Category: Charlotte City Council

Bike-sharing in Charlotte – soon?

A Charlotte City Council committee today takes up the question of what should happen next if Charlotte is to have (or not) a bike-sharing program. It also takes up an even more hot-potato topic: How to pay for the city’s road needs.

For those unfamiliar with the term bike-sharing, those programs have sprung up in cities all over the country, as well as in other countries. For a small fee – typically paid online – you can become a member or pay for a temporary membership. That gives you the ability to take a bicycle from a bike station, ride it for a certain number of hours and return it to another bike station

In its August meeting, the committee heard a presentation from Alta Bicycle Share, a consultant group that manages the Washington bike-sharing program known as Capital Bikeshare. (Photo courtesy of Capital Bikeshare, taken from the City of Charlotte’s website.) 

If you click on the link in the first sentence of this item, you’ll see that the committee agenda also holds a discussion on the sure-to-be-controversial topic of what revenue sources (read: tax or fee increase)
might be available to provide money for the Charlotte region’s huge transportation needs. The agenda says “provide detailed information on a variety of potential transportation revenue sources.”
The presentation will be a reprise of the recommendations from the Committee of 21, led by developer Ned Curran, which met in 2009 to look at the city’s “road needs.” It did not look at transit needs.  It did not look at “street” needs. None of which is to say that the city doesn’t need some work on its roads. It does. But in Mary’s Perfect World, we’d talk more about streets, which is what you have in a city, and less about “roads,” which are what you have between cities. And we’d mostly talk about “transportation” needs, which means looking at driving, transit, bicycling and walking, i.e., the Big Picture. We need to serve all those transportation forms.
The Committee of 21 looked at a gigantic list of possible funding, including such  Big City ideas as charging a fee for driving into uptown. It rejected most of those. For instance, congestion pricing (the downtown fee) can work well where residents have plenty of good options for transportation other than driving. Charlotte is not one of those places.
Why is the Committee of 21 presenting a reprise? I asked committee chair David Howard that very thing when I chanced to run into him Saturday at the UNC Charlotte Student Union. (I was walking around campus for exercise; he was waiting for his daughter to finish an educational program on campus.) He said he asked for it to be put on the agenda, because it’s a conversation the community needs to have.
The committee meets at 3:30 p.m. today in Room 280 of the Government Center.  

Bike-share idea moves forward in Charlotte

Charlotte City government officials will discuss whether to push ahead with what’s now a fledgling idea for the city to launch a bike-sharing program, preferably in time for the Democratic National Committee in September 2012.

The City Council’s Transportation and Planning Committee this afternoon (Monday, Aug 22) heard a presentation from Alison Cohen, president of Alta Bicycle Share, which operates the Washington, D.C., bike share program, Capital Bikeshare, launched in September 2010. Also at the meeting was John Cock of the affiliated Alta wing, Alta Planning + Design.

Bike-share programs let customers pay (via memberships, or kiosks) to rent bicycles temporarily from a system of stations around the city. In Washington, yearly membership is $75, which buys you an electronic key you insert to free the bike from its locked slot at the station. Day-pass users ($5) get an unlocking code to use.  The first 30 minutes of a ride have no other fee bu the longer the ride, the more it costs. 

It’s important to have places for bicycle riders to ride, Cohen said. Washington went from 3 to 50 miles of bike lanes in the last 10 years and saw bicycle commuting rise 86 percent, 2000-2009. The average distance of a Capital Bikeshare ride is 1.2 miles, Cohen said. (Charlotte is up to 50 miles of lanes, city bicycle coordinator Ken Tippette said.)

Today’s meeting had no specific proposal on the table for council members; it was an information session arranged by Tippette with the encouragement of City Council member Edwin Peacock III, who chairs the council’s Environment Committee and who described his experience using Capital Bikeshare when he was in Washington recently for a National League of Cities meeting.

Cohen said the D.C. bike share program is the nation’s largest to date, although New York City plans to launch one in 2012 with 10,000 bikes. Other cities with programs: Denver, Minneapolis, Boston – even Spartanburg, S.C., which has only two bike share stations according to Cohen. Also in the works are programs in Chattanooga, Tenn., San Antonio and Miami. And yes, you read that right. Spartanburg.

Council members David Howard, Patsy Kinsey and Nancy Carter had questions for Cohen and Cock, but no one pooh-poohed the idea. At the end of the meeting, Howard, who chairs the committee, asked Assistant City Manager Jim Schumacher to talk with City Manager Curt Walton about what, if anything, the city should try to do.

Reading the tea leaves, as we pundits try to do, I predict the city will explore some sort of small-scale bike sharing program limited to center city and possibly one or two nearby neighborhoods, and will look for private sponsors to help with costs. A year is a short time frame for setting up a full program, but with enough push it could be done. After all, if you were in Charlotte in 1994 for the Final Four you saw center city enthusiasts create a fake nightlife scene, setting up bars inside vacant buildings. It worked. Doubters saw the huge crowds of people willing to come uptown for a night out, and it helped spark more authentic night life uptown. Setting up a real, if small, bike share program might have the same kind of inspirational effect.

The council committee also, with little discussion, unanimously recommended approval of the Center City 2020 Vision Plan, which goes to the full council Sept. 12  Here’s a link to the draft of the plan, and here’s a link to some commentary from my UNC Charlotte colleague David Walters and me. Also, here’s a previous Naked City Blog item from me.

Council member says planning IS included

City Council member David Howard just phoned to comment on my previous post, “Charlotte’s disappearing focus on planning.” Howard chaired the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Commission before he was elected to an at-large Charlotte City Council seat.  He wants to make this point: The council committee, which he chairs, is still named Transportation and Planning. I’ve corrected the previous post to make that change.

The council’s committees essentially divvy up the workload, vetting issues before they reach the full council. So his committee hears and gives preliminary approval to many – but not all – area plans, land use policy changes, etc.  The so-called focus areas are the issues the council makes its top priorities. He said planning has never been a council focus area, “because it’s infused in everything.”

Since I was fortunate enough to have the chairman of the Transportation and Planning committee on the horn, I asked him about another tidbit I had spotted while burrowing through Charlotte City Manager Curt Walton’s proposed budget for the next fiscal year. This is on page 70. Deep in the text accompanying the summary of the Planning Department’s accomplishments and focus, etc., under “Service Delivery Challenges,” is this:

“One of Planning’s challenges is updating this [zoning and development] ordinance so that it reflects desired community characteristics and recently adopted land use and urban design public policy. A more comprehensive update is necessary. This will require a tremendous amount of resources and technical expertise that Planning does not have available in-house and funding is not available. The impact of which will be the inability to fully implement adopted area plans and [not] achieving the highest quality development Planning can in our community.” 

In other words – and if you follow my writing this will sound familiar because I have been beating this drum for years – the city-county zoning ordinance needs a top-to-bottom rewrite. The types of development it allows and in some cases requires can all too often completely undercut the city’s adopted plans and policies.

I asked Howard about that. He said he had had conversations with Planning Director Debra Campbell about that issue while he was on the planning commission. I asked if the idea of a comprehensive re-do of the city’s zoning ordinance had come up at the City Council level. “It hasn’t come up to that level,” he said.

As a postscript I’ll note, just because Charlotte and Raleigh NEVER compete, that Raleigh has in the past few years finished a massive re-do of its comprehensive plan, adopted in 20090, and is embarked on the huge task of rewriting its whole zoning code so that it upholds the plans.  That process is in the public comment period.

Charlotte’s disappearing focus on planning

So I’m poring through Charlotte City Manager Curt Walton’s proposed budget today – I know you wish you could do the same, but sometimes they just pay us here at the paper to have fun like that – and I notice that the City Council’s committees and their “focus areas” seem to have dropped a word from previous years. That word is “planning.”

The committee formerly known as Transportation and Planning is now simply Transportation. Council member David Howard, who chairs the committee, says that while the official council “focus areas”  don’t mention the word “planning,” the committee name remains Transportation and Planning.  Before Mayor Anthony Foxx took office in 2009, there was a committee known as Economic Development and Planning.  When Foxx took office, it became Economic Development, and “Planning” was added to the title of the Transportation Committee, and there it remains.

Of course you can make the case that “planning” is embedded in many focus areas, such as environment, transportation, housing, etc. For the record, the focus areas are: Community Safety, Economic Development, Environment, Housing and Neighborhood Development and Transportation. Other committees are Budget, Government Affairs [no silly, this does not include Schwarzenegger, Edwards, et al] and Restructuring Government.

Pardon my bias here, but I want to stand up for the idea that planning, in and of itself, is important for a growing city such as Charlotte.

The City Council should make clear, as part of its focus areas, that planning is important. Aren’t the city’s plans a valued resource for the council and the whole community? If they aren’t, why not, and what needs to happen to make them so? A comprehensive city plan, drawn up with massive public involvement, builds buy-in from the community toward a vision for the city’s future, lays out a road map for policy changes that help get there, and builds buy-in as well for making those changes.

Planning should again become a visible part of the City Council’s focus.

Historic church gets saved on Seigle Ave.

It looks as if the Seigle Avenue Presbyterian Church sanctuary won’t be demolished. Neighbors, church members and other interested parties found a local builder-developer who has contracted to buy the old church property. Monday night the Charlotte City Council granted a 90-day delay in the city’s demolition order.

As I wrote in my Jan. 28 op-ed, “Once-loved sanctuary faces the end,” the church may not be an architectural gem, but it and its congregation played a notable role in ongoing efforts here to create more racially integrated congregations. It was, I wrote, “a small congregation, racially integrated for more than 40 years. For decades that 1950 sanctuary was home to a group of African-American and white Christians puzzling their way through barriers of race, income, gender, class and other inequities – a journey so difficult that many other people and groups in Charlotte have not really begun it.”

The congregation split over a variety of issues, with many long-time former members of both races joining Caldwell Memorial Presbyterian Church. The remaining Seigle members moved up the street to another building five years ago and put the old property on the market. But the real estate slowdown, the three buildings’ bad condition and the lack of parking made it a difficult sale. The city’s new building code for non-residential property, when applied to the church property, resulted in a demolition order. In January the City Council granted a 30-day demolition delay, after the church’s real estate agent said he thought he had found a buyer.

Monday night, the buyer himself – Brandon Brown of Green City Development – told the City Council he would close on the property in about a week and asked for 150 days’ delay in the demolition order so he could tear down the oldest building and start repairing the sanctuary and fellowship hall. He’s also asking to buy 2 city-owned acres behind the church to use for more parking; those negotiations will be more complex and his purchase of the church isn’t contingent upon that separate land purchase.

Brown said he’d like to turn the church sanctuary into a restaurant (he didn’t use the example of Bonterra in Dilworth, but I will) and the fellowship hall into a coffee shop or office. The City Council gave him a 90-day extension of the demolition. Brown was good with that.

The city’s nonresidential building code is well-intentioned but it’s having the effect of threatening historic landmark buildings, as I wrote in November’s “City May Seek Landmark Demolition.” (The Seigle Avenue church building wasn’t a landmark.)

Observer file photo below showing the front of the sanctuary was taken in 1993.

When introverts hold office

I’m live-blogging from the Charlotte City Council’s retreat. I’m also Tweeting, follow @marynewsom.

I caught some possibly significant discussion for a time this afternoon, post-lunch and before the current budget presentation. Facilitator Mike Whitehead pointed out that most of the council members are “sort of introverted,” which means there’s a tendency for less communication. “You flaming extroverts know who you are,” he said, and laughter erupted from the table where Andy Dulin and James Mitchell are sitting. Those two are not what I’d peg as introverts.

Then Whitehead gave the formula he says is sometimes used in corporate America NC = MSU. That stands for “No communication? Then people make stuff up.” The lesson, he said, is to communicate better with each other, so people know what’s going on.

And, he said, you could communicate better with the media. (Colorful type font for emphasis is mine.) Answer questions and give data, he said, especially since a lot of the data is public record anyway.

But Mayor Anthony Foxx said he’d had experiences when C = MSU “and that’s a problem” He has sometimes talked to council members (“and you know who you are”) and then they tell reporters something else. Hmmm. So I think he just accused some council members of lying to the news media. If you’re a journalist, let me note, the only thing surprising about all that is for the mayor to call it out publicly.

When introverts hold office

I’m live-blogging from the Charlotte City Council’s retreat. I’m also Tweeting, follow @marynewsom.

I caught some possibly significant discussion for a time this afternoon, post-lunch and before the current budget presentation. Facilitator Mike Whitehead pointed out that most of the council members are “sort of introverted,” which means there’s a tendency for less communication. “You flaming extroverts know who you are,” he said, and laughter erupted from the table where Andy Dulin and James Mitchell are sitting. Those two are not what I’d peg as introverts.

Then Whitehead gave the formula he says is sometimes used in corporate America NC = MSU. That stands for “No communication? Then people make stuff up.” The lesson, he said, is to communicate better with each other, so people know what’s going on.

And, he said, you could communicate better with the media. (Colorful type font for emphasis is mine.) Answer questions and give data, he said, especially since a lot of the data is public record anyway.

But Mayor Anthony Foxx said he’d had experiences when C = MSU “and that’s a problem” He has sometimes talked to council members (“and you know who you are”) and then they tell reporters something else. Hmmm. So I think he just accused some council members of lying to the news media. If you’re a journalist, let me note, the only thing surprising about all that is for the mayor to call it out publicly.

TARP saved our rears, economist says

I’m live-blogging the Charlotte City Council’s retreat. Follow me, also, on Twitter @marynewsom. And see my previous post: “Charlotte’s economy shows a lagging city.”

At the Charlotte City Council retreat, council member James Mitchell asked the panel of economists’ opinion of the stimulus spending.

UNCC economics professor John Connaughton said, “But for TARP we would all be selling pencils on the street corner.” We were that close to collapse, he said.

He goes on to say that if the U.S. is to regain its economic standing, “It’s not going to be in stealing manufacturing jobs from China.” Instead, in his view, it’s going to be in selling high-level services to the rest of the world, which makes an educated workforce even more important.

Charlotte’s economy shows “a lagging city”

I’m live-blogging (and tweeting – and Tweeting, follow me @marynewsom) from the Charlotte City Council’s yearly retreat. We’re about to hear from three economist-types about the 2011-12 economic outlook.

Council members were 45 minutes late for this session, as they all went out to West Charlotte for the Project LIFT announcement.

12:09 p.m. – Wells vice president and economist Anika Khan predicts Charlotte won’t recover the jobs we lost until 2014-15. Says unemployment won’t get as low as 8 percent until 2012. She calls Charlotte “a lagging city.”

12:15 p.m. Anika Khan says the local apartment market “starting to take off.” “We have still a way to go with the Charlotte office market.” Said retail still has an 11.3 percent vacancy rate.
She concludes, “Charlotte is positioned for growth. But it’s going to be slow and very modest.”

12:17 p.m. John Connaughton, UNC Charlotte econ prof and director of the UNCC Economic Forecast, opens by saying, “I’m far less optimistic.” He points out that North Carolina lost 283,000 jobs since recession started. Last year, he said, NC added only 10,000 jobs. That leaves 273,000 to go. “You can do the math,” he says, about how long it’ll take to make up the jobs at that rate.

12:25 p.m. Connaughton predicts it will be 5-6 years before Charlotte gets back to the same level of employment the city had at the peak in December 2007. Many of the jobs lost are blue-collar jobs that aren’t coming back, he said.
Also, there’s a “new normal” and people aren’t buying as much. Since 71 percent of the U.S. economy is personal consumption, he said, that means slower growth.
And “consumers are just not happy campers” he said. “Consumer confidence has been hammered.” Consumers don’t see job numbers that make them comfortable.

12:35 p.m. – Connaughton now talking about risk of double dip recession if oil prices go up much higher. For every 50 cents that gas prices go up, he says, it takes $150 billion out of U.S consumer pockets. He used to think the double-dip recession wasn’t likely. Now he’s not so sure.
He noted the huge cash reserves that banks are holding. “There’s plenty of cash out there. It’s just not getting into the hands of small businesses,” he says. That’s one thing that’s a real killer,” he said.

Connaughton also pointed out the need for North Carolina to restructure its tax policies. Property tax revenue will rise, but slowly, he said. But the state depends too heavily on the sales tax, which (see “new normal,” above) is becoming a smaller and smaller share of economic growth.

12:50 p.m. – Matt Martin, senior vice president of the Federal Reserve in Richmond, is less pessimistic than Connaughton.
He says the construction jobs we saw at the peak aren’t coming back. It was 6 percent of U.S. GDP at the peak, he said, which was high for historic norms. Now it’s less than 3 percent.
And the lost manufacturing jobs won’t come back, either, he said.

Foxx’s 3 C’s – including consolidation

Mayor Anthony Foxx made a series of proposals, some of them sure to be controversial, in his State of the City speech this morning – his first since being sworn in as mayor last December. Among them:

• He reiterated his belief that city and county governments should ultimately consolidate. “It will never happen if we don’t start now,” he said.

• He’ll convene a regional group early next year to develop a plan for bringing the region’s fractured transportation planning organizations. Most metro regions have one regional transportation planning body. The Charlotte region has six, or if you count Hickory, seven. “The time has come,” Foxx said, and said he wanted the regional group to come away with “concrete steps.” He said: “The time has come.”

• He wants to create a board of experts who’ll take a comprehensive look at after-school programs and create a competitive grant-making process, akin to the federal Race to the Top for state school systems. The city still funds some after-school programs, but has cut its funding to others.

• Charlotte City Council, he said, should be prepared to support state legislative agendas of fellow elected bodies such as Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. He endorsed raising the cap (now at 100) on the number of charter schools the state allows. And with CMS facing “staggering cuts,” he said, the City Council shouldn’t have reduced its funding for school resource officers and school crossing guards. (Here’s reporter Steve Harrison’s article on that.)

The city in the coming year should focus on what he called the 3 C’s: Consolidation, Collaboration (i.e. regionally) and Children.

It was obviously not the sort of speech you’d have heard from former Mayor Pat McCrory, the seven-term Republican who shied away from speechifying about public schools in general and CMS in particular. (That may have made him the wiser politician, of course. CMS in general is a topic that gets many people’s blood boiling, from both ends of the political spectrum.)

I saw no one in the crowd I recognized as a Republican, and plenty I recognized as Democrats, but of course people don’t have to wear badges. So while Foxx offered congratulations to incoming N.C. House Speaker Thom Tillis of Cornelius, and incoming Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger, both Republicans, and even threw them a political bone with the recommendation to lift the charter school cap, I wonder if that will do much for bipartisanship. “We look forward to working with you,” Foxx said. Then he quipped, “And we desperately hope you (the legislature) won’t take any of our money.”

But Tillis wasn’t there. Nor were any Republican elected officials.

Foxx ended his talk with a nice little vignette, asking the crowd to recall the cathedral builders of old. Some workers, he said, spent their whole lives just moving stones from one place to another, and never lived to see the cathedral they were building. As a city, he said, “If we don’t move those stones to the proper place the cathedral will never get built.”