She replied, via email: “Your effort to bring attention to pedestrian crossings is much appreciated. While the City has a history of working to address the inherited challenges of how our land use and road networks function, it is an ongoing balancing act.” CDOT will focus anew on its Pedestrian Plan starting in 2012, she said.

Tell them where you really go

Where do you really travel, and how do you get there, and how long does it take? The collection of transportation planning groups in the Charlotte metro area (a group I like to call the Seven Dwarfs), is undertaking a survey to learn more.

I learned this tidbit in reading the Oct. 28 memo to Charlotte City Council from City Manager Curt Walton. (This is why the world needs journalists; someone has to read these things and sort the chaff from the wheat. Whether this survey is chaff or wheat remains to be discovered.)

The memo reports:

Over the next few months, a sample of residents of Mecklenburg, Gaston, Union, Cabarrus, Iredell, Rowan, Cleveland, Lincoln, and Stanly counties in North Carolina and residents of York and Lancaster counties in South Carolina will be contacted by phone to participate in the regional household travel survey. ETC Institute, the firm conducting the random survey on behalf of the planning agencies, will be recruiting 4,000 households to participate based on geographic location, household income, and household size.

Households participating in the survey will have each household member keep a travel diary for one day. They will be asked to record the destination address, travel time, travel mode, and vehicle occupancy for their trips throughout the day. The travel diary results will be used to understand travel patterns, and specifically, how, when, and where people travel. All information collected is confidential and individual responses will not be released.

Wondering about the reference to Seven Dwarfs?

The memo goes on to list the multiple transportation planning agencies in the Charlotte region, saying, “This study was programmed by Mecklenburg-Union MPO (MUMPO), Cabarrus-Rowan MPO (CRMPO), Gaston Urban Area MPO (GUAMPO), Rock Hill-Fort Mill Transportation Study (RFATS), NCDOT, SCDOT, Rocky River RPO (RRRPO), and Lake Norman RPO (LNRPO).” Where’s the seventh dwarf? That would be the Hickory-area MPO, also known as GHMPO.

Getting better information about how and where people travel is sound planning. If you worry that it’s sort of Big Brotherish you don’t have to take part in the survey. Plus, your cellphone is keeping a record of everywhere you go, anyway, courtesy of AT&T or Verizon or whoever.

But the larger point about transportation planning is this: How in the world can the Charlotte region think it is doing anything that is even in the same hemisphere as “sane transportation planning” while it is split among seven different planning groups, each jealously guarding its own projects and only one of them (MUMPO) shouldering the very real need for regional mass transit? Merge them all. Even consider – gasp! – merging transportation planning and the Charlotte regional land-planning agency, the Centralina Council of Governments. Many, many large and successful metro areas did that years ago. It’s not a cure-all. But it’s a smart start.