Category: Wilmore

Foxx makes his moves

Sorry about the lengthy hiatus, faithful readers. Vacation happens, thank goodness. Meantime I’ve been stashing away tidbits for you.

Foxx makes committee announcements: I don’t think the Big O had an article on this, but in mid-December Mayor Anthony Foxx announced the City Council committee assignments. This sounds like City Hall inside-baseball, but City Hall watchers know they matter. Committees can speed up issues, stall them or sometimes make them disappear. Here’s where having a Democratic instead of a Republican mayor changes the landscape. Notice the committees with the most influence over policies and ordinances that affect growth, development, transportation, etc.:
– Foxx has split Economic Development and Planning (aka ED&P and formerly chaired by Republican John Lassiter). The new ED committee is chaired by Democrat Susan Burgess. Transportation (formerly chaired by Foxx) is now Transportation and Planning, chaired by new Democratic council member and former Char-Meck Planning Commission chair David Howard.
– Environment continues to be chaired by Republican Edwin Peacock III, but the committee now has a Democratic voting majority: Peacock, Dulin and Democrats Burgess, Howard and vice chair Nancy Carter. (Republican Warren Cooksey leaves the committee.)


No Butts Uptown? Coming to uptown (unless they’re already there – it was too cold today to go check): New cigarette disposal urns on waste receptacles on uptown sidewalks, courtesy of the City of Charlotte’s Solid Waste Services. See photo at right. This, of course, is sparked in part by the new ban on smoking in bars and restaurants, effective Jan. 2. The city notes that it picks up thousands of cigarette butts daily from sidewalks and streets, and those butts are not biodegradable. When they wash into storm drains and then into the creeks they release toxic chemicals into the water, such as arsenic, acetone, lead, toluene, butane, cadmium, etc. So stow your butts, smokers.

Enviro-artist to stick around: Environmental artist Daniel McCormick, whom I wrote about here (and check the cool video link there) – who created the art at Freedom Park – has had his residency at the McColl Center for Visual Art extended through January. He and other collaborators are working on a proposal to keep him here for six months to design a “master plan” for three years of artists/sites along the Carolina Thread Trail.

Wilmore wins magazine kudos: Southern Living magazine declared Wilmore and South End among the South’s Best Comeback Neighborhoods. I was on vacation but the City Council voted down the rezoning for the Wilmore church on Dec. 21. (And I am here to report, courtesy of chef and hostess extraordinaire Susan Patterson of the local Knight Foundation office, that the devil’s food cake featured on the cover of the December issue was as delicious as it looked.)

Growing church vs. historic bungalows

It was easily the most interesting of the rezoning cases the City Council heard last night – and the one that brings up the trickiest issue of the evening: What rules, if any, should the city have to limit institutions that encroach into neighborhoods? And how do you deal with big ugly surface parking lots? They’re not pedestrian-friendly, nor do they contribute to the much-loved-by-planners “vibrant urban village.” They’re also polluters, due to polluted storm runoff.

A church in the Wilmore neighborhood wants to expand and build a large new building and a big surface parking lot on a street now holding several historic bungalows. (By “historic,” here, I don’t mean designated landmarks or in a designated historic district, simply a neighborhood that dates to the turn of the 19th-20th century and has an ambiance akin to Dilworth, Elizabeth and Wesley Heights.) The church has said it won’t demolish the five houses but will move them to other property it owns.

The matter was a public hearing on zoning case 2008-158. The council vote should come next month.

Several things made this an interesting presentation. First, the council chamber was virtually filled with members of the church, Greater Galilee Baptist Church, whose current sanctuary (shown above, photo courtesy of the church) is on South Mint Street at West Park Avenue.

Second, one speaker in favor of rezoning had a great line: “We, as people, are in noncompliance. With Jesus.”

Yet opponents had some good points: Why should a church be allowed to remove five houses and put up a surface parking lot? As neighbor Chip Cannon put it, this would be putting “a suburban mega-church in the center of a small-scale pedestrian neighborhood.”

Some political realities are in order. This church is African American. Two at-large council members are running for mayor and both want African American votes (though black candidate Anthony Foxx has an edge there). Among nine at-large candidates (for four slots), three of the four Democrats are African American. Two at-large incumbents – Democrat Susan Burgess and Republican Edwin Peacock – will have to vote on this petition. Burgess, in particular, will want as many Democratic votes as she can get in November. If she faces black voters’ triple-shotting for the three black at-large candidates, she’ll have a problem.

Another political reality: No one wants to vote against a church, especially an obviously growing church. Maybe they’d do that in some other city in some other state, but in oh-so-Christian Charlotte? Not on your (eternal) life.

Yet another political reality: How fair would it be to crack down on an African American church when Carolinas Medical Center has been allowed to devour vast tracts of Dilworth with, near as I can tell, hardly a peep of protest from the city? And the affluent and predominantly white Myers Park United Methodist plopped a surface parking lot (nicely landscaped, though) at the prime corner of Providence-Providence-Queens-Queens. No one told them, “No.” (Note to out-of-town readers: That intersection is for real. Don’t even ask.)

Final political reality: I chanced to be sitting near Planning Director Debra Campbell and asked if there were any zoning standards that said you can’t put in a parking lot, and she said, only in the UMUD (uptown) zoning. I asked if planners had considered cracking down on surface parking lots in other zoning categories. She just laughed – heartily, I must add – and said, “No way.”