The city of Greensboro is a high-performing bureaucracy attached to a nonfunctioning government with the potential to periodically lop of the head of administration in a spasm of fury at its own ineffectiveness.
A two-day retreat scheduled for the purpose of setting the new city council’s priorities and developing a strategy that ended on Dec. 12 went almost an hour over and disintegrated into mutual recrimination over bad blood from the previous council’s tenure.
“I don’t think it’s going to be a peaceful council,” said at-large Councilman Robbie Perkins, as he tried to find his way out of the labyrinthine Center for Creative Leadership building on a wooded campus on the northern outskirts of the city. “You’re going to see a lot of 5-4 votes. The sides have already been drawn.”
As Perkins conceives it, the opposing faction consists of District 5 Councilwoman Trudy Wade and District 4 Councilwoman Mary Rakestraw, both former Guilford County commissioners who were first elected to the council in 2007 and who led the effort to remove former City Manager Mitchell Johnson, joined by at-large Councilman Danny Thompson and Mayor Bill Knight, who were first elected in November. The four share a governing philosophy of fiscal conservatism.
On the other side, Perkins has made common cause with District 1 Councilwoman Dianne Bellamy-Small. The two are veterans of the council: Perkins has served the most years, having first been elected in 1993, although he took a two-year break from 2005 to 2007; Bellamy-Small has served the longest continuous tenure, having been first elected in 2003. District 2 Councilman Jim Kee, who is one of the four new members, shares significant interests with Perkins and Bellamy-Small. Like Bellamy-Small, he represents one of the city’s majority African-American districts.
Like Perkins, he works in the real estate industry. Like both, he speaks passionately about public investment and developing infrastructure on the east side. Perkins said he sees District 3 Councilman Zack Matheny as gravitating to his faction.
The Perkins faction voted with Mayor Pro Tem Nancy Vaughan, a new member who previously served from 1997 to 2001, at the end of the Dec. 1 organizational meeting to revisit an 11 th-hour decision by the previous council on the financing of a planned Aquatic Center whose low bid came in at more than $6 million above a $12 million bond approved by the voters. The vote amounted to a defensive maneuver to kill a motion by Thompson to rescind the financing decision altogether.
Guilford County Republican Party Executive Director Tony Wilkins has dubbed Vaughan, who is unaffiliated, as the new council mediator and the council member who will likely wield the deciding vote on many 5-4 decisions.
The 2009 election, which is officially nonpartisan, saw Republicans take a majority of the seats on the nine-person board, and all but one victorious candidate received the services of political consultant Bill Burckley.
And yet Republican members and clients of Burckley find themselves on either side of the split. Wilkins downplayed the notion of emerging voting blocs, although he acknowledged that the new council’s Dec. 1 vote on financing the aquatic center appeared to cleave between members who emphasized fiscal responsibility and those that “are gung ho about public development.”
“I hope it’s too early to predict that,” he said. “Because we have more conservatives on council than ever, I would hope that the voting bloc may not occur.”
Wilkins said emphasizing party affiliation plays to his party’s disadvantage in a city where registered Democrats significantly outnumber their counterparts in the GOP, but he acknowledged that he has encouraged Republicans to get more involved in municipal politics.
“When I was elected as executive director of the party one of the main platforms I spoke of was for us to be more involved in electing conservative candidates to city council,” Wilkins said. “My involvement meant helping on campaigns and making phone calls, but not actually pushing [candidates’] party affiliation.”
Wilkins’ advocacy has brought him into conflict with Perkins, whom he differs with on the aquatic center and whom he calls a “RINO,” or a “Republican In Name Only.” (It could be considered an ironic historic reversal that “RINO” was once used by mainstream Republicans allied with African-American citizens in the post- Civil War South as a derisive term for elected officials who were registered as Republicans but governed according to values more in line with the conservative, white supremacist Democratic Party of the day.)
Matheny, like Perkins, is a registered Republican whose support of the current financing plan for the aquatic center and interest in public investment puts him somewhat at odds with the more conservative members.
Under the new alignment, there exist both personal lines of goodwill between the emerging factions and secondary fissures within.
“We need to be fiscally conservative in these tough economic times; we also need to be compassionate to those who are hurting, to the degree that a city council can be,” said Thompson, a new Republican member who lives in the newly annexed Cardinal neighborhood on the city’s west side. “We also need to recognize that we need to build infrastructure that will invite investment.”
Kee, who won election after promising to resist cost-cutting pressures to reopen the White Street Landfill, expressed appreciation for Thompson as a lead-in to an appeal for unity during his remarks at the Dec. 1 organizational meeting.
“I have come to dispel a myth that I hear about the city of Greensboro,” Kee said. “I hear that we are a divided city. Some people see us as east side, and some people see us as west side. But people outside of Greensboro simply see us as Greensboro, and we too must see ourselves as Greensboro. You know, scientists say that the world is round, and I guess we all can agree with that. If that is true, the moment you start on a journey toward the east, you’re already headed west; you’re just taking the scenic route.”
The cohesion of Perkins’ faction is undermined by a strained working relationship between Bellamy-Small and Matheny.
Early in the second day of the retreat, Bellamy-Small complained that crime in Matheny’s more affluent District 3 attracts more media attention and commands more police resources than crime in District 1. City Manager Rashad Young assured her that police commanders deploy resources based on monthly crime trends. Matheny attempted to respond to the charge of inequity, and Bellamy-Small cut him off, saying, “I’m talking, I’m talking.”
In outlining their priorities, Bellamy- Small and Matheny also described starkly contrasting visions.
Bellamy-Small’s presentation focused on service enhancements and equitable treatment for her working-class, predominantly black constituents. Her detailed list of considerations included green job creation, strengthening community watches, supporting a homeless day center and planning for transit expansion.
Matheny emphasized streamlining government. He asked the council to consider creating task forces that would, at least in part, be comprised of business people to recommend ways to reduce the size and cost of government.
“We’ve talked about garbage for two years, but looking at the cost that we charge for bringing in garbage we should be making sure that our cost is competitive with private industry,” Matheny said, discussing a possible privatization committee. “We’ve talked about privatizing the coliseum area….”
He also proposed a competition committee.
“The goal of city government is not to hire people, but to provide services to citizens,” Matheny said. “I would encourage us to pay our employees on more of an entrepreneurial basis. We’ve got some terrific business owners, CFOs and CEOs that could serve on a task force.”
Matheny said the city of Charlotte was able to realize significant cost reductions in the 1990s by incentivizing employee performance.
Similar to Bellamy-Small, Wade has clashed with Matheny over police resources, and those tensions resurfaced during the second day of the retreat. Previously, Wade has complained that downtown, which lies in Matheny’s district, receives an inordinate share of police attention. In 2007, district lines were redrawn so that District 5 was transformed from a pie slice that reached into the center city to a crescent arcing around the southwestern rim. Wade pointed out that hers is the only district that doesn’t touch the new Downtown Greenway being built by the city and Action Greensboro.
“I don’t think citizens in District 5 are too concerned about the greenway, but they do want speed bumps,” Wade said. “We need to remember that District 5 exists out there.”
During the second day of the retreat, City Manager Young noted a feeling of intimidation among staff members that has been an unspoken undercurrent during the past two years. Along with the nine council members, the retreat included senior administrators, the city clerk, the city attorney, members of the media and a facilitator from the UNC School of Government in Chapel Hill.
“There’s a reason they’re quiet in here and none of them have said anything,” Young said, referring to his staff. “It’s because the relationship between the council and the senior staff has not always been the best. They’ve told me: ‘You’re going to run into that wall, Rashad.’” On the first day of the retreat, Young noted that all nine victorious candidates emphasized two primary priorities during their campaigns: jobs, economic development and tax base, and crime and public safety. To a slightly lesser extent, they emphasized infrastructure. Over the next two days, Young and the UNC School of Government facilitator tried to coax ideas out of the council members to develop a strategy around those stated areas of agreement. Instead of a workshop for charting a cooperative plan to meet those needs for all citizens, the retreat often felt like a stage upon which to play out various petty personality dramas among the council members.
Much as they did over the past two years, economic development, job creation and tax-base improvement were largely pushed aside while members argued about process. The three issues that are immediate fires requiring the council’s attention — the White Street Landfill, financing of the aquatic center and longstanding racial tension within the police department — were hardly discussed at all.
One of the most intractable disputes spilling over from the last council is the matter of small group meetings. The council voted 5-4 in February 2008 to prohibit council members from meeting with staff in groups of two or more unless they do so in an official meeting with public notice. Perkins and Bellamy- Small contend that the small group meetings are essential for council members to make informed policy decisions.
Rakestraw and Wade take the position that the small group meetings were used by the opposing faction to secretly conceive policy changes and ram through votes. Matheny voted with Rakestraw and Wade to discontinue the small group sessions in 2008, but appeared to be sympathetic to an argument by Vaughan that the council needs more flexibility to go to staff with constituent concerns.
After a long and unproductive discussion about small group meetings, the meeting disintegrated in acrimony. As the UNC School of Government facilitator tried to tie off some loose ends, Perkins suggested that he might muster five votes to overturn Mayor Knight’s forthcoming council appointments if they were not to his liking. When Bellamy-Small stated that then-Mayor Yvonne Johnson consulted members about what boards and commissions they would like to be appointed to in 2007, Rakestraw and Wade angrily responded that they had not been approached by the previous mayor about their preferences.
“I feel like I’m being threatened,” Knight said.
The ill will escalated when Kee complained about being seated at the end of the dais and only having the benefit of one experienced council member next to him – that being Rakestraw. He asked Knight if he and Rakestraw could switch seats.
By then, Young had abandoned his post at the front of the assembly and had plopped into a chair next to the media table. As the council members talked over each other in raised voices, Young shook his head.
“I can’t believe this,” he muttered.
Greensboro Councilwoman Mary Rakestraw confers with City Manager Rashad Young during a recent retreat. (photo by Jordan Green)
