| 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 Return to Community Index | 
