The biggest difference between this year’s at-large City Council candidates doesn’t come from party affiliation or where they stand on the issues, but what they’re willing to actually commit to doing about things on the record. The savvier incumbents spent a lot more time answering CL’s questions, but said a lot less than some of their competitors.
After a year of citywide angst over the arena, candidates are going back to the basics. Overall, this election has marked the first time in years that candidates have returned to talking about long-ignored issues like traffic, infrastructure and land-use planning. Here’s what they said you can expect if you vote for them on November 4.
Susan Burgess
Burgess, a Democrat who served on City Council from 1999 to 2001, says she’s running a campaign based on “rebuilding trust,” a veiled jab at other opponents who supported the arena after telling voters they’d abide by the results of an arena referendum. Of all the candidates running, Burgess, 57, offered the most detailed answers to how she would accomplish her goals, which included dealing with congestion, addressing air quality and attracting businesses and jobs.
Burgess said the city should offer incentives like free parking downtown or a property tax break to people who buy hybrid, fuel efficient cars. She wants to explore adding high occupancy toll lanes to local highways — “I don’t know why we haven’t done that,” she said — and improve sidewalk networks around schools to provide a safe way for kids to walk to nearby schools. She also wants to study and improve the coordination of the city’s traffic signals during rush hour and add incident management signs to heavily traveled areas to warn drivers about accidents and delays.
She said rising property crime should be addressed with heavier police enforcement in neighborhoods that are being repeatedly victimized and by sending officers out to talk to victims and investigate crimes. That’s a practice the city has gotten away from in recent years.
Burgess said that Charlotte’s high taxes are driving development over the county line. She wouldn’t raise taxes if elected, she said. She also called the city’s economic development incentives a “joke” and said the city shouldn’t continue giving hundreds of thousands of dollars in incentive money to businesses to entice them to locate here.
Patrick Cannon
Cannon, 36, is seeking his sixth term on City Council. Cannon says it’s time to deal with street road maintenance the city has long put off, especially potholes. He says that the city needs to study what can be done about traffic congestion, including widening roads.
“Charlotte is beyond gridlock these days,” Cannon said. Cannon gets credit for talking about this issue before election season heated up, and for referring the issue to the city’s transportation committee for study. But when asked how the problem should be addressed, how much money it might cost or where he thinks it should come from, Cannon said, “it’s a work in progress.” He was among the candidates who said he’d consider tapping into the half-cent mass transit sales tax to upgrade roads. He said the city needs to start partnering more with the state and local developers to improve roads.
Cannon has some issues with proposed growth policies that would restrict development in some areas to redirect it to the transit corridors because the formula it’s based upon could choke growth in struggling and stagnating areas that need it.
“I want to balance directing development to the (transit) corridor with allowing it in areas on the east and west side that could benefit from it,” said Cannon. While he favors policies that promote growth along the transit lines, in some cases, he said, the currently proposed growth policies could raise the cost of housing, making it unaffordable for some.
Cannon, a business owner, defends his vote in favor of building a new arena uptown.
“I say that there are now 400 construction jobs,” said Cannon. “There’s a $320 million economic impact that will occur within a five-minute walk of the arena and there’s $4 million annually in property taxes that will be generated from development around the arena that can be used for housing, police protection and job programs.”
Chris Cole
Cole, 39, is a Libertarian who has a habit of running almost every year for one office or another. While his party affiliation virtually eliminates any chance of winning, it’s worth noting that in recent years Cole’s command of local issues has rivaled or surpassed some new candidates that the voters actually elected.
Cole said the best way to deal with traffic is to build and expand roads. He says he’d hold a referendum to ask voters’ permission to redirect the half-cent sales tax money slated for mass transit to road building and maintenance. He said he doesn’t support any of the city’s current growth policies and doesn’t believe in zoning, which restricts the free market.
Cole said that City Council districts need to be redrawn. “Incumbents have virtually guaranteed reelection and they are not accountable,” he says. “I believe in government by consent of the governed and we don’t have that.”
He also believes the city should work with the school system to convert empty, abandoned retail buildings into schools.
Cole, who is gay, said the city should extend domestic partner benefits to gay employees. “I’m upset that the city is willing to take my tax money, but people like me are disqualified from receiving (benefits).”
Paul Eich
Eich, a Republican, is making his second attempt to win an at-large seat. Voters may remember Eich, 59, for his vocal opposition to the new arena as part of the arena protest group CO$T.
Eich calls the city’s transit plan a “great pie in the sky dream” and says it’s guaranteed to fail the way it’s currently planned. He’s particularly opposed to light rail, and says a bus network like the one he rode through Europe could much better address transit needs because light rail is too expensive and can’t be moved to follow growth like bus routes can.
Eich, a longtime neighborhood activist from the Derita area, says the city’s current zoning system is unfair because developers can “beat” neighborhoods by repeatedly requesting rezoning delays with little or no notice to neighborhoods, which wears down neighborhood leaders who must find childcare and rearrange their schedules to attend council meetings. He says he’d fight for a one-shot, drop dead, up or down vote on rezonings if elected.
Taxes are too high in Mecklenburg, Eich says, and they are driving development over the county line. He also thinks that raising the price of land through restrictive zoning might force redevelopment of abandoned big box stores in need of renovation.
John Lassiter
Lassiter, a Republican, is a former at-large school board member who is making his first run for city office. He says job creation and economic development are the most important issues to him. When pushed for an answer on what action he’d take on those issues, he said the city should spend some work session time assessing the economic climate Charlotte is providing, and how the city stacks up to others in attracting Fortune 500 companies and stimulating small business development.
“We should take some quality time to review what the city is doing, review what the needs are, and dovetail that with what’s going on at the Chamber of Commerce,” said Lassiter, a business owner.
Lassiter, 48, said road building has fallen behind traffic growth in Charlotte and that the city has to make sure it has the right allocation of money between roads and light rail.
“We don’t get our fair share of state and federal dollars based upon the dollars that we send both places and we have not been effective in having highway trust funds come back to us,” Lassiter said. “We’ve got to become much more aggressive, primarily with Raleigh, but also with Washington about getting our share of road building money and combining it with dollars we want to allocate locally.”
Lassiter said he probably would have voted to build the new arena if he had been on council because the plan the council approved was better than the one the voters rejected in the arena referendum. A quality ownership group and private investment money made the deal the council approved more positive, he said.
Pat Mumford
Mumford, a Republican, is seeking his second City Council term. He says the most important issue in city government right now is the road, water and sewer maintenance the city has delayed.
“If we don’t focus on that next year and the year following, we’ll have a huge bill to pay four or five years out,” Mumford said. He said he wants to study how much work is needed and what it will cost.
“I’m suggesting we do a self-imposed, minimum investment in those core responsibilities of the city so that when somebody comes to us with name the project, call it baseball, we can say if we have any money left over from focusing on these things, we’ll address it, but if we don’t, that’s it.
“At some point traffic becomes so bad people will decide they’ve had it and move,” Mumford said. “Others will choose another form of transit and may use mass transit. Until there’s something compelling enough to force someone to get out of their car people are going to drive. If you widen roads forever you’re just going to put more cars on the street.”
Mumford, 39, said he’d modify roads to support mass transit or an improved bus system, but that the transit system is a multi-billion investment and the city has to be dedicated to using the limited transit funds for transit. He said that the city needs to support mass transit with higher density along the transit lines but that the council needs to take more time to study whether its currently proposed planning theory will work in Charlotte’s market.
Mumford defended his vote to build a new uptown arena, which he initially questioned and still has some reservations about.
“I don’t believe major league hockey is coming to Charlotte; I don’t think the NBA would ever come back,” said Mumford, a Wachovia real estate executive. “I felt that if we didn’t jump on this owner, this NBA opportunity, this major tenant opportunity, we weren’t going to have another one. The underwriting or the corporate investment reduced our risk dramatically. So could we use the money for something else? Yeah, absolutely. That’s the part that’s difficult for me. It’s tying our hands as we speak.”
Fran Perez
Perez, a Republican who is running for office for the first time, has served on numerous city and county advisory committees and most recently was the Chairwoman of the Police Community Relations Subcommittee.
She wants to attract jobs to the city by aggressively expanding city business incentive programs, lowering property taxes for businesses, and selling city-owned land to businesses at a reduced rate. Perez, 39, says the city should make detailed information on how to start a business available by posting it on its website.
Perez said she is a proponent of the transit plan, but that it’s also necessary to maintain roads. She thinks the city is setting a dangerous precedent by paying to maintain roads that are state-owned. She says the city should improve its relationship with Raleigh so Charlotteans won’t have to foot the bill for roads that the state should be paying for.
Perez said she doesn’t think the city should put too many restrictions on growth.
“I’m looking forward to higher density around the transit corridors and a little bit higher in the wedges, but also we need to make sure we have the options for those people who want to have a house with a yard.”
Perez, a business analyst with Phillip Morris USA, said she wants to lower Charlotte taxes. “We’ve got to make sure that Charlotte is a place where we can afford to live now and in the future,” she said. “We’re already losing people to the surrounding counties.”
While Perez voted against the arena referendum and would have voted against the current arena deal if she were on council, she said the new arena is a positive thing for the city.
This article appears in Oct 29 – Nov 4, 2003.
