It was a year we won’t be forgetting anytime soon, particularly if you’re involved in any way with the local public school system. Or if you or a friend or family member is gay. Or if you watch TV. Or pay taxes. Or flush your toilet. Or care about your rights. Or think prisoners shouldn’t be punching bags. Without any further delay, here’s a list of some of the stories that made us pay attention in 2003.
Wheeler goes down
During a radio debate in 2002, Charlotte City Council member Lynn Wheeler explained why it was OK for the City Council to ignore the results of the arena referendum, in which 57 percent of voters voted against the project.
“We would have spit in the face of the voters if we had put together the same deal and went back and did it anyway,” Wheeler said.
Voters, who apparently didn’t care what kind of deal the city put together, agreed with Wheeler that they had been spat at. They returned the favor on election day, ousting the high-society uptown booster who only two years before had come in first in the Council at-large race. Though conservative Republican voters took the hit for throwing her out, Wheeler, a seven-term incumbent, lost votes everywhere from Myers Park’s silk stocking precincts to election boxes frequented by conservative Bible-thumpers in the suburbs.
Meanwhile, the hole in the ground uptown where the arena will go got deeper as the city plowed ahead with construction on a building Council members had promised they wouldn’t build if voters rejected it in a referendum. City bureaucrats celebrated by using $25,000 from the city’s general fund to throw a celebration party largely attended by — you guessed it — bureaucrats. Oh, and Ms. Wheeler. All of this led the brainiacs at the Observer to conclude that the low voter turnout this fall must have been a sign that Charlotteans were happy with what local government had been up to. Sure, that’s what happened.
Supremes Sanction Sex
After 227 years, the highest court of the freest nation on earth finally acknowledged the right of all Americans to participate in their favorite pastime in the privacy of their own homes without police interference. In the process, the court’s ruling in Lawrence v. Texas wiped out anti-sodomy laws across the nation. While members of the gay community can now legally have sex, they still can’t serve soup, at least not at the Charlotte Rescue Mission. The Mission’s leader, Rev. Tony Marciano II, refused to allow members of the Metropolitan Community Church to serve a meal to the rescue mission’s clients because the church welcomes openly gay members. The law may change, but the country, and this city, still remains polarized over the issue of homosexuality.
Oil and Water at CMS
Decades after two famous legal decisions ordered the desegregation of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, schools resegregated in a single school year in 2003. This school year was the first in which court-mandated school choice, where parents can choose a school nearby, replaced forced busing of kids to integrate schools. The result was a parting of the races like oil from water.
White kids packed overcrowded suburban schools while brand new inner city schools were left half-empty. For the first time in perhaps decades, whether school board candidates were willing to build new schools in overcrowded suburban areas became a litmus test for school board members, many of whom promised more suburban schools in order to win seats on the board.
The fight over equity, where schools will go, and which kids get to attend them is likely to drag on for decades, but 2003 was significant in that it was the first year in recent history when parents had a choice of where their kids would go. With a newly elected school board tilted in favor of the “burbs, anything could happen.
You Want Condoms With Your Sludge?
For 11 years, David McManus complained to the city about the raw human sewage that spewed from a manhole 150 feet from his back porch every time it rained. Sometimes, he said, the added pressure would blow the manhole cover skyward, continuously spewing sewage several feet in the air. The woods behind his Lansbury Court home in south Charlotte are often littered with used condoms left behind after sewage spills. Then this spring, rainy weather finally unleashed a five million gallon sewage motherlode into a 10-foot wide stretch of McAlpine Creek that runs along McManus’ backyard.
For years, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Utilities has been getting away with spills like this as overburdened state regulators let major spills slide. But last month, the North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources (NCDENR) finally took notice of a problem Creative Loafing has been harping on for two years after county regulators pointed out that 60 percent of the 21 million gallons the city has spilled in the last three years originated from a handful of sites. NCDENR is now demanding that the city clean up its act at each site, a first for the agency. So far though, City Council continues to remain officially oblivious to the problem.
Guns in Schools
Test scores at Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools are up this year for all racial and socio-economic groups, and so are the number of guns — and guns discharging — in our schools. Just goes to prove that all children can learn something at CMS if they survive long enough.
Iraq/Saddam/Terror
The people of Saudi Arabia, the country from which most of the Sept. 11 hijackers hailed, watched as the US attacked Iraq, a country from which none of the hijackers hailed, in an effort to combat terrorism in America.
Now, while US troops are patrolling Iraqi borders, the next generation of terrorists is crossing ours. From our unprotected chemical plants to our shoddy nuclear security, they’re bound to find this a land of boundless opportunity.
While we’re doing the rest of the world a service by pulling Saddam Hussein out of a rat hole over there, terrorist cells here are digging into theirs.
Clay Aiken
The American Idol runner-up was perhaps Charlotte’s best export this year. Aside from making UNC-Charlotte a household name nationally, his other never-before accomplished feats included beating out Oprah Winfrey for the number one spot on the National League of Junior Cotillions’ “Ten Best-Mannered People of 2003” list.
Don’t Drop the Baby
The local Department of Social Services took a well-publicized beating for interfering too much in the controversial Stratton case, in which a gaggle of Christian children was taken from their parents by bureaucrats whom critics say were essentially seeking to trade them for federal adoption money. Soon after, the DSS came under fire for doing too little in other cases where children suffered at the hands of caretakers they should have been taken away from. By year end, the agency was under fire for allegedly favoring a gay couple over a straight one as adoptive parents.
Things could be worse. At least Michael Jackson doesn’t live here.
Big Brother is Watching
This year, the City of Charlotte has found new ways to use your money to keep an eye on what you’re up to. This summer, the state legislature voted to let the city start using cameras to catch speeders on film so it could ticket them and fine them $50. Then this month the Charlotte-Mecklenburg police announced that the city was going to use federal money to add more “security” cameras uptown so they could gather something they call “criminal intelligence,” which includes keeping track of everyone from terrorists to panhandlers, all supposedly in the name of keeping us safe. All this is in addition, of course, to the cameras the city mounted at intersections a few years back to photograph the license plates of those running red lights.
Miracle at the Sav-A-Lot
What 50-plus FBI agents working full time for over two years couldn’t accomplish with a $24 million budget, Jeffrey Scott Postell pulled off in less than 15 minutes at no additional cost to taxpayers. The 21-year-old rookie cop, a one-year veteran of the nine-member Murphy Police Department, bagged world-famous abortion clinic bomber Eric Rudolph in June after arresting an unknown man lurking behind the Sav-A-Lot in the small mountain town where Rudolph had been spotted on and off for five years.
It was a feat for which his training as a Wal-Mart security guard and later as a police officer had apparently prepared him and was yet another public humiliation for the FBI’s agents, most of whom have no Wal-Mart security training. Rudolph will be tried this summer in Alabama for the 1998 bombing of a Birmingham abortion clinic.
Leave Us Alone
This year, Americans traded a bit of the First Amendment for a bit of peace and quiet in two court decisions. One bans telemarketers from calling them at home if they sign up on a no-call list. The other, a ruling on campaign finance by the Supreme Court, bans the generally unpleasant campaign commercials run by special interest groups right before an election.
Both bans don’t apply to the politicians who backed them, of course. Their campaigns can still call you at home during dinner soliciting donations or your vote, and they can still run all the nasty commercials they want right before an election, regardless of whether what they have to say about their opponents is true or not.
Beaten Senseless at Jail Central
This fall, former Mecklenburg County Jail Central inmate Stacy Cunningham won a $49,000 jury award after a kick in the eye from a detention officer while Cunningham was restrained on the floor left the prisoner partially blind. Though state laws barring plaintiffs from collecting damages from the government will insure he never receives a dime, the jury’s decision was the first acknowledgement that something terrible is going on in our county jails.
An FBI investigation and pending trial are on the docket for next year, as are multiple civil cases against the sheriff and his deputies for alleged beatings.
This article appears in Dec 24-30, 2003.
