Pam Don't Play 

Way back then, a handful of bank execs, a couple of highbrow businessmen from Charlotte's old money families, and the occasional politician or government type usually made the list.

But that was before the market bubble burst and the banks began merging at the speed of light, before September 11 and Enron. One by one, Charlotte's beautiful people disengaged from public life, turning their attention to fortifying their own fortunes or keeping corporate knives out of their backs. Many weren't young to begin with, and the oldest of the powerful set simply faded into moneyed obscurity.

The economy eventually bounced back, but the titans never fully reengaged in the political game. In their stead, they left a power vacuum and a generation of lackluster politicians who were used to taking corporate marching orders. With no one else to take cues from, they've increasingly begun to follow the only people left who seem to have any sense of direction.

These days, if you ask political observers who the most powerful people in Charlotte are, they'll roll their eyes and give you the same two-word answer: City staff.

By this they mean the powerful cabal of high-level bureaucrats who work for Charlotte City Manager Pam Syfert, who in recent years has arguably become the most powerful person in Charlotte.

Syfert technically works for City Council, rather than the other way around, although it's sometimes hard to tell. Syfert has never let the Council stand in the way of her all-consuming vision, or her remarkable consolidation of power under the city crown.

Although it's usually Mayor Pat McCrory or the Council who take the heat on local talk radio for city policy -- or the praise for it from the Charlotte Observer -- it's really Syfert who controls the city's agenda with an iron fist and the City Council that does the rubber-stamping.

Don't let Syfert's sweet, soft-spoken demeanor and insistence that she takes her direction from the Council fool you. She's a master at subtly railroading the politicians she works for. That doesn't mean that they don't rein her in from time to time, but that usually only happens when the Council is facing down an angry mob that's been jerked around by city bureaucrats hard enough that they've actually organized and come to a Council meeting. But in the absence of an angry neighborhood mob, Syfert rarely faces difficult questions from the Council.

Syfert traffics in information the way a drug lord traffics in cocaine. When Council members ask too many pointed questions about a pet project that is part of Her Plan, they find themselves essentially cut off, spinning in a whirlwind of polite smiles, half-answers and bureaucratic minutiae.

Syfert clearly prefers to ask forgiveness rather than ask permission. That's why Council members rarely learn the real costs, or the most politically unpalatable details, of controversial projects until after they've approved them, at which point confusion ensues and the City Council comes out looking dumb. In the process, Council members come to learn shocking truths, like, for instance, that they've voted for a plan that will pull police officers off-duty or pay them overtime to provide free traffic control to the Bobcats at a cost of approximately $20 million over the life of the contract. This is typical Syfert.

Riding The Rails
To understand the impact Syfert has had, you've got to go back to the October 1996 reception celebrating her ascension to the post of City Manager after 24 years of service to the city.

Back then, battling traffic congestion by building more roads was the holy grail of local politics, an issue that had decided mayoral contests and sunk politicians unwilling to go along.

As was expected, Syfert paid homage to asphalt in her comments that day, promising to balance building roads with "public safety concerns."

She didn't mean it. In fact, Syfert promptly proceeded to do the opposite. Roads just didn't fit into her plan. According to the Syfert dogma, which would eventually become conventional wisdom here, a strong urban core is the answer to every problem. Nothing bad could ever befall a city with a strong urban core. What's more, uptown had to be expanded beyond the chokehold of the John Belk Freeway if it were to prosper, preferably in the South Boulevard direction. A trolley, light rail or some combination thereof would justify, both legally and publicly, the demolition and rebuilding of an entire decrepit corridor. It would also make whatever governmental entity that controlled the transit lines the premier power player in the development of the new uptown, a fact that wasn't lost on Syfert.

Let's get this straight: none of these ideas were originally Syfert's. But she has skillfully latched on to them and ridden them to an increase in her own power and influence.

The Charlotte establishment had been eyeing light rail as a development tool for a long time. The problem was that under the city's and the county's previous, more timid management, two citizens' committees that studied traffic solutions and the consultants who guided them had been disastrously mismanaged and thus had arrived at the wrong conclusions, namely that the city needed more roads, that Charlotte wasn't dense enough to support light rail, and that -- horror of horrors -- the city should try busways because they were much cheaper and would accomplish the same transportation goals as rail.

Within a month of Syfert's debut as City Manager, Council had voted to allow staff to start negotiating with Norfolk Southern to buy the abandoned rail right-of-way from Second Street to Scaleybark Road, a course of action that just months before had been a distant suggestion by one of those failed mass transit committees. Buying that rail line cemented the city's control over the development of what would soon become the south corridor rail line.

At the same meeting, Council also approved Syfert's request for $175,000 to "study" using the thin strip of land as a busway or streetcar line -- or maybe even for light rail sometime in the far distant future.

The game was on. Though both the county and the city appointed the members of the third committee that would study "mass transit options," it was city bureaucrats who really ran the process, steering the committee in the right direction when it got off track. This time, a consultant who understood the game and stood to profit from it was brought in to assure the end result was the desired one. With guidance from Parsons Brinckerhoff, which would later rake in numerous light rail contracts, the committee ultimately backed what the company proposed -- a rail line that would start on South Boulevard and stretch into the nether regions of the county.

Two years and one month after Syfert took the city's helm, county voters approved funding for a light rail line that wasn't supposed to happen for decades - if ever - when Syfert took office. By then, all talk of building more roads to ease congestion - the untouchable holy grail of local politics - had ceased. Because roads made it easier for people to live or conduct business in places other than uptown, roads became the enemy.

But light rail was only the beginning of the uptown crusade under Syfert. While the rail line itself would be paid for by county taxpayers and governed by a mix of city, county and town officials, the city was determined to solidify its control over the development along the transit lines, and in particular along the South Boulevard transit line, which happens to fall within city boundaries.

Under Syfert, the city began a systematic power grab at the Planning Commission, a joint city/county government agency that makes development decisions. For 50 years, the city and the county had shared both the costs of running the commission and control over it. Three years after Syfert took office, the city won its battle to take over all of the costs of running the commission. County employees at the Planning Commission were shifted to the city's payroll. All major development decisions now ran through City Hall, a fact that gives the City Manager's office tremendous power over how Charlotte grows -- and over the fortunes of powerful developers and businesses.

Last year, Syfert convinced the City Council and the County Commission to give her the right to hire and fire the Planning Director, cementing her control over the department. City bureaucrats then rewrote the city's general development policies, which systematically make it harder for developers to build anywhere other than in the transit corridors without their approval.

Meanwhile, the city was learning that by dangling $15-to-$20 million in "incentives" in front of developers, it could buy into their projects and micro-manage them. A list of all the "buy-in" development projects the city currently has going shows how staggering the scope of the city development machine has become in the eight years since Syfert took the city's reins. Right now, the city is playing some role in literally millions of square feet of uptown development, including the new uptown arena, a mixed-use development at Midtown Square, the redevelopment of Elizabeth Avenue, and the redevelopment of the old convention center.

Then there's the redevelopment of the Piedmont Courts housing project, an interesting choice for the city when you consider that most of Charlotte's housing projects are crumbling to the ground with nary a peep out of city officials.

While the city has played a largely passive role in the renovation of other housing projects by the Charlotte Housing Authority, an agency the city funds but does not directly control, it has micro-managed the Piedmont Courts project to death, in the process growing it into a $140 million plan to transform an entire neighborhood into a housing development geared toward those of higher incomes, with space for low income units. Why? The project is on the edge of uptown, and presents another opportunity to control center city development.

Council Can't Keep Up
The developments listed above will likely be only the beginning, because the city now has powerful new tools in its arsenal. The renewed push for tax increment financing, which statewide voters approved this fall, originated deep in the bowels of City Hall as a way to entice developers to build uptown and along the rail line, a fact that wasn't immediately obvious because the Charlotte Chamber carried the water on it at the state legislature, eventually convincing legislators to put it on the ballot. With this tool, city government will no longer need to ask voters permission to issue debt to fund development projects. They can simply pledge the future increased tax receipts on development to pay for the bonds, allowing City Hall, and ultimately other governments across the state, to subsidize, direct and control development.

With the flurry of construction uptown, it's easy to forget that demand for more uptown office space has ground to a near halt as the banks set their sites on other markets like Boston and New York. If it weren't for the city's efforts, that is, if development uptown were left to the private sector alone, the headlines about the economic health of uptown might read very differently than they do today.

Meanwhile, with so many projects going at once, there's no way part-time City Council members can keep up with the sheer volume of material they're rubber-stamping, a fact that makes Syfert much more powerful.

In the past eight years, no one has done more to refocus the city's growth than Syfert. But that single-minded focus has come at a price. Potholes dot Charlotte's roads and traffic backs up at intersections in parts of town light rail will never serve. The waiting list for sidewalks in Charlotte's neighborhoods is decades long. Yet this fall, the projects on the city bond package, which city bureaucrats selected, included sidewalks for the rail corridor and roadwork on Old Pineville Road, which doesn't have much in the way of traffic congestion, but is critical to the light rail project.

At a meeting this fall, frustrated neighborhood activists blasted Syfert. Despite their best efforts, they can't seem to get the city's sorely understaffed code enforcement office to address very real problems that threaten fragile neighborhoods in places other than uptown. The city lacks the manpower, and apparently the will, to enforce the ban on parking in yards that it recently passed. Untested rape kits are gathering dust in police evidence rooms. And sometimes, when call volumes are heavy, an operator doesn't immediately respond when you call 911.

But when arts groups wanted hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for new buildings, they emphasize that the buildings will be uptown. That way, when they go to the city, they know that come hell or high water, after a long, micro-managed process, the City Manager's office will make sure politicians find the money to pay for it all.

And that, more than anything, is the Syfert trademark. Years from now, when the hacked-off neighborhood activists are long gone and forgotten, odds are pretty good that all that Pam Syfert built will still stand.

Contact Tara Servatius at tara.servatius@cln.com