Pam Don't Play 

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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.