City Council
At-large
Patrick Cannon It’s now or never for Patrick Cannon. Cannon may only be 34, but he has sat around the council dais since the early 90s, near long enough to become a Queen City political institution. Cannon’s campaign may be about public safety, economic vitality and affordable housing, but his run for an at-large seat has come to be about much more. Strong white Democratic incumbents usually have little trouble running at large and getting elected in Charlotte. For strong African-American Democrats, the record is much spottier. Ron Leeper lost. Arthur Griffin won a school board seat countywide. And last year, at-large county commissioner Jim Richardson was defeated. So whether he likes it or not, Cannon’s victory will affect race relations in Charlotte and Democratic Party politics for years to come.
“I was running like a chihuahua in the district, and now I am running like a Saint Bernard at-large,” said Cannon. “I have been moving in the vein of not knowing what people are going to do.”
Cannon, the chairman of the city’s public safety committee, says he wants to crack down on the drug trade in Charlotte by putting more cops on the streets, and more street cops into drug interdiction units. But the twist is that Cannon wants law enforcement to focus on buyers rather than dealers, a likely throwback to Cannon’s assertions last year that white suburbanites support the drug trade by driving into the inner city to buy drugs while African-American drug dealers wind up doing the time behind bars. Cannon said the city’s police officers are doing their jobs, but that the district attorney’s office hasn’t been willing to focus on cracking down on drugs.
Cannon is a business owner and wants to make greater use of existing city tax, loan and business grant incentives to recruit new and expanding businesses to Charlotte. He also vows to make sure the $40 million affordable housing bond package makes it on the November 2002 ballot.
“We are actually losing the opportunity for businesses that want to relocate to Charlotte because their employees cannot find workforce housing, so they’re going on to the Rock Hills and other places in the region.”
Warren Cooksey Warren Cooksey is probably the most informed non-incumbent running for office this season. Republican Cooksey, 31, has been scrutinizing city council agendas and hanging around city hall for long enough to write a manual on how the place is run, and in fact teaches the city council section of the League of Women Voters’ Civics 101 class, an introductory course on local politics for future candidates and activists.
Cooksey is a member of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Commission and sits on the Charlotte Convention and Visitors Bureau Board.
His campaign slogan, “Common Sense for Common Cents,” describes Cooksey’s studied, methodical style to a tee. He’s the guy who’s likely to know the council agenda backwards and forwards, to serve as an encyclopedic resource for other council members, and to count every word in this paragraph to be certain that he got the full 300 he was promised.
Cooksey, who is a Republican, said he plans to focus on the basics like improving roads if he is elected. Cooksey says he won’t raise taxes and wants to reprioritize the city budget by lining up the city’s priorities, starting the budget at zero and cutting out the five lowest priorities. He’d use the slashed funds to either give Charlotteans a tax cut or increase spending for the five highest priority items.
To competitively recruit and retain business, Cooksey said Charlotte must change the way it measures its accomplishments. For instance, crime may be at the lowest level per capita in Charlotte in 20 years, he said, but it is still higher than other cities that business relocation search firms analyze, like Atlanta.
Paul Eich If this rightward-leaning, MIT-educated, Republican brainiac were as well known around Charlotte as he is at city hall, he’d surely win an at-large seat on council. But with a thin smattering of signs and just $4,000 in his campaign coffers, that doesn’t seem likely this time around.
Paul Eich, 57, is one of only two newcomers running this season who could find city hall without a map, and who has actually been sighted at a council meeting. To his credit, Eich, a Republican, has attended more meetings than he has missed in the last year, and was signing up on the public speakers list to bash council over the arena issue long before it became a popular thing to do. But then, as a recently retired former business owner, Eich probably has more time on his hands than most.
Eich has a respectable grip on the issues, and says he wants to not only hold the city tax rate flat, but to reduce taxes. The Treasurer and past president of the Derita-Statesville Road Community Organization says he’s tired of the council passing area plans it doesn’t stick to and approving more developments and density than area roads can handle.
“The university area is choked because they wouldn’t listen to us that this is a two-lane road you are building all these developments on,” said Eich. “They approve one and go down the block somewhere and approve another one. Pretty soon you have thousands of extra trips on the road. I would like to see rezonings delayed until the infrastructure develops accordingly so we can absorb these developments as we go.”
Eich lists affordable housing as one of his top three priorities, but doesn’t seem too excited about anything city officials want to do about it. He says he wants to get affordable housing to those who need it without developers or buyers making money off city subsidies.
“The private sector can build homes for less than $80,000 and many are sold for less than $100,000,” said Eich. “Let’s don’t just throw money at it.”
Laura Lewin Laura Lewin has accomplished a lot in the two-and-a-half-years she has lived in Charlotte. The 33-year-old Democrat and vice president of the Cameron Woods neighborhood association won an award for being the most involved neighbor in her 800-home subdivision, went through the Charlotte Chamber’s leadership school, Civics 101 and Leadership Charlotte, in addition to work for several charities and organizations.
In addition to all that, Lewin has managed to raise over $30,000 and to pepper the landscape with her campaign signs, which is impressive for a newcomer both to Charlotte and to politics. But like several of the political newcomers this election season, her grasp of the issues is tentative. Unlike most newcomers, however, her leadership potential seems unlimited. The name Lewin is one that Charlotteans should remember, as they will likely hear it again in the future.
Lewin says she wants to increase the supply of affordable housing at a much faster rate and make the environment more of a council focus. She would also like the city to pay more attention to traffic and transportation, and for the city to implement its transit plans at a faster rate of speed.
“It seems like we have the money and can go faster,” said Lewin.
Lewin said she has a big problem with the fact that the council, the county commission and the members of the state legislative delegation don’t communicate well and aren’t on the same page. She says that if she is elected, she’ll make it her business to ensure that representatives of the three bodies get together at least on a quarterly basis.
As a former resident of Atlanta, Lewin says she’s running to make sure the city takes a longer term approach to the issues it is currently facing.
“Having lived in Atlanta, I’ve seen what can happen,” said Lewin.
Patrick Mumford For $102,000, Republican Patrick Mumford could have fed 20 Afghan orphans for the next five years. Instead, the until-recently little known candidate is using money donated by some of the city’s biggest names in an effort to make his own name familiar to voters with 24 billboards and a smattering of signs.
Though we’re still reserving judgment, Mumford doesn’t quite fit the mold of your typical bought-and-paid-for-by-uptown council stiff. For one thing, the 37-year-old senior vice president of First Union’s corporate real estate division bikes to work from his Dilworth home most mornings. For another, he’s the current president of Charlotte Habitat for Humanity and vice president of Charlotte Emergency Housing.
Like most of the candidates running, Mumford has a few solid ideas and a vague general sense of what he’d like to accomplish on council. For instance, he says he wants to explore using well-planned public transportation (city buses) to move children to and from school in the afternoons, during off-peak transportation hours. He wants to use solid land use planning to support and build upon the city’s transit plan, but doesn’t seem to be very familiar with it.
Mumford waxes politically conservative when he talks about affordable housing and stretching the city’s increasingly burdened budget in worsening economic times. He says he won’t support a tax increase unless the city is in a position where it can no longer physically function without one, and emphasizes a back-to-the-basics approach to budgeting, which he says the current economic situation makes necessary.
“We need a lot of these things,” Mumford says, referring to a potential new baseball stadium for the Charlotte Knights, “but we can’t have them all at the same time today.”
Despite his considerable volunteer background in affordable housing, unlike most other council candidates, he did not list affordable housing in his top three priorities.
“I’m a firm believer that the market can support the units we need out there,” said Mumford. “The city does not need to be in the business of building homes or apartments. The city needs to support those in the market.”
Lynn Wheeler Although she rarely participates in debate, Republican Lynn Wheeler has at times been council’s most powerful and influential member in the decade she has served on council. Wheeler took a hit this year, though, when over a year’s worth of hard work to keep the Charlotte Hornets basketball team in town — by cementing a deal to build the team a new arena — went down in flames at the polls along with the rest of the cultural and sports facility referendum package it was strapped to. But as the arena debacle fades into the sunset, Wheeler will no doubt emerge again as a powerful influence on council, though exactly how powerful is yet to be determined.
We’re not certain what Wheeler plans to do in her next term if she is elected, since she was the only at-large council candidate who didn’t return our calls.
Wheeler, 57, chairs the City Council Economic Development/Planning Committee and the Budget Committee, where she shepherds through some of council’s touchiest and most controversial projects with behind-the-scenes lobbying. Wheeler will likely retain both these posts in her next term on council, and continue to have a significant influence over how the city spends its money.
Joe White In his two years on council, Joe White has proven to be something of a quiet maverick. He doesn’t say much, but when he gets riled up, he commands the full attention of his audience. When they elected him two years ago, voters knew him only as a former high school football coach. On council, he’s proven to be a Democrat known to stray from the fold on what few partisan issues council tackles.
His vote against a moratorium on the death penalty in North Carolina was one of several that angered some Democrat and African-American voters critical to his reelection. But then again, the same votes have earned him some level of appreciation among conservative Republican voters, so the whole thing may be a wash.
Compared to his last two runs for office, when his signs jumped out at drivers from behind every median and shrub, White seems to be taking a hands off approach to this year’s election.
Though anyone who has attended council meetings knows White is well-versed on the issues, his campaign platform lacks specifics, and is in many ways as vague as those of this year’s crop of political newcomers. Perhaps it’s that White, 66, has become jaded after just two years on council. Or perhaps it’s because he lacks higher political ambition.
“I am one of the few people on council that doesn’t want to be mayor or go to Raleigh or DC,” White said. “What you see with Joe White is what you get. If I don’t win, my tennis game will just get a lot better.”
White says the council needs to continue to address land use, open space and housing density issues, which he says are vitally interconnected. White also shook his finger at those who continue to clear cut trees, pollute the city’s waters and neglect to provide stream buffers (we assume he was referring to developers.)
If reelected, he says he also plans to continue to work to move the current transit plan forward.
“Most of these things are a continuing work in progress,” said White.
District 1
Sara Spencer Democrat Sara Spencer is probably the council’s quietest member. Although she’s not one to play politics, Spencer was dragged into the game two years ago after Republicans on council attempted to draw her out of her district during redistricting. Spencer ran a tough campaign against Republican challenger John Tabor that year, and subsequently presided over the council’s redistricting committee.
Tabor said he and Spencer agreed to a plan that moved Tabor out of District 1 and into District 6, where he could run against vulnerable Republican council member Mike Castano, rather than taking on Spencer again. And if Spencer’s district became more heavily Democratic in the process, well, that couldn’t be helped.
Aside from her redistricting trauma, Spencer, 60, is best-known for being a neighborhood advocate on council, a studious advocate of such politically sexy topics as speed humps and traffic calming devices, subjects upon which she is something of an expert.
After eight years on council, she says she still has work to do, in particular working with those areas and neighborhoods that haven’t gotten organized yet to be effective for their own goals.
“I really like it when folks figure out their own goals and how to get things done and pull it off themselves,” said Spencer. “I want for every part of this town to feel like it is the best part.”
To her, that means multiple neighborhoods coming together to form self-contained communities with their own resources like grocery stores, libraries and post offices.
Spencer said she plans to focus on the continued expansion of bus service and the implementation of light rail on the South corridor if she is re-elected. To pull that off, Spencer says, the city will have to get our zoning in place for the transit stations and make sure it improves the sidewalk system so that streets are walkable enough to make the transit system seamless.
Bill Williams Republican Bill Williams says he decided to run for council two weeks before filing because he felt the city wasn’t telling the whole story about the arena deal.
“I felt like I was getting sold a used car,” said Williams. “Council was a bit player in it; they were manipulated by the uptown crowd. They spoon-fed us what they wanted us to hear.”
Williams, 57, is a former helicopter pilot who served in Vietnam. He believes the city should be run more like a business, and the council should function more like a board of directors. Many of the current council members have the financial background to read and understand a balance sheet, Williams said.
Williams questions the city council’s push to spend $40 million on affordable housing.
“Affordable housing is already all over the place,” said Williams.
Williams, who’s now a realtor, said the city needs to reexamine its zoning and permitting policies, which he says hold up projects unnecessarily and cost developers money.
District 2
Bryan Holladay Republican Bryan Holladay has several innovative ideas for improving job-training and employment resources for Charlotte’s jobless. As a human resources director for a major hotel, he has a grasp of the available solutions that could be expanded to make a dent in the problem. His plan to bring Charlotte’s more innovative employment resources to the city’s employers is to be commended, and council members would be wise to take notes on his ideas in this department.
Before he’s electable though, he’ll need a better overall grasp of city issues. His environmental and transportation platforms, for instance, include helping people locate recycling recepticles and “running bus routes to the people.” Holladay, 25, is clearly bright enough to do better than that. Still, we aren’t willing to brush him off quite yet. Despite his youth, he may have some leadership potential.
Last year, Holladay showed up at a meeting of the Deercross homeowners’ association not to join, but to gripe about dues assessed on his neighborhood. He was later elected president of the organization, and promptly proceeded to lead a charge to — guess what? — raise neighborhood dues, effectively ticking off some in his neighborhood.
Holladay’s reasons for running for council are fairly simple.
“I can’t just let (Mitchell) run unopposed,” he said. Keep an eye on this one. For better or worse, and the jury is still out on that, Holladay is bound to make a name for himself on the Charlotte political scene.
James Mitchell Other council members often rib Democrat James “Smuggie” Mitchell over the multiple trips he makes to the buffet line during council dinner meetings. Perhaps the reason that Mitchell, 39, doesn’t appear to have gained an ounce during his first term in office is because he has run his skinny self from one end of the district to the other, accomplishing more in two years than the rest of the district representatives on council combined. Though Mitchell generally has less to add to the debate than many other council members, he is perhaps the council’s best public servant.
Mitchell led the battle to close down drug houses on heroin-infested Kohler Avenue off Statesville Avenue; organized a district clean-up day in which over 400 volunteers cleaned up some of the district’s more blighted areas; dragged the city manager and city staff to heavily promoted and attended neighborhood meetings; set up a program for neighborhood leaders called “Community University,” which teaches a curriculum he wrote on everything from how to access city service to how to speak to city council.
Mitchell lists economic development, community safety and affordable housing as his priorities for his next term, if he is elected. He wants to continue his work on the creation of a business improvement district in the Beatties Ford Road corridor, complete with a municipal tax district to pay for corridor improvements.
Though Mitchell’s contribution to overall debate on council has been limited, overall, he’s an asset to the council and a valuable resource to his district.
District 3
Harold Cogdell, Jr. The heir apparent to this council seat, Democrat Harold Cogdell, Jr., 31, returned phone calls from Creative Loafing, but was unable to make our scheduled interview.
Troy Watson Troy Watson is one of a rare breed of politician — the African-American Republican. Watson, a Marine who served in Vietnam, is quick to clarify that he is a “Colin Powell Republican” and supports affirmative action. Still, his GOP stripes will make him a long shot in this Democratic, heavily African-American district. Despite this, Watson, 57, is fairly qualified for the job. He once was the economic development manager for Houston, TX, and helped develop the city’s performing arts center. Watson was also the director of the Minority Business Development Center in Charlotte.
“Its time for some new developments and approaches,” said Watson. “The problems of the district have been the problems of the district for the last 10 to 15 years.”
Watson said he wants to make sure any affordable housing bond money goes to help those with the greatest need. Watson wants the city to put the emphasis on rehabilitating older homes to stabilize the city’s already existing stock of affordable housing.
“These houses are really well built, and these absentee landlords aren’t doing it,” said Watson.
Watson says he wants to put the “community” back in community policing and that the city must pursue grants and other funds to redevelop brownfields, or abandoned former commercial and industrial sites, and put them back on the tax rolls.
District 4
Chris Cole If the people elected Libertarians like Chris Cole to run the government, the issues the council has tackled this year — affordable housing, zoning, economic development and subsidies for sports facilities — wouldn’t be issues at all. Those things would instead be beyond the legal scope of what a weak city government would be empowered to impact.
Like most Libertarians, Cole would roll back the property tax rate and privatize the water and sewer systems — “there is no reason for the government to be selling water,” Cole says. In addition, businesses would no longer need permits to open or close, and land wouldn’t be zoned or annexed, but developed according to the dictates of the free market.
Even though his solutions are radical by mainstream standards, the soft-spoken Cole has followed city government for years and is to be commended for actually doing his homework and having a better grasp of city issues than the majority of the non-incumbent candidates this season. Cole is also one of the few candidates this year with enough knowledge of the inner workings of city government to offer solutions to foreseeable problems not yet on the city’s official radar screen.
“The city has been subsidizing the tax rate by continually annexing the wealthier suburbs,” said Cole. “For the past few years, the combined city and county tax rates have been pushing people further out to the suburbs, and the city has caught up through annexation. We’re about to run out of annexation space, which is going to force the city to cut back programs or go though a rapid tax increase. I’m concerned that decay could set in when the city is no longer be able to keep up through annexation.”
Cole says he isn’t running to be elected.
“I want to run my own life and the government isn’t letting me do that,” said Cole. “I’m running for office as an act of self-defense.”
Malcolm Graham Democrat Malcolm Graham has picked up both polish and stature in his first term in office, judiciously balancing the needs of blighted and recovering areas of District 3, heavily populated by African-Americans, and the largely white, suburban areas experiencing explosive growth in the university area. He is council’s most optimistic member, and though at times in his burgeoning political career that optimism has led him down the path of naivete, Graham displays all the signs of a future community leader, a refreshing change from the pass-through leadership of the district’s past representation.
Graham continues to advocate for affordable housing and economic development and has a growing list of accomplishments. He’s been a tireless advocate for the North Tryon corridor and he effectively lobbied to expand the scope of the House Charlotte program, which now offers down payment assistance for home ownership in the Hampshire Hills, Hidden Valley and Plaza Road Extention areas. Graham recently completed a set of model neighborhood guidelines, and has been a tireless advocate for the struggling Belmont neighborhood.
District 5
Nancy Carter Soft-spoken Democrat Nancy Carter isn’t one to seek the spotlight or the soundbite. Carter, 56, says her goal is to make living on Charlotte’s east side “healthy and delightful.” If re-elected, Carter wants to spend her second term bringing economic stability and jobs to east side areas like Albemarle Road and Eastland Mall, to name a couple. She says that will mean working with the city’s new economic development office and finding reuses for abandoned buildings like the former Hannaford’s and Upton’s on Albemarle Road. Carter says she wants to organize neighbors and use city resources to approach national and international developers and encourage them to invest or reinvest in the area.
Carter supports the city’s affordable housing plans, but says she’ll make sure her district doesn’t become the locale for all of the city’s affordable housing, and that the projects it gets blend in well with current neighborhoods.
Carter said her key push will be the development of a variety of types of housing on the east Charlotte transit corridor and working with planners and developers to guide the creation of mass-transit-oriented village centers along Independence Boulevard. She also plans to continue to lobby for the creation of more parks for the district.-
Alan Wells Charlotte City staff will likely be relieved if Republican Alan Wells is defeated on November 6. Wells has been one of the staff and council’s toughest critics, so much so that he is now regularly appointed to city committees on initiatives he takes issue with in order to head him off before he gets good and revved up.
Wells, 62, is one of Charlotte’s most concerned citizens, and at times his quests for truth and common sense have single-handedly improved the way city government functions, like the time he stopped the needless demolition of a renovated home near completion in the Belmont neighborhood.
“I am tenacious like a bulldog,” said Wells, a semi-retired businessman. “Once I get on an issue, I always see it through to a resolution.”
In his 10 years as an activist, Wells has dealt with nearly every city department, and knows his way around better than some sitting council members. Wells has served on the capital budget advisory committee, the new arena committee and the affordable housing implementation task force, to name a few.
If elected, Wells wants to “cut all the pork from the general budget and spend tax dollars wisely” by using a zero-based budget process, rather than simply refunding everything funded the year before. Wells also wants to concentrate on building and improving programs to recruit businesses to Charlotte and retain the ones already here.
This article appears in Nov 3-9, 2001.
