RALEIGH – The Charlotte Observer offered readers a good piece of journalism yesterday – even though it tended to give me the creeps.
The subject matter was a changing of the guard in Charlotte’s uptown power establishment. Longtime Mayor Pat McCrory just gave up the gavel to Democrat Anthony Foxx. The two CEO Kens, Lewis of Bank of America and Thompson of Wachovia, are out or almost out the door. Wachovia is now a subset of Wells Fargo. Those are just the top entries in the change list.
Reporters Peter St. Onge and Tim Funk describe the previous generation of Charlotte leaders as The Group. Actually, let’s call it The Group™. It consisted primarily of mayors, banks, and utility executives. All worked in and often fixated on the downtown area of the city – which for marketing purposes was renamed “uptown” decades ago, mostly to guffaws from natives such as myself who didn’t work, live, or play downtown.
For years, the Charlotte establishment has fretted about what would happen when the current generation of leaders moved on. The establishment fretted about what would happen if one or more of the big banks stumbled or moved their headquarters elsewhere. The establishment fretted about what would happen if the attention shifted away from downtown attractions and playthings for the corporate set.
The time has arrived. And there’s no need to fret.
The whole notion that a community of more than a million residents needs a few powerful elites in a room to make decisions for them is archaic – as McCrory said in the piece, if you think that way you should “get your head out of the ‘70s.” While I have respect for many of the members of The Group, and would call several of them personal friends, they often seemed to think that what was good for downtown Charlotte was good for everyone in the Charlotte area – so good, in fact, that taxpayers elsewhere had a duty to “contribute” to downtown projects regardless of what the taxpayers thought about them.
As readers of JLF’s blog The Meck Deck hear about on a daily basis, the Charlotte establishment has made a number of expensive bets over the years, on subsidized sports and subsidized trains and subsidized downtown redevelopment, that have generated few benefits for the vast majority of citizens while consuming scarce resources that should have been devoted to addressing high-priority needs such as fighting crime and finishing highways.
Skeptics of these enterprises were called all sorts of names. In politics, they lost more often than they won. But I think it’s evident that their warnings about local governments becoming overextended and over-reliant on the real-estate and financial-services booms of recent years have proven to be prescient. Perhaps Charlotte’s tendency towards central planning by the uptown elites of The Group™ was not such a good leadership model after all.
Another model is presenting itself. This model is messier. It assumes so many different institutions and emerging leaders that it would be impossible ever to bring them together in a single meeting room. It assumes more diversity – not just of the familiar bean-counting sort but more diversity of opinion, diversity of preferences, and diversity of information sources. It assumes robust political competition and frequent shifts in electoral momentum, particularly at the county level, rather than years of perpetual rule by a few.
Some may talk wistfully of days past when a handful of people could meet at a downtown restaurant, hammer out an agreement, and then implement it without much regard for potential opposition. They may call this old process “efficient.” But I’d argue that the result was anything but efficient. It built pricey homes for underperforming professional sports teams, sure. But it didn’t build a community with a diverse economic base and an affordable, effective government.
Charlotte can do better. Perhaps it will. What’s certain is that the days of The Group™ are over.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation