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Topics:
Community
Building
Coalitions for the Future in Charlotte-Mecklenburg
William
J. McCoy
Reprinted with permission from the National Civic Review, Spring
1991, pp. 120-134. Copyright ©1991 by the National Civic Review.
In
mid-1988 the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Citizens Forum elected to launch
an ambitious self-evaluation/strategic planning process using
the ten components of the Civic Index to orient the effort. For
one year a diverse 60-member Stakeholders Committee met at three-
to four-week intervals to build coalitions, evaluate local governance
practices, and identify priority community projects. Case
study plus.
Index
I.
Project Genesis
II. Project Progress
III. Project Outcomes
IV. Conclusion
Contents
I.
Project Genesis
II. Project Progress
Case
study: Building Coalitions for the Future in Charlotte-Mecklenburg
In
mid-1988 the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Citizens Forum elected to launch
an ambitious self-evaluation/strategic planning process using
the ten components of the Civic Index to orient the effort. For
one year a diverse 60-member Stakeholders Committee met at three-
to four-week intervals to build coalitions, evaluate local governance
practices, and identify priority community projects.
Charlotte
began as a crossroads trading center for the Carolinas Southern
Piedmont over two centuries ago, but its real growth has occurred
during the 20th century. Originally developed as a trade and financial
center for the burgeoning textile mill economy of the region,
Charlotte is the epitome of the New South. Industry and business
activity have diversified in the last two decades, making Charlotte
a center of distribution, financial, legal, and other services.
While Charlotte continues to serve the textile industry, it is
widely recognized as the banking center of the Southeast. Charlotte
has doubled in size since World War II and is in many respects
a "new" city. Today, Mecklenburg County has over 511,000 people
with about four-fifths of them living in the City of Charlotte.
Based on the prevailing terminology in this area, the two local
government entities will be referred to collectively as Charlotte-Mecklenburg.
I.
Project Genesis
Public decision-making
in Charlotte-Mecklenburg is and has been weighted heavily toward
the business community. In fact, governmental decisions are often
seen as an extension of private-sector influence. For the most
part, this method of operation has provided local residents with
a progressive, highly principled and uncorrupt government that
has achieved significant results in building a "new" city.
Both local
governments utilize the council-manager plan of local government
organization, and both were among the first in the nation to adopt
this form. These actions are further evidence of the influence
of the business community in the public sector—the adoption
of the council-manager form was intended to make the administration
of the governments more "busi-ness-like." Charlotte has a non-executive
mayor who is elected separately from the council, and Mecklenburg
County's executive is the chairman of the Board of Commissioners
elected by that body from among its membership. In terms of administrative
powers, Charlotte's mayor has almost none. In practice, however,
the mayor often has significant persuasive powers, since that
office holder had traditionally been a spokesperson for the business
community. It was not uncommon for a Charlotte mayor to have served
as lay leader of the chamber of commerce or to have been active
in chamber work over the years.
This system
of politics as an extension of the business community began showing
signs of unraveling in the 1970s. A bond referendum to build a
new airport terminal and expand the runways was defeated. The
airport expansion was a top priority of the business leadership,
but it was torpedoed by a coalition of neighborhood interests
led by the Westside Community Organization, representing the area
in which the airport is located. The defeat of the referendum
was a surprise and shock to business and governmental leaders.
How could a motley crew of neighborhood leaders pull off such
a victory and, perhaps more telling, why did they dare step in
the path of progress?
The growth
that the leadership had wanted and had been successful in achieving
led to an unintended consequence: the community had become more
pluralistic and many among these new groups felt disenfranchised
and were willing to challenge the "establishment."
Traditionally,
the leadership had been resourceful in heading off such confrontations
by persuading, cajoling and co-opting those potentially involved
in opposing the prevailing view. With the business leadership
at the forefront, the community had consolidated its school systems
in the early 1960s; devised a plan to integrate the schools; preempted
racial unrest by peacefully integrating eating and entertainment
establishments; functionally consolidated the two primary local
governments; introduced an effective planning function; and supported
a high level of public investment in maintaining the viability
of the downtown area. The same tactics were brought to bear on
the opponents of the airport expansion. An intense campaign was
undertaken to persuade the opponents that airport expansion was
in the best interests of the Westside. They were told that it
would bring new jobs and public investment to the area of the
city most in need of economic opportunities, and the leadership
continued to emphasize that a small band of citizens should not
stand in the path of progress for the entire community. The tactics
worked. The airport bonds were floated again and they passed,
although this success occurred after the neighborhood coalition
had forced a change in the form of city government.
The Westside
Coalition had become a player in city-wide decisions and, through
bulldog tenacity, what had now become a city-wide neighborhood
coalition successfully placed on the ballot a referendum for district
elections. This proposal was passed by the electorate, by a margin
of less than 100 votes, after a heated campaign pitting (in general
terms) the business community against the neighborhood activists.
In the late 1970s, therefore, the city council changed from an
at-large, seven-member council to an 11-member council with seven
members nominated and elected by dis-tricts and four elected at-large.
Business leadership continued to rail about the shortcomings of
the district system and successfully placed the issue on the ballot
for another vote. The citizenry overwhelmingly endorsed the district
system in that election. The county commission, by its own initiative,
changed to a mixed at-large and district system in the mid-1980s.
The seeds
were sown in the decade of the 1970s for experimentation with
new methods of achieving consensus and understanding the community,
leading to consideration of the National Civic League's Civic
Index tool in the late 1980s. Because progress was the preeminent
value for the business and governmental leadership, efforts were
made to accommodate the new pluralism rather than taking the negative
course of fighting the changes brought on by a more diverse and
participatory society.
Early efforts
at group decision making
One of the
first efforts to deal with these changes occurred with the formation
of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Citizens Forum (CMCF) in 1984. Conflict
between development interests and neighborhood groups on rezoning
issues provided the impetus for developing the Citizens Forum.
Leaders from the two groups as well as other community leaders
were invited to a weekend retreat to discuss these conflicts and
consider ways of improving the dialogue. This group of leaders
found that there was more agreement than disagreement among them
concerning the future growth of Charlotte-Mecklenburg. They initiated
a dialogue and decided to formalize the first discussions with
the formation of CMCF. While this new organization began largely
as a way of maintaining open discussion among developers and neighborhoods,
its agenda soon expanded to include the broadest array of development
and community issues. It became more action-oriented, and its
membership was expanded, although membership in the organization
continued to be by invitation only.
During the
first three years of its existence, the Forum achieved significant
successes in directing public policy to respond to emerging issues.
The Forum initiated Project Catalyst, which was a partnership
of community groups seeking to redevelop and revitalize a run-down
area in Northwest Charlotte around Johnson C. Smith University,
a historically black institution. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Housing
Partnership, an effort to promote affordable housing for low-income
residents, was a Forum project. The Forum also advocated and eventually
prevailed in establishing a new policy for the expansion of water
and sewer lines into selected portions of the county as a method
of redirecting growth. In addition, the once heated exchange between
developers and citizens had become much more amiable and less
threatening to community consensus.
By 1987,
discussions at Forum meetings had taken on a new tenor. Broader
issues such as traffic congestion and dissatisfaction with the
public schools threatened the continued growth and prosperity
of the community, and a feel-ing persisted that the leadership
process was failing to respond to these issues. The campaign for
mayor in 1987 and the eventual outcome of that campaign led community
leaders to the conclusion that a new method was needed to address
the problems facing Charlotte.
The 1987
mayoral contest was between Harvey Gantt, a popular two-term mayor
who had successfully wedded his representation of the disadvantaged
and neighborhood groups with the desires of the business community,
and Sue Myrick, a maverick politician who had served an uneventful
term on the city council. Challenger Myrick continually used the
traffic congestion issue as evidence that the incumbent had failed
to respond to the needs of all Charlotteans.
The mayoral
contest brought Sue Myrick to office, a person who was an unknown
to the traditional leadership and who had defeated a highly respected
African-American mayor. Her agenda was composed almost entirely
of one item—relieving traffic congestion—but she said
little in terms of methods to accomplish that end. These events
catalyzed the discussions in the Forum. Changes in the methods
of achieving community goals were evident, and many worried that
these changes could endanger ongoing efforts to build community-wide
consensus.
Some members
of the Forum were aware of the National Civic League's de-velopment
of a Civic Index to evaluate a community's "civic infrastructure,"
or its ability to govern itself through consensus and cooperation.
The League began to advocate the use of this technique because
it seemed to fit what the group saw as the problem in Charlotte-Mecklenburg:
a diminution of the ability to govern with consensus on a commonly
held view of progress. Negotiations began with representatives
of the National Civic League and were concluded successfully.
Under the sponsorship of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Citizens Forum,
the community became one of the first in the nation to use the
Civic Index to evaluate the effectiveness of its civic infrastructure.
II.
Project Progress
Once the
decision was made to proceed with the Civic Index, the difficult
questions had to be resolved. Who would serve on the stakeholders
group? How many should be selected? How would the process be financed?
How frequent would the sessions be? How long would the sessions
be? Who would facilitate the sessions? To answer these questions,
an initiating committee was named, chaired by John Lewis, a Citizens
Forum member and business leader.
The initiating
committee decided on a budget of $75,000 with one-third coming
respectively from the City of Charlotte, Mecklenburg County and
local foundations. Both the city and county quickly responded
to the request for funding with appropriations of $25,000 each.
Eventually, some $25,000 in cash and in-kind contributions was
raised from foundations, nonprofits and corporations. This revenue
proved to be adequate for funding the project.
Identifying
and selecting the stakeholders became a much more problematic
task. A subcommittee of the initiating committee was given the
task of compiling a pool of names that met at least some of the
criteria for membership developed by the initiating committee.
The number of qualifying characteristics grew as the process proceeded.
Some of the factors that the subcommittee considered included:
racial diversity; socioeconomic diversity; geographic diversity;
representation from all of the local governments; ideological
diversity; balanced representation of the public, private, and
nonprofit sectors; balance of males and females; representation
of major occupations within the community; and religious diversity.
In addition, there were overarching consideration such as an attempt
to tap emerging (new) community leadership from various sectors,
an effort to ensure that the participants had demonstrated prior
community involvement, and belief that not only those who can
say "yes" to community projects but also those who can say "no"
had to be included. Trying to factor in all of these variables
became an almost impossible task. The subcommittee spent hours
reviewing a pool of names that numbered several hundred. That
number was finally narrowed to 80 persons who were invited to
be on the Stakeholders Group. Of that number, 68 people had committed
to the project by September 1988 and the series of Civic Index
meetings started on October 4, 1988.
By far the
most onerous task in starting up the Civic Index process was the
selection of stakeholders. The initiating committee quickly decided
that the frequency of meetings would be every three weeks (holidays
caused some exceptions to this rule); the sessions would last
approximately three and one-half hours (reduced to three hours
after about the second session); meetings would begin at 3:30
p.m. (soon changed to 4:00 p.m.) and go to 7:00 p.m.; meetings
would be held in a large educational room in an uptown Methodist
Church; and light refreshments would be served. National Civic
League vice president Christopher T. Gates, who had been the focal
point of the discussions about the viability of the Civic Index
process for Charlotte-Mecklenburg, agreed to facilitate the Civic
Index meetings. Mr. Rennie Cuthbertson, a local banker, business
leader and activist in CMCF, agreed to chair the meetings.
Throughout
the negotiations with Chris Gates, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg representatives
continued to request information from him about logistical and
process arrangements used in other communities where the Civic
Index was underway. His response was that the Charlotte-Mecklenburg
process would be a local endeavor, that the Civic Index needed
to be adapted to the local environment and that following too
closely what others had done might nullify the usefulness of the
process.
To facilitate
the study process, the Stakeholders Committee was split into ten
subcommittees with each sub-group becoming the research team for
one of the ten components of the Civic Index. Members were given
their choice of subcommittee but an attempt was made to retain
as much diversity on each subcommittee as possible. These study
committees became the backbone of the Civic Index process. They
generally had the responsibility of describing the current status
of the community as measured by each of the components. This required
developing a process of data gathering and fact organizing. These
subcommittee reports generally used most of the first hour of
the sessions, and the tone established during that hour tended
to carry over into the remainder of the discussion.
Civic Index
discussions revolved around four items in reference to each specific
index: what is the current state of affairs; what will the future
be like if no changes occur; what is the preferred future; and,
if the preferred future is different from the predicted future,
what changes are needed to reach the preferred future. The study
subcommittees had the responsibility of responding to the first
item with the full stakeholders group providing a validity check.
The stakeholders had the responsibility of addressing the other
three items.
Overall,
the process worked well with few significant pitfalls, although
some minor criticisms arose and some loss of interest occurred.
Every participant probably had a somewhat different view of how
the process could have worked better and there were a few things
that caused frustration. One common concern was that the process
was too long—lasting for the better part of a year. Predictably,
some participants, particularly business people, were somewhat
uncomfortable with an open-ended discussion and discovery process,
believing that too much time was spent accomplishing too little
in concrete results. Some felt that the community had talked enough
about these topics, action was needed, and that the process was
producing little of that. Although attendance began to wane about
midway through the process, adequate numbers for a full and thorough
discussion were present for each of the components of the Civic
Index. While there were some heated discussions, open conflict
leading to hurt feelings and denouncements of the project did
not occur. As usual, some people were more forthcoming than others,
but Mr. Gates made certain that everyone had an ample opportunity
to express his or her feelings, and the group was receptive to
each person's point of view. Despite these concerns, community
support for the project remained strong throughout.
The actual,
initial timeline for the process was as follows:
- Orientation
October 4, 1988
- Community
Information Sharing
October 25, 1988
- Intergroup
Relations
November 15, 1988
- Citizen
Participation
December 6, 1988
- Cooperation
and Consensus Building
January 10, 1989
- Community
Leadership
January 24, 1989
- Government
Performance
February 14, 1989
- Civic
Education
March 7, 1989
- Volunteerism
and Philanthropy
March 28, 1989
- Inter-Community
Cooperation
April 18, 1989
- Community
Vision and Pride
May 9, 1989
- Prioritization
Process
May 30, 1989
About midway through the process, a committee composed primarily
of representatives of each of the subgroups began meeting for
the purpose of pulling together the primary recommendations coming
out of the Civic Index process and guiding the final report. Al
Pruitt, a public relations person who had assisted in developing
a campaign to inform the public about the Index, agreed to draft
the final report. The first draft of this report was presented
to the committee in late May, and the report was issued in mid-summer
of 1989. The last official meeting of the stakeholders occurred
in late-summer of 1989 when the group was apprised of follow-up
activities and given a copy of the report. However, additional
meetings of the stakeholders have occurred, with the most recent
in April 1991. These meetings have been called to provide progress
reports about the recommendations.
Index
I.
Project Genesis
II. Project Progress
III. Project Outcomes
IV. Conclusion
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