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.”