Category: growth strategy

High water bills? Whose fault really?

Who’s really overseeing Charlotte-Mecklenburg Utilities?

Obviously, City Manager Curt Walton is the top boss. And the Charlotte City Council is Walton’s boss.

But if you’ve followed city government very long you’ve noticed the elected officials tend to let CMUD (technically it’s CMU) have its own way. That’s because CMU is an “enterprise fund” – like the airport – and runs off its own revenues. Because council members don’t have to raise taxes for CMU, they haven’t given it much scrutiny. (Yes, I know that fees come out of people’s pockets, too. But trust me, fee increases don’t raise nearly the political wars that tax increases do.)

So who scrutinizes CMU? I took at look at the CMUD Advisory Committee? That’s a seven-member committee (3 members appointed by the city, 3 by the county, 1 by the mayor). They are to “review and make recommendations to City Council” concerning: all water/sewer capital improvement programs, changes in policies for extending water/sewer service as well as proposed changes in how fees are determined, and pretty much anything else.

Why is this important? Many cities have used utilities as a way to strategically manage growth. It’s less expensive, in the long run, not to have to build and maintain water/sewer lines over every square foot of land. But Charlotte’s powerful developers have never wanted any land set aside from development. Shrinking the supply of land would raise the price of their raw material – undeveloped land. What better way to ensure that no land got set aside than to control the CMUD Advisory Committee?

Another reason it’s important: It’s in the best interests of this whole urban region to encourage more water conservation. What sucks up a disproportionate amount of unnecessary water use?Expansive suburban lawns. But suburban subdivision developers have little interest in not offering suburban lawns.

So who’s on this board? It’s required to have a real estate developer, a water and/or sewer contractor, a civil engineer, a financial expert, a representative from the non-Charlotte towns in the county, and a neighborhood leader.

I took a look at the board. It’s revealing.

The chairman is James Merrifield, a developer with Merrifield Partners, formerly with Crosland. Last year he replaced former chairman Charles Teal, an owner of Saussy Burbank, a developer.

The two engineers are Robert Linkner with HDR and Erica Van Tassel with Kimley-Horn. The contractor is Marco Varela of CITI-LLC, a systems design company. Varela was mentioned in an Observer article in several years back (before his 2008 appointment) as selling wastewater treatment equipment to the city.

So far it’s rather predictable. You’d want some civil engineering expertise, for sure, as well as developer expertise. Yet it’s worth noting that engineering firms are generally hired by developers so they’d have little business reason to tick off potential clients by, say, pushing for using your utility department as part of a growth strategy that might involve setting some areas aside from development. Even if that would probably have been a lot more fiscally sound than stretching water-sewer pipes all over Mecklenburg County and asking all the rate-payers to fund those capital and operating costs.

But what about the people who are presumably supposed to add the non-developer points of view – the neighborhood leader, the towns representative?

The “neighborhood leader” turns out to be a Charlotte Chamber executive, Keva Walton. I suppose he lives in a neighborhood, but you wouldn’t exactly expect him to be a voice in opposition to any business-developer interests.

And that towns representative? It’s David Jarrett, vice president at Rhein Medall Interests, a Charlotte-based developer.

The end.

1977 Charlotte plan – Back to the future?

From the files of things I found looking up other things:

I was leafing through the dusty old reports my former colleague Tom Bradbury bequeathed, in hopes of finding when Park Road was four-laned, before writing our editorial opinion in the trees vs. sidewalk flap. (I shall note that from what I can tell, most readers prefer the trees.)

The stack of old reports even includes the 1960 Wilbur Smith and Associates “Charlotte Metropolitan Area: A Master Highway Transportation Plan.” Cool. Someday I’ll read it more thoroughly.

But it was in the 1977 Charlotte-Mecklenburg Thoroughfare Plan, prepared by H.J. “Herman” Hoose, transportation planning coordinator, and W.E. McIntyre, director of the Planning Commission, that I found some interesting recommendations.

They’re taken from the 1995 Comprehensive Plan, adopted in 1975. You be the judge of how well Charlotte-Mecklenburg followed those 1975 recommendations (bold-face emphasis mine, in case you are missing the sarcasm):

• To meet the needs of a diverse population, plan for different types and densities of housing in all areas of the community through carefully controlled implementation procedures.
• Plan for all types of services, commercial, governmental and other needs, through carefully controlled implementation procedures to minimize the impact on the land. These to be provided in convenient proximity to residential communities.
• Plan for a more efficient transportation system; for a more equal balance between auto travel and mass transit opportunities.
• Plan for more parks and open spaces to enhance the visual and physical environment of the community.
• Plan for high visual quality of suburban growth with higher density uses located and designed to support mass transit.

Hmmm. About those parks: I heard once that the City of Charlotte went for something like 75 years without buying land for a single park. Not until city and county park departments were combined in the 1990s were any new parks created inside the city. A shout-out to those decades of City Council members throughout the 20th century whose legacies include a sadly park-poor city.

A quick bit of research in the Observer’s archives found this from a 1985 article by then-Observer reporter Mae Israel (who’s moved back to Charlotte after years at the Washington Post, for those of you who remember her). The piece is about 1985 city candidates’ support (or lack of it) for a 2005 plan.

“One policy in the 1995 Plan encouraged city council members to clip the spread of restaurants, car washes and convenience stores along busy streets by denying rezoning requests.
For the most part, they didn’t do it. Albemarle Road in east Charlotte, for instance, now is lined with commercial development and choked by traffic. … (Remember, this was written in 1985.)
“The plan’s centerpiece policy called for encouraging metropolitan service centers, or urban villages, to slow suburban sprawl. Concentrating public services, homes and businesses was expected to ease traffic congestion and strain on utilities.
“Politicians never directed city staffers to develop strategies for starting such centers, and the sprawl continued, mostly in southeast Charlotte. “

Of course, I can’t be too negative. After all, in 1994 (a short 19 years after the 1975 plan) Charlotte City Council adopted a “Centers and Corridors” concept – not an adopted plan, certainly nothing as specific as actual zoning standards. Since 2008, an effort to update that concept and create more specific policies has been ongoing on in the Planning Department. It hasn’t been adopted yet.

I think it takes a heap of patience to be a city planner here.