Who can Stop our State from Killing the Things it Loves?

Thirty years ago, Charlotte, NC, where Democrats will gather this week for their national convention, beautifully landscaped the parkways leading to and from its airport and other parts of the city, in part to ensure a positive first and last impressions for visitors arriving by air.

In 1999, an out-of-state billboard company desecrated that stretch by committing what then-Charlotte Mayor and now-Republican candidate for governor, Pat McCrory termed “an environmental crime” and described as “the worst I have seen in 10 years.”

Today, thanks to a powerful eastern NC Senate Republican from the eastern part of the state, that crime has been legalized while stripping out, during a last minute conference committee, any local say or respect for local values along state roadways including those running through Charlotte.

Decriminalized, those who perpetrated the crime McCrory spoke so passionately about a few years ago are now rapidly clear-cutting huge swaths of trees throughout the state, enabling soil erosion and flooding in places such as Charlotte and scaring the last impressions given visitors as they depart North Carolina via routes such as those shown in the image in this blog taken along I-40 heading west out of Asheville.

McCrory courageously spoke out against the new billboard legislation in his first debate with Democratic opponent Walter Dalton.  These aren’t the only times McCrory has stated his opposition to the desecration wrought by roadside billboards.

Good friends in Charlotte report that, as mayor, he vetoed several measures passed to enable billboards to litter those same roadsides that were violated in 1999. Dalton on the other hand has been an enabler of billboards and, not surprisingly but coincidentally I’m sure, has been one of their largest beneficiaries of campaign contributions.

Even worse, as a legislator, Dalton spearheaded legislation a few years ago to strip away the ability of communities to use a tool called amortization after it had found legal by several courts during long years of struggle by Durham NC, where I live, as a means to remove billboards by giving owners a set number of years to withdraw any value.

Several months ago, Dalton defended billboards in writing to a group in Durham as “good for the economy.”  I’ve only spent 40 years in economic development, but that was certainly news to me and unbelievable by any measure.

As a political Independent, I try not to rely only on specific policies such as this to make a ballot box decision, but I am definitely among unaffiliated voters who by double digits are leaning toward voting for McCrory as are some progressives I know.

I wouldn’t expect him to govern the entire state through a Charlotte lens but this issue definitely gives a sense of his ability to think and act beyond party ideology or politics.

At the very least McCrory would give a “backbone infusion” to several departments and agencies that seem to serve more as billboard sycophants, if not passive enablers, leaving no one to stand up on behalf of a public shown in polls as overwhelmingly in opposition.

He may even inspire or at least give a NCIS-Gibbs-head-slap to some out-of-state tourism beneficiaries of the state’s marketing, such as two restaurant chains, who keep this obsolete form of advertising on “life support” while making a bewildered public wonder why “tourism so often kills the things beloved by tourists.”

I met McCrory and listened to him in person during a meeting with a small handful of other tourism leaders a few years ago.  I got a sense of him as a person and a politician.  He reminds me of Nick Tennyson, a friend and former Mayor of Durham who also happens to be a Republican, and who, like McCrory stands out as far more moderate and pragmatic than those who dominate headlines for that group.

Some who read this blog may think I’m drawn to McCrory who grew up in Guilford County, because I’ve written previously about one of my 4th-great-grandfathers, James McCrory, who initially settled after immigrating here in the hamlet of Guilford Courthouse before enlisting a few months later in the Continental Army and later relocating after the War of Independence across the Blue Ridge Mountains and eventually making his home in Pickens County, Alabama.

But before relocating to Durham, a quarter-century-ago, I was born and raised and lived nearly 40 years in the Pacific Northwest with a stint in south-central Alaska.  Pat McCrory, while now also a long-time North Carolinian, hails from Irish, German and Swiss ancestors who congregated near Milwaukee after immigrating to the United States in the early 1800s.

He was born and spent his early years in Ohio and comes by his pragmatism honestly as his roots reflect the American dream likely inherited from ancestors who worked as farmers, a blacksmith, a pipefitter, a plumber, a high school teacher, an engineer and inventor.

A reader might think that I sound Republican and that I might also vote for presidential candidate Mitt Romney because we were classmates at BYU and members of a small group known as Cougar Club and share some cultural heritage.

But I’m certain that I’ve voted for as many or more Democrats as Republicans during my lifetime beginning with the first presidential election after I became eligible (I just missed benefiting from the 26th Amendment to the US Constitution) when I cast a ballot for former South Dakota Senator George McGovern after swinging from an ultra-conservative upbringing to my left of center of my college years before settling as an Independent moderate except where forced to pick a party in order to vote in some primaries where I have lived.

I probably would have leaned toward voting for the Romney of my college years or even the Romney when he was governor of Massachusetts.  But he appears no longer free to be that Romney and I’m just not persuaded that the same ideological rigidness that got us into our current mess is what we need to dig out of it, although some seem to betting a lot on “teflon” memories these days.

Hopefully, McCrory won’t become similarly constrained and his courage in speaking out against a powerful legislator from his party will remain steadfast.

Somehow the mess with billboards tells me he will stand his ground.

A Strategic Overhaul for North Carolina Marketing

In 1995 I was honored when I was nominated by my state for an appointment as a Presidential delegate to the White House Conference on Travel and Tourism, but it is clear today, some 17 years later, that many other attendees did not take notes.

One of the clear outcomes of that ground-breaking conference was an understanding that tourism isn’t an industry, never has been, never will be. It is, instead, a sector of 6 or 7 different industries.  When I got back to Durham and the community-destination marketing organization where I was an executive until several years ago, we flipped that switch immediately.

Seventeen years later, you can use someone’s reference to tourism as a sector vs. an industry to quickly determine how strategic they are.  Of course, being thought of as a strategic thinker is something almost everyone seeks but lamentably few qualify as such despite the best efforts to teach it in leading-edge programs today such as Appalachian State University’s Hospitality and Tourism Degree Program.

It is more a mindset than a matter of smarts and the difference is more than semantic.  Anyone who has flipped the switch from viewing tourism as an industry to a sector of industries is more likely able to take the long view of leadership which in the words of Dr. Roger B. Porter, a Harvard professor and classmate two years ahead of me at BYU means they:

“…are more concerned with investing in the future than in immediate gratification, and they value dynamism, change, and innovation over security and stability.”

North Carolina Governor-elect Pat McCrory has an opportunity to overhaul state government the way Governor Bill Umstead did in the early 1950s and nowhere more so than in travel and tourism and the way the state is marketed overall.

Like Umstead, a Durham native, who embedded the development of Research Triangle Park in his overhaul, which after his untimely death happened to be carved into Durham pinelands and the launch of what would become North Carolina’s transition into a powerhouse for research and development, especially in healthcare, McCrory has the opportunity to set the tone for North Carolina’s marketing for the next 50 years.

In the late 1950s, North Carolina’s approach to both development and  environmental conservation were fused into one department.  Similar to how these two forces have become under separate agencies, today the state’s marketing has become much too fragmented with many divisions and departments trying their hand at marketing with little or no strategic coordination with the state’s destination marketing agency.

A more strategic, forward approach to marketing the state won’t be a replica of what McCrory saw in Charlotte when he was Mayor.  They have done some novel things there but it is still essentially old-school, facility-driven community-destination marketing, the way it was practiced in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

At its core, destination marketing, regardless of whether it is for a community or a state, is about promoting a the destination as a whole.  As a destination, the State of North Carolina has had some remarkable leadership over the years, but those leaders’ hands have been tied by a mix of old-schoolers in the tourism sector and fragmentation within state government.

A first order of any strategic realignment in this state must recognize and adapt to the reality that over the past thirty years it has been the marketing agencies of North Carolina’s cities and counties, working in collaboration, that have collectively driven nearly 80% of the state’s tourism growth.

McCrory is in a position to generate synergistic realignment of the paradigm in North Carolina state government, just the way Governor Umstead did with the state’s approach to economic development 60 years ago.  Fortunate for North Carolina and especially Durham, a McKinsey Global Institute Report last year entitled An economy that works: Job creation and America’s Future, two of the three most potent sectors for job growth will be healthcare and tourism.

According to the report, the tourism sector alone, reported to be the nation’s fifth largest employment sector, is projected to generate one in seven jobs over the next decade, adding to sub-segments such as the 1.9 million in arts, entertainment and recreation and more than 11 million combined in sub-segments of foodservice and accommodations.

Ironically, soon-to-be Governor McCrory will need to look no further than the state constitution for an overarching strategy to guide any strategic overhaul of North Carolina’s marketing.  By a vote of more than 7 to 1, in 1972 North Carolinians embedded an oft-ignored constitutional amendment that reads in part:

“It shall be the policy of this State to conserve and protect its lands and waters for the benefit of all its citizenry, and to this end it shall be a proper function of the State of North Carolina and its political subdivisions to acquire and preserve park, recreational, and scenic areas, to control and limit the pollution of our air and water, to control excessive noise, and in every other appropriate way to preserve as a part of the common heritage of this State its forests, wetlands, estuaries, beaches, historical sites, openlands, and places of beauty.”

Unfortunately, the following year responsibilities for economic development and environmental resource protection were segregated, leading to desecrations such as the recent legislative give-away of roadside beauty to out-of-state billboard companies, something McCrory lamented during the campaign.

North Carolinians have a very deep love for their state and its incredible and unique sense-of-place.  They deserve an overarching strategic direction for the state that puts the protection of its sense-of-place at the top of any list of development priorities, just as the state constitution requires.

Election rhetoric aside, no one has a proven track record of doing this more than Governor-elect McCrory!

A Personal Story of Why I See Immigrants As Patriots

In May of 1775 as a set of my 4th and 5th great grandparents set sail for America from Belfast on a 350-ton brig named The Pennsylvania Farmer, they already knew what civil war was like.

But they probably hadn’t heard yet about the clash less than two weeks earlier on Lexington Green between colonial militiamen and British Army regulars.

Nor were they aware that the makings of the revolution and even after, in places such as North Carolina where they planned to settle was already more like a civil war.

Four years earlier, in the Battle of Alamance, North Carolinians fighting as colonial militia on behalf of the Royal Governor defeated North Carolinian rebels known as Regulators.

The ship my ancestors were on had meant to dock in Charleston, South Carolina.

But cross-Atlantic voyages at the time, even aboard a ship as fast and maneuverable as a two-masted brig were often blown off course and forced to land at other ports.

So on July 1, 1775 The Pennsylvania Farmer (similar to the brig shown in the image in this essay) dropped my ancestors off in Baltimore instead.

Soon Thomas and Hannah McCrory along with my 17-year-old 4th great grandfather James plus some other relatives began trekking down the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia on the Great Wagon Road.

They were at the tail end of the Great Migration of 200,000 Scots-Irish who immigrated here between 1717 and 1775, most settling inland along the Appalachians and western Piedmont.

They were Presbyterians of differing factions whose lowland Scottish ancestors had been transplanted to Northern Ireland by the British.  Even in religious, they understood civil war.

It is from their folk music, by the way, that country music spawned.

Initially it was successive droughts in Northern Ireland that drove them to leave.  My ancestors, though, were weavers who also left because the linen market had collapsed and British estates had cancelled the land they leased.

Shortly after passing through the relatively new Moravian settlement of Salem, North Carolina (part of present-day Winston-Salem,) they planned to cut south on the Georgia Road to their final destination Waxhaw, North Carolina.

It was an area just south of the village of Charlotte where the month after their departure from Belfast, the defiant Mecklenburg Resolves had been signed as one of the earliest declarations of Independence.

But it may have been at Salem, that one of my 4th great grandfathers, James McCrory, decided to settle 28 miles east instead at a new crossroads that had sprung up around the Guilford Courthouse the year before, while Thomas and Hannah continued a hundred miles further south to Waxhaw.

After less than a year as Americans, Thomas enlisted as a captain overseeing a company of troops in the 9th North Carolina Regiment of the Continental Army commanded by Col. John P. Williams.

James also enlisted first under his father and then seemingly transferred to another company in the same regiment under Captain Ramsey.

Ironically, this is also when North Carolina purchased their old ship The Pennsylvania Farmer in New Bern and began to arm her as the centerpiece of the colony-soon-to-be-state’s Navy.

The regiment soon marched north to join General Washington in Middlebrook, NJ.  They soon engaged the British Army in battles at Brandywine and Germantown where my 5th great grandfather was apparently mortally wounded in action.

His body must have been taken home to Waxhaw because he is buried near there on Mint Hill.

James eventually served in nearly every major battle in the Southern campaign including at Guildford Courthouse before marrying after the war and heading over the mountains in 1783 into Tennessee and eventually down along the Tombigbee River.

But why leave North Carolina?  After Generals Greene and Cornwallis left the state, the nearly seven year Revolutionary War soon concluded in victory of Americans.

But in North Carolina, the vacuum meant the civil war continued to rage on between loosely organized gangs of armed men terrorized Tar Heels while presenting themselves as either revolutionaries or loyalists.

Totally undisciplined, according to the late Dr. William S. Powell in his book entitled, North Carolina Through Four Centuries, they were more like “robbers.”

These partisan gangs “burned houses, murdered men, and attacked women indiscriminately,” terrorizing large areas of the state while taking hundreds of prisoners hostage.

Normalcy wouldn’t come to North Carolina for nearly a decade.

Powell reminds us that during this period there were almost 350,000 people living here, a quarter in bondage with no hope of freedom and a third of those who were white still loyal to Great Britain.

Even after the war, only 40% of Tar Heels were un-ambivalent about Independence.  A faction known as “conservatives” wanted a return to prewar ideals and conditions including renewal of trade with England.

Back then they even wanted to “tap the breaks” on Independence.  Another known as “radicals” or “rioters” wanted even more change.

Sound familiar?  I obviously come from a long line of moderates.  But during that time Tennessee was part of North Carolina which had been granting land their to soldiers and their families.

My McCrory ancestors were close to the family of later US President Andrew Jackson both because they lived in the same Waxhaw district but also because Jackson’s brother married a Crawford relative of James’ mother Hannah.’'

Judging by the year, Jackson, my 4th great grandparents James and Jane McCrory along with his brother Thomas, Jackson’s friend, all migrated to Tennessee together in 1783, during this period of anarchy.

But life there was anything but peaceful.

While living on land along Cripple Creek, James was fired on by Indians just north of the Cumberland River in 1792.

By 1811 when my 3rd great grandmother Sarah Ann McCrory was born, her parents had purchased land down in the recently opened Mississippi Territory, along the Tombigbee near the western border of what five years later would become Alabama.

It was a still a tense time for the young family.  A civil war soon broke out within the Creek Nation of Native Americans due to a hostile faction known as the “Red Sticks” because of of the red war clubs they used.

It soon spilled over with the massacre of settlers.  In addition, there was the threat of invasion by the British via New Orleans as war broke out again in 1812.

This in turn drew General Andrew Jackson’s troops down from Tennessee in defense, along his friend my 4th great grandfather’s brother, Col. Thomas McCrory, who had built a two story cabin in 1790 along what is now Old Hickory Blvd. in Forest Hills, Tennessee.

The cabin is now on the National Register of History Places.

When the old solider, James McCrory finally died in his 80s, my great-great-grandmother Sarah Ann headed to Illinois and then across Iowa with her family hoping to make it into my native Rockies.

She died in route, just south of Des Moines, in the harsh winter of 1847 but it is in part from her daughter Amanda, who was five at the time, that I draw my 5th generation Idaho roots.

McCrorys were late comers compared to all but a couple of lines of ancestors who immigrated to America in the 1850s and 60s.  Most had been here since the 1600s.

But uncovering their story and placing it in context makes me even more proud to be an American.

Lakeside Context

If it clears due diligence, I may be writing some of these essays at a retreat on Mayo Lake which, as I will describe, is very unique.

By the way, being drawn to lakeside getaways, like being a morning person, is probably one of those contexts that researchers have found to be predictors of relationship longevity.

Even if you didn’t grow up along lakes, as each of us did, like being a morning person or a night owl, it is just something in your nature.

Mayo Lake lies 35 miles and change north of our house in Durham.  The most scenic route, for me, will often be astride the Harley Crossbones up and over Mt. Tirza.

That will add a couple of miles to the route but will be well worth it after cutting up Moores Mill Road from Quail Roost in Durham.

Mt. Tirza is the location and namesake of a church where good friends of mine, Eddie and Nita Hill, were first posted after he graduated from Duke Divinity.

Nita helped us jumpstart Durham’s community destination marketing organization 26 years ago.

But the crossroads there predates the church by three or four decades, when it was established by a Revolutionary War veteran, Lt. Colonel Stephen Moore, in 1777 and 1778, two years before he famously led the Caswell County Regiment at the Battle of Camden in a losing cause.

The rest of Moore’s family had sided with the British so after the war he inherited the family’s estate at West Point overlooking the Hudson in New York, which he negotiated to sell to the newly created U.S. government beginning in the late 1780s for use as a military academy.

The Battle of Camden has significance to me because along with Moore, my fourth great grandfather, James McCrory, was captured there after seeing earlier combat at Brandywine and Germantown and serving a stint in General Washington’s select guard.

At Camden, he and Moore along with 1,000 other American soldiers were captured during the battle.  Moore was imprisoned on a prison ship in Charleston Bay while my fourth great grandfather was imprisoned on a ship near Wilmington.

Moore was held until a prisoner exchange in late summer 1781, but after only four months as a POW, my great (x4) grandfather was earlier released in only his underwear and without shoes upon taking a vow that he would never again take up arms against the British Crown.

Moore returned to a noncombatant commission in Hillsborough, a 20 mile ride from his home on Mt. Tirza and retook his seat in the North Carolina legislature there, then the capital.

But instead, just four months after his release, my fourth great grandfather McCrory rejoined the war in combat at the Battle of Cowpens where his British captor Tarleton was thoroughly routed, marking a turning point in the war.

A few months later he was fighting in the Battle of Guilford Courthouse, a place to which he had immigrated from Northern Ireland just as the Revolutionary War began.

The British Army retreated to the Virginia coast and seven months later surrendered to American General Washington bringing the Revolutionary War to an end.

While Moore was settled back on Mt. Tirza, my fourth great grandparents McCrory headed up and over the Appalachians, eventually settling on the frontier along the Tombigbee River southwest of Tuscaloosa.

The old soldier lived until 1840 at which time his daughter and son-in-law, whose grandparents had migrated from North to South Carolina before ending up on the Tombigbee, headed into the Rockies.

James McCrory’s great grandaughter, my great grandmother was claimed by the Great Influenza Epidemic in 1919 while visiting the ancestral Idaho ranch where I would be born three decades later and spend my early years.

It is from her parents and two other lines of ancestors that I derive my 5th generation Idaho roots.

Moore, who had been in the lumber trade in Canada before the war, was proud that his home on Mt. Tirza was “where the ax had never been laid to a tree.”

He would be greatly dismayed today by clear-cut timbering now laying waste along Mt. Tirza’s northern slopes not far from his home.  It is a lazy way to timber, fueled by technology, compared to the equally lucrative but more sustainably way of selective cutting.

Moore had a grist mill on the Flat River, just over what would become the Durham County line, thus the name Moores Mill Road, which I will take past Hill Forest and Mt. Tirza.

He died in 1799 while visiting friends in Durham at Stagville Plantation, now a state historic site, and is buried up on Mt. Tirza in a family cemetery along the route to Mayo Lake that bears his name.

Like the lakes that dot northern Durham - two to provide the city’s water and one to provide for Raleigh’s further to the south and east -Mayo is a reservoir, but not just for drinking.

It has 85 miles of shoreline that encompass its 2,800 acres lined with homes on the southern half that are very secluded compared to other lakes.

The shoreline while accessible for boating and swimming has been uniquely set aside as a wildlife habitat dating back to the late 1970s when Mayo Lake was created to cool a steam power plant on the far northern end near the Virginia border.

It finished filling in the 1980s, a few years before I arrived in Durham.

Mayo, both the lake and the stream that was dammed to create it, are named for Major William Mayo, an Englishman who immigrated first to Barbados in the early 1700s and then Virginia.

He led the survey teams that mapped the gaps in the Blue Ridge Mountains through which my Messersmith ancestors traveled soon after immigrating to settle along a creek feeding the South Fork of the Holston River.

It is where the southern and northern tips of the Jefferson and Cherokee national forests, respectively, nearly touch today.

In 1728, Mayo also led one of the teams jointly surveying along each side to map the border between Virginia and North Carolina, guided, in part, through the area north of what is now Mayo Lake.

It was a prequel to officially dividing North and South Carolina the following year.  Mayo was guided by Native Americans in that area known as the Sappony (aka Sapponi) who had migrated down from the foothills to avoid Iroquoian raiders.

Sappony is derived from Monasusapanough, one of three villages they inhabited.

They were thought to be eastern Siouan cousins to the Eno and Shoccoree in what is now Durham and the nearby Occaneechi who had also migrated down from Virginia.

All of these tribes traded with the Catawba nation down the “Great Trading Path” remnants of which can still be seen where it cut diagonally across northern Durham near Stagville.

It is actually a spine or mainline for a network of countless other tributary trading paths along its route.  It was created first by buffalo, then by Indians following game, then for trade.  Then came pack horses and settlers, followed by wagons.

Signaling the road building savvy of buffalo, today, it is roughly the route of Interstate 85.

However, it appears the Sappony didn’t really migrate permanently across into North Carolina around Mayo Lake until after the Revolutionary War, in which they had fought on behalf of the colonists against the British Crown.

Their slow migration down into North Carolina had begun after the 1676 Bacon’s Rebellion.

At the time, only coastal counties in Virginia had been organized along with only a handful in the very northeast corner of North Carolina, including Bath near where my eighth great grandmother had been born twenty-six years before.

Yes, my Tar Heel bonafides stretch back to when there were fewer than 1,000 settlers in all of what became North Carolina, long before there were counties.

But a line of my ancestors, the Sheltons, had already moved into the interior along the border northwest of what is now Mayo Lake.

The migration of the Sappony had hastened by 1746: nine years after Mayo had laid out the city of Richmond and two years after his death, when Lunenburg County was created along the Virginia side.

At the time Granville spanned along the North Carolina side.

Their flow had quickened even more by 1752, when Halifax was carved from Lunenburg in Virginia across from Mayo Lake, while Orange County spanned North Carolina side by then.

At the time, there were fewer than 53,000 white settlers in all of North Carolina and another 19,000 enslaved African Americans.

In 1761, my fifth great grandmother Miller was born in Orange County before relocating with her family to a point in South Carolina along the Old Trading Path.

It was her grandson, my third great grandfather Graham who had later married a McCrory on the Tombigbee before heading westward to the Rockies.

The crossover by the Sappony into North Carolina had begun in earnest six years later just as western Halifax in Virginia was divided to create Pittsylvania.

It had become a steady stream by 1776 when my ancestors, the Shelton’s, petitioned to carve off Henry County further west along the border of Pittsylvania.

The next year Caswell County was carved from Orange on the North Carolina side which is why Lt. Col. Moore led a regiment from that county.

Person County, where both Mayo Lake and Mt. Tirza are located today wasn’t carved from Caswell until 1791; the year after Moore had sold West Point to the government.

It was five years later that the town of South Boston, Virginia was created in Halifax County just across the border from Mayo Lake. 

As with other nations of Native Americans across the country, we didn’t keep our agreements with the Sappony regarding land.

By the time Mayo Lake was created, the bottom land for the reservoir, which averages 30 feet in depth as well as the surrounding embankments were purchased from subsequent settlers.

There will be a lot to contemplate from lakeside and a lot to learn, but all of this is to say that it will seem like coming home.

Making Economic Development Transformative

Newspapers across North Carolina picked up on an announcement by Governor Pat McCrory that he wants to shift the marketing of economic development to public-private partnerships like it was something new.  It really isn’t a new idea.

Focused on story value, the news media, especially short-handed as it is today, appears to have little interest in corporate memory even if clues are buried in their own archives.

Unfortunately, many in political circles are even less inclined to historical context, dooming progress at best to “two steps forward and one step back” or as it seems in the NC General Assembly for several years, “two steps backward and one step forward.”

Many governors have tried what Governor McCrory outlines.  Hopefully, his vision goes far beyond the usual attempt to shift costs to the private sector.  I also hope this isn’t the attempt to make things less transparent that we’ve seen in other states recently or heaven forbid as merely a means to put the “fox in charge of the chicken coop” as some have tried.

Generally, something similar to the current proposal was pitched more than two decades ago during the administration of Governor Martin, another North Carolina Republican, but it was shouted down by members of his own party I suspect because it was floated by a Lieutenant Governor from another party.

It has also been tossed around many times in North Carolina tourism circles with an eye to leapfrogging the draw backs of retro-approaches in Florida, Georgia and Alaska.  Many favored the more dynamic and self-sufficient California model which is an adaptation of the approach modeled long ago for produce such as Washington apples.

However, while tourism and business recruitment are both housed in the state commerce department, they are fundamentally very different approaches.  The former is demand-driven and the latter supply-driven making a one-size fits all impractical.  However, integration and leveraging of the varying roles and skill-sets needed is imperative.

Where they intersect is that more than 80% of business executives who are considering relocating or expanding to North Carolina come here secretly as visitors first.  Another fundamental difference in demand-generated and supply-driven economic development is that the former is expert at branding and marketing and the latter is sales-focused.

I believe Governor McCrory genuinely seeks to be transformative, but regardless of how revolutionary the proposed retooling is will depend on how well these inherent cultural differences are understood and addressed.

Approaches such as the one to which the Governor is intimating are usually inhibited because politicians - and those in business even more so – according to place-marketing gurus such as Dr. Philip Kotler have a hard time understanding marketing in general or that the marketing of “places” such as states and communities is inherently very different than the marketing of individual businesses or corporations.

Lumping huge swathes of counties under non-profits, as the state did many years ago as an outsource conduit for economic development funds also does not a place make. These are merely layers that can aid decisions but at the end of the day, the decision is about specific locations in specific cities, towns and counties.

Even more important though to economic development are state responsibilities that were long ago severed from the department responsible for commerce. Economic development success regardless of tourism or business recruitment is reliant on being attractive to “talent” which has more to do with “quality of place” than anything.

Being an attractive state for talent is at its core about clean air and water, forest canopy including urban area and along roadsides, preservation of scenic character as well as sense of place, well-maintained infrastructure – green, gray and brown - and the vitality and uniqueness of individual cities, towns and counties.

Ironically, all things that are under attack by many in high positions of state leadership and members of the Governor’s party.

We all got to vote for who would be Governor, but we didn’t get to vote for the power-brokers in charge of lock-step caucuses in the legislature nor the lobbyists who have undue sway there, brokered in part, by donations to campaign funds.

No amount of retooling of the economic development apparatus can outweigh the importance of quality of place.  Corporate graveyards are littered with businesses who believed marketing could make up for a degraded product.  The same is even more true of “places.”

If he wants to truly revolutionize economic development, the Governor first needs to align the legislature in support of a long forgotten and oft-ignored amendment embedded by a 7 to 1 vote in the North Carolina constitution in 1972:

“It shall be the policy of this State to conserve and protect its lands and waters for the benefit of all its citizenry, and to this end it shall be a proper function of the State of North Carolina and its political subdivisions to acquire and preserve park, recreational, and scenic areas, to control and limit the pollution of our air and water, to control excessive noise, and in every other appropriate way to preserve as a part of the common heritage of this State its forests, wetlands, estuaries, beaches, historical sites, openlands, and places of beauty.”

So-called “privatizing,” even to non-profits, is a step backward, not forward as the Governor seeks.  However, North Carolina leadership doesn’t have to look far though for a successful model and as with many so-called innovations, it has been honed right here in the Tar Heel state.

When North Carolina’s local option lodging occupancy tax was pioneered here in the early 1980s to self-fund community-destination marketing and visitor-centric economic and cultural development, it took a decade but the NC General Assembly instituted some best-practice stipulations:

• The organizations responsible are public-private but in the form of public authorities.
• This enables them to secure the best talent possible and to be free of limitations that make state employees less effective.
• However, this approach ensures transparency, public accountability and financial oversight and audit by a state commission and the North Carolina treasurer.
• Proprietary information is still secured away from competitors.  The authorities can combine public and private funds but for a mission and purpose that is strictly legislated.
• Governing boards are appointed to not only represent the public and private sectors but balance within economic sector and by size of enterprise and geography.
• Guidelines protect the authorities’ missions from political pressure and special interests, public or private.
• Stipulations provide for incentivizing facilities or events but not at the expense of the core mission and only when the authority receives all of the funding it is meant to have.

This approach in cities, towns and counties now drives 80% of the revenues generated for North Carolina on the tourism side.  This is a better approach than the non-profit model because it has all of the benefits but with transparency.

Adapting it would further Governor McCrory’s transformative vision by leveraging and adapting a by-product of the state’s innovation and this is how most innovation evolves.

Undocumented, Maybe Deported But Still A Hero!

I’m thinking a lot today about James McCrory, who, undocumented, maybe even deported, landed in this country about 235 years and three days ago today.

Irish, his kind, were vilified by the conservative right in this country through the 1930’s, just as many vilify Hispanics immigrants today. Like many Hispanics today, he almost immediately went to war for this country.

Like me he settled in North Carolina, about an hours drive west of where I live today. He almost immediately enlisted for a tour in the fight for Independence and then re-enlisted. A success we’re celebrating today.

His tour included the battles of Germantown, Brandywine and Guilford
Courthouse and as an Ensign, a stint in Valley Forge, as one of General Washington's body guards, all along today’s US 202. He re-enlisted and fought here in the Southeast until he was captured by Tarleton’s Dragoons and imprisoned for four months at Wilmington to the south and east of where I live now.

Paroled after four months, he then took a British officer prisoner and turned him over to the American Army. After the war he relocated again, eventually settling in Alabama where he died 65 years after arriving in this country.

James McCrory is my Grandmother’s, Grandmother’s , Grandfather. So if my count is right he’s the Great, Great, Great, Great, Great, Great Grandfather to my Grandsons.

He arrived on this continent a century and a half after some of my other ancestors. I’m also not unique , I read on Ancestry.com that 60% of Americans have Revolutionary War era roots.

James risked his life for a land he barely knew. But I wonder how welcome he’d be today? I doubt he’d associate with the Tea Party of today or settle in Arizona. And even if he was a Republican, I bet he’d be a progressive in the tradition of Teddy Roosevelt.

But I guess the people who formed this country were essentially all progressives, seeking change and making things better. No status quo NIMBY’s then although it was not nearly as tidy as we like to think it was. Plenty of partisan gridlock.

I’m proud and grateful to be among the many descendents of James McCrory and grateful today in particular for his sacrifices. Here’s to all of the immigrant “James’s” fighting for this country’s values today and who I fear may not feel nearly as welcomed or honored here as he did.

Mapping Why North Carolina Could Use Some Gridlock

Earlier this month, Republican Governor Pat McCrory helped distribute awards in honor of North Carolina’s popular roadside wildflower program, including one named for a friend  of mine, Bill Johnson, the 30-year roadside veteran who helped  establish it.

The Governor also inducted former Governor and Mrs. Martin into the Wildflower Hall of Fame, in which Bill was one of the first inductees two years ago.  The former First Lady inspired the wildflower program shortly before I made Durham, NC my adopted home in 1989.  I first met the legendary Mr. Johnson as he was launching the state’s Scenic Byways as a follow-up.

At the luncheon the Governor vowed to do what he can to enhance scenic programs such as this.  He has his work cut out for him.

Powerful members of his party in the General Assembly still hold views of the natural world that date to the late 1700s and 1800s.  This was a time when nature was viewed primarily as something God placed on earth for us to exploit.

More on the source of my view on this and other worldviews of the natural world later.

While less than a third of North Carolina voters are Republicans, they now control nearly 65% of the overall seats in the NC General Assembly. Regardless of whether it is due to careful gerrymandering or the resulting over-amplification of swing voters it brought about, it is interpreted by these powerful interests as a mandate to “deform.”

Prior to McCrory’s election, these powerful and unchecked legislators had brow-beaten the executive branch into enabling the sacrifice of tens of thousands of flowering dogwood and redbud trees that the state had planted along roadsides stretching between the wildflower beds the Governor honored.

For instance, over the objections of 8 out of 10 North Carolinas including by 19 to 1 members of their own party, these legislators also pushed through authorization for out-of-state billboard companies to desecrate roadside trees across the state and over ride local ordinances in communities with higher standards.

It may very well be that anything the Governor does to fulfill his vision of being transformative will be similarly over ridden by these and many other similar deformations underway in my state.

North Carolina could desperately use a little grid-lock.

Helping me understand how otherwise reasonable people would seek to deform North Carolina is an incredible article published last year in the Harvard Law Review.  It was written by Professor Jed Purdy who teaches constitutional, property and environmental law here in Durham at Duke University Law School.

He is also the author of the 2010 book entitled The Meaning of Property: Freedom, Community, and the Legal Imagination but you may want to start with one of my favorites, a book he wrote in his mid-20s and published more than a decade ago entitled For Common Things: Irony, Trust and Commitment in America.

It takes an appreciation of irony to stay engaged with what’s being perpetrated now by those in high office in North Carolina.  By stuck in the 1700s, I was implying that powerful interests who seem intent on deforming our state appear to have the perspectives Purdy describes as more relevant between 100 and 200 years ago.

This was a time dominated by a view of the natural world as “waste.”  Dismissing restraint or regulation as a “threat to liberty,” this mentality pillaged much of the country until the late 1800s. Purdy cites an 1883 debate over administration and funding of Yellowstone Park adjacent to where I was raised and spent my years on an ancestral homestead cattle and horse ranch.

Some senators at the time, according to Purdy, argued that Yellowstone should be divided up and sold, or in my opinion to use a word euphemistically used by those with the same view today about lands set aside in the public interest, “privatized.”

Just the last sixty years of that era saw two-thirds of the deforestation that has taken place in the United State during the last 400 years and by the 1890s the desecration began to shock the nation and its leaders into what Purdy describes as a new ideal of the human-nature relationship, what he calls “progressive management” or conservation.

It is  epitomized by Republican President Theodore Roosevelt and legislation such as the creation of national forests which was inspired by immense desecration right here in North Carolina.

In recent polls, more than one in five Americans still consider themselves conservationists today, more than any other label used by the more than one in three Americans overall who are deeply concerned about the state of natural environment being left for future generations.

As a moderate independent voter, it is the description with which I feel comfortable.  Three times as many people who fish and hunt in this country consider themselves conservationists than those who belong to the NRA.  Many are Conservatives and relate to the group formerly named Republicans for Environmental Protection.

Renamed ConservAmerica, the group is represented in Washington by a native North Carolinian and last fall formed a ground-breaking partnership with Audubon called the American Eagle Compact under the slogan “Because Conservation Doesn’t Have A Party.”

The early 1900s also saw the emergence of an ideal toward the natural world that Purdy calls “romantic epiphany.”  This ideal has been at the center of a key part of North Carolina’s tourism appeal since the 1930s including the inspiration for the first efforts to roll back roadside billboards in the state.

Today, this ideal is carried forward by groups such as Scenic North Carolina, an affiliate of Scenic America.

Judging by their actions, the ideals of conservation and “romantic epiphany” are despised by those Republicans in powerful positions in the NC General Assembly today. They seem determined only to roll our state back to the era of despoliation, back to the view of nature as only indicative of waste, back to the 1800s.

Tourism is a visitor-centric form of economic and cultural development.  Trees are a signature element of the natural aspect of North Carolina’s appeal to tourists which include more than 80% of relocating business executives prior to announcing their interest.

Trees along roadsides are the state’s first impression of its natural assets.  Butchering them for billboards or even just the convenience of maintenance engineers is obviously a good way of dampening tourism interest and eroding the North Carolina brand overall.

I suspect though, that anyone with a worldview of nature that has been in disrepute since since the late 1800s has little concern for tourism or relocating businesses or thousands of small businesses.

Their latest maneuver to prohibit the high standards of North Carolina’s towns and cities is further evidence of wanting to deform the state back more than a century and with it the state’s hard-won brand.

Purdy continues by describing a view of the natural world that emerged  in the early 1960s called “ecological interdependence.”  It spawned American’s deep concern for clean air and water anchored in the interdependence of nature and the moral sanctity of life.

Those bent on deforming North Carolina back into the 1700s and 1800s are even more disdainful of this ideal, even as we begin as a society to re-imagine a future ideal around the natural world spurred by scientific evidence of catastrophic climate change.

It is ironic that even scientists who were climate change skeptics now agree that this current environmental threat is nearly all the result of from human interaction with nature dating back to the 1700s and the dawn of that view of nature as wasted unless fully exploited.

Purdy is careful to note that none of these human-nature ideals have ever been monolithic even in the 1700s.  He provides evidence that often they were defined by something society was trying to avoid.

This blog is certainly not a substitute for reading and re-reading Professor Purdy’s salient overview of these various eras of the relationship between humans and nature, which I highly recommend.

His mapping of our views of nature over time has helped me not only better understand the realities and worldviews driving those so intent on deforming North Carolina, but made me even more concerned.

As valid as parts of that reality may seem, it is imperative that it once again be with other even more valid and relevant views.

When the pendulum begins to swing back from such extremism - and it surely will - hopefully we will not only seek rectify the damage, which will take generations, but re-imagine the next era of human-nature ideals in a pragmatic, moderate and less ideological sense.

Governor McCrory can get a head start on this process by following through on his comments at the Wildflower luncheon this month.  He’ll need all the support he can get from North Carolinians and courage within his party’s caucus to bring some sense to the General Assembly.

If not, instead of being transformative, the legacy of his administration will be one of deformity.

Part of Me came to North Carolina 250 Years Ago

For 20 years, I’ve been telling people that when I was recruited to help start a destination marketing organization or community marketing agency in Durham NC, it was my first time in the Southeast, other than stops in Washington D.C. or changing planes in Miami or Atlanta.

But this weekend while doing family genealogy, I learned that isn’t true. Part of my genetic make-up came from North Carolina in the mid 1700’s, maybe earlier. My Great Great Grandmother Amanda Graham’s Great Grandmother Martha Miller in fact was born in Orange County, North Carolina on Christmas Day. I’m not sure how much earlier her father, David Miller, had arrived but he was born in South Carolina.

Now Orange County at that time was one of only a handful of counties in a Colony that covered North Carolina and stretched into what is now Tennessee. Orange County covered a vast part of North Carolina then, everything from Rowan County to Johnston County. So I’m not sure yet, but Durham was part of Orange then and maybe her parents lived here then.

Also, my Great Great Great and Great Great Great Great Grandparents in that same line, James McCrory and Thomas McCrory, emigrated from Northern Ireland in 1775 and settled in North Carolina, one in Guilford and the other in Mecklenburg counties which today are anchored by the cities of Greensboro and Charlotte.

Immediately after arriving Thomas and James volunteered in the Continental Army, Thomas became a captain in the 9th Regiment of the North Carolina Line and James an Ensign and at Valley Forge, a member of George Washington’s life guard. Thomas died in 1779 during the war but I’m not sure where. I just know he fought in battles like Brandywine and Germantown and was buried in Mecklenburg County as was his wife, Hannah Crawford a decade later.

James fought in several battles in North and South Carolina including decisive engagements at Cow Pens and Guilford Courthouse. He later moved to Tennessee and then Tuscaloosa on the far side of Alabama.

So I guess North Carolina is more than my adopted home…it's been my home for many generations… I could be more North Carolinian than many natives.

The Fortunes of Permanence

Some of my least favorite people are those who text while driving. Seemingly invisible to police, I spot at least three or four every time I’m out.

They drive like they are drunk, jerking near other lanes, driving way too slow and reacting unevenly to traffic signals.  To keep from getting too peeved, I've been keeping track of what their bumper stickers (an early form of social media) say about them.

So far Obama 10, City Councilman Steve Schewel 6, McCrory 4 and Romney 2.  Guess it isn't just trailing Millennials who need to be careful about what others socially post.

The sample of course is not at all scientific. When indexed for party registration where I live, fans of Governor McCrory and former Governor Romney are more likely to be text offenders.  Traffic accidents can unexpectedly change lives in a heartbeat.  Those texts better be worth it.

One of my favorite blogs is Permanent Record, described by its author, Paul Lukas, as “an object-based history project.” If you are involved with marketing you've probably read his work on the subject as a journalist as I often did during my now-concluded 40-year career in community marketing.

Here is a link to his story on Monday about “twist ties vs. plastic clips,” a $10.6 million struggle over fiercely loyal fans of each. I’m a twist tie guy. They are more easily reclaimed for other uses.

I thought of a Permanent Record post earlier this month when I learned of Monday’s tornado where residents of Moore, Oklahoma got just 16 minutes warning before it destroyed 13,000+ homes, killing 24 people and injuring 377.

Lukas blogged about a project that took root following a devastating tornado that hit Joplin and Duquesne, Missouri on this month in 2011. After the event, more than 35,000 personal photographs were found scattered over four states and as far as 350 miles from their owners.

I know from a friend’s pain who lost most of her photographs and mementos in a flood in the late 1990s how much of a loss this was.

The Joplin tragedy spawned formation of the National Disaster Photo Rescue. Nearly half of the priceless photos and other documents have been retrieved and returned to their owners. It is the subject of the documentary film, Photos in the Wind.

I have digitized several thousand family photographs dating back nearly 100 years that captured the images of ancestors dating to the 1840s. I’ve preserved them on DVD, thumb drive and on the cloud and distributed them to my daughter, my mom and sisters, my niece and each of my nephews.

But this doesn't replace the full value of the photographs themselves which need to go in a safety deposit box. I’m really fortunate to have these.  I hope the photo rescue was activated after Hurricane Sandy and that they are already mobilized for Moore.

They are bound to be busy.  Climate change debates aside, it is probably no mistake that 69% of global losses from weather-related catastrophes take place in North America.  It has quintupled here over the past three decades.

As a line in the film trailer states – “If you could only see what this means to people.  If you could see their faces when they get back something they thought was completely gone, it will change your life.”

I suspect future generations may be saying that about a lot of things if the current state of gridlock in Congress remains.

The Southern Roots of a Fifth Generation Idahoan

As a fifth-generation Idaho native dating back to its first permanent settlement (other than Native Americans, of course), I didn’t learn of my deep Southern roots until one day in the early 1950s.

When I first remember her telling me about this part of my heritage, I was a preschooler helping my paternal grandmother Adah tend to family graves in the tiny hill-top cemetery, above our ranch house with a view of the Tetons.

It was a bit of “commons” carved into that ancestral ranch stretching for 270 degrees around that hill.  By then my grandparents had turned the place over to my parents when my Dad, their only son, came back from chasing down Nazis as they fled into the Alps.

Because of my insatiable curiosity, my dad gave me the nickname “windy,” but I have long wished that I had asked my grandmother far more questions such as the location of the 12 x 12 homestead shack where she and grandpa first lived.

It was before they moved into the ranch house down below the cemetery where a bend of the road cuts across Snow Creek.  This is where my dad was born and where my parents first brought me and my two sisters home.

I wish I had been more curious about the abandoned house at the end of the meadow where my great-grandparents had lived and ranched and died, leaving it for me as a favorite place to explore and reflect.

I’ve carried the smells of sagebrush, my horse Gypsy, a fresh mown meadow and rain on a dirt road wherever I’ve lived since.

But it would be more than five decades after my grandmother’s revelation before I would find my Carolina roots, both North and South, dating back three hundred years and before the permanent settlement of either.

By 1860 when those roots first crossed up into Idaho Territory, and during their previous twelve years since crossing the Rockies, they had already helped create at least three other settlements including Fort Union and Fort Mendon.

My second great grandmother, Amanda Sarah Graham, had been born in 1843 near DeKalb in Kemper County Mississippi.

Her father Tom famously protected settlements from Grizzly Bears until he was mauled to death by one.  He also was also a farmer, carpenter and butcher, as well as a saw mill operator where he fashioned ox bows and handles for pitchforks, rakes and hoes.

He was heralded for reportedly being able to spit tobacco across his cabin and through a latch hole. 

For much of his life he had also been a third or fourth generation slaveholder.

Only 3% of first generation Mormon settlers were from the South and after crossing the Rockies, Tom freed slaves by the names of Isaac Green Flake, Aunt Hannah and Robert.

He set them up with land of their own outside Fort Union (rendered in the image above), at the mouth of Little Cottonwood Canyon, named not for the land of cotton but for a type of poplar tree long-common along streams even in the arid west.

Cottonwoods later became known as “Mormon trees” because they mark where settlements were created along the Meridian of my DNA, stretching from the Salt River to my native Henry’s Fork.

Fort Union was in a ravine down the canyon from where Alta and Snowbird ski resorts are today.

Leaving instructions for his children to help their former slaves with the transition to freedom whenever asked, my Southerner third great grandfather headed further north along the Rockies.

During the migration west, Tom’s wife, my third great grandmother Sarah Ann, had died along the journey during childbirth near what became Winterset, Iowa two years later and now known for the Bridges of Madison County and as the birthplace of actor John Wayne.

My Graham great (3) grandparents had once owned plantations along both sides of the Tombigbee River.

The first was on three parcels above the Sipsey River, a free-flowing Alabama swamp, 50,000 acres of wetland Cypress, Cottonwood, Hardwood and Pine forests.

Today, this area is known for canoe and hiking trails, as well as game and tree preserves, but in the 1830s it was settled by all sides of Tom and Sarah Ann’s families including the Grahams, Bradfords, McCrorys and Gilmores.

They had fought, at times side by side in the same regiment, during the Revolutionary War and Tom’s father in the War of 1812, as well.

The McCrory’s who were Scotts-Irish immigrants, left North Carolina for Tennessee after the Revolutionary War with Andrew Jackson, a family friend.

Near Nashville is where my great (3) grandmother Sarah Ann was born.

Her soon-to-be husband Tom was born in the Kershaw District of South Carolina but my fifth great grandmother was at least second generation North Carolinian on both sides.  Still they are not my earliest roots from here.

McCrory’s then migrated to western Alabama, probably down a military road through Mudtown, now Birmingham, while the Grahams and Bradfords preceded them by a few years, probably migrating down through what is now Greenville and Athens around the southern Appalachians and across through Mudtown.

There is no evidence that McCrorys ever held slaves but both my Graham and Bradford ancestors did generations before.

These migrations from the Carolinas were motivated by more than wanderlust.  One reason was the political tensions following the Revolutionary War.

Even victorious, my patriot southern ancestors were in the minority.

A majority of North Carolinians and even more South Carolinians were either ambivalent about the Revolution or loyalists to the British Crown, known as “conservatives” following the war.  They wanted a return to those values.

Another reason for their migration was soil depletion in the upper South.  Landowners, especially plantations, viewed the soil back then as something to be cleared and planted in staple crops such as cotton, tobacco and even corn and wheat, until no longer useful.

Slavery and public land policies made it cheaper to move on to new lands than to manure and rehabilitate depleted soils.

Rare today in the Carolinas are clear waterways such as Mayo Lake where we have a place.  Even here, when rains come after upstream harvests the “sheet” erosion overwhelms the ability of wetlands to filter the runoff, resulting in a temporary turbid invasion.

Southeasterners, especially it seems elected officials, who dismiss or undermine water quality standards have come to believe the waters in North Carolina are naturally muddy.

But southern soil historians such as Dr. Paul Sutter note that “a little more than a century of cotton culture…transformed the ecology, hydrology, and geomorphology of southern watershed in way that may last for thousands of years.”

On April 6, 1842, my third great grandparents Graham along with Tom’s mother, Jane, followed Mormon missionaries down into the Sipsey River to be baptized into the 12-year old, distinctly American restorationist Christian church.

In early 1846, after briefly owning plantations across the Tombigbee in Mississippi, the Grahams and their young daughter, Amanda Sarah, along with her older siblings and their three slaves loaded up wagons and headed cross state and up the Mississippi River past Saint Louis to where Mormons were already fleeing west.

Tom went ahead after his wife died crossing Iowa and then returned to bring his children across the Plains and over the Rockies.

When she crossed over the Rockies, my second great grandmother, Amanda Sarah, was about the age I was when my grandmother revealed my southern roots that day while tending graves in sight of the Tetons.

It was also the age my grandmother had been when she had briefly lived with and cared for her grandmother Amanda following a Trolley accident during a visit from Idaho to Salt Lake.

When I travel through these places of my roots and along the routes my ancestors took, I don’t romanticize as much as it probably seems to some readers.

I leave the traces in this blog as testimony to descendants through my two grandsons that the values found in our gene pool are complex and varied - a merger of many different backgrounds.

I often wonder, when judging my slaveholding Southern ancestors what we may hold common today that will be similarly revolting through the lens of future generations.

I suspect they will look back at our short-sighted “utility” economy and the havoc it is wreaking for future generations with similar disgust.

On a future visit, I plan to take my grandsons to visit the grave of Isaac Green Flake, one of the slaves freed by my southern ancestors, who was also from North Carolina, where I have lived for nearly three decades now.

Mr. Green Flake. who also elected to be baptized Mormon before the trek west, was born in eastern Anson County, North Carolina just east of Charlotte and just north of where my third great grandfather Tom was born in South Carolina in 1807.

But when their parents were born, there had been no such distinction between the Carolinas.

After Mr. Flake was given his freedom and land of his own, he worked for a time as a carriage driver for Brigham Young before also heading up into southeastern Idaho where his son had homesteaded Grays Lake near the mountains east of Blackfoot.

He also stayed in touch with the children of my Southern ancestors.

But he asked to be buried down at the old Fort Union cemetery in the shadow of the mountains he had crossed 60 years earlier and where he at last had become free.

Hubris Is The New Tyranny

I believe regulatory reform is necessary, not because I agree with the 4% of Americans who believe they are too regulated, but because I believe any regulation needs periodic performance evaluation.

A month ago, I was listening to my grandsons play at a Washington lake, a mile as the crow flies from the border with Northern Idaho.  I read a lot and even more next to a Rocky Mountain lake.  Two things I was reading struck me that day.

One was the so-called North Carolina Regulatory Reform Act of 2013 (referred to as House Bill 74,) the second was the just-released 2013 Economic Values Survey of Americans.  One does a disservice to regulatory reform, the other sheds light on the values we as Americans have on issues such as that.

One was driven by anecdotes and special interests, the other scientific and generalizable.

The first few pages of the North Carolina bill are indeed a step toward regulatory reform.  The other 60 pages more than justify a veto of the bill by North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory.

Stuffed with gross and vindictive overreactions to petty grievances, the bill violates the values of the vast majority of members of his party and very possibly even the state constitution while aggrieving every North Carolinian.

In my opinion, as a moderate Independent,  regulatory reform should periodically ensure regulations are being robustly executed and that the enforcement is not only even-handed but nimble.

Reform should also update and streamline regulations, purge them of pollution by special interests or political corruption and embed metrics to ensure cost-effectiveness.

Of greatest need regarding regulations is establishing a much more transparent, easy to understand and non-political process.  Much of what was dumped into HB 74 was to appease whiners and special interest lobbyists whose influence continues throughout the process of re-writing regulations.

Tragically, if signed, it comes at the expense of the general public and taxpayers.

Published last month, the 2013 Economic Values Survey is a much more scientific and accurate reflection of the way Americans think about things such as regulation.  Only 4% think we are too regulated by government.  I suspect even that percentage would not approve of what special interests dumped into legislation in my state.

The hubris that polluted the regulatory reform bill in North Carolina may be reflected in the survey,  which shows that roughly one-quarter (26%) of Americans say that people like them take absolutely no benefit from government.

This percentage zooms to close to half of Tea Party members and more than a third of Republicans and 35% of white working-class Americans.  Really?  They get no benefit from even such things as roads, schools, clean air and water?  Nothing?

One thing the majority of Americans agree on (by 6-in-10) is that government should do more to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor and take care of people who can’t care for themselves.  This holds consistent across all groups including white working-class Americans.

Millennials, by 7-in-10, even support “universal” healthcare insurance.

Americans have concerns about Capitalism with 9% believing it is working well and 16% not at all.  Forty-five percent see it working somewhat well and 26% not too well.

Tellingly, Democrats think capitalism is working because it provides equal opportunity, while Republicans think it is works because it encourages personal responsibility.  Faith that it works well is consistent across affiliation, 56% Democrats, 54% Independents and 52% Republicans.

A real divide in America is that 69% of Democrats and 54% of Independents believe that one of the biggest problems in the country is we do not give everyone an equal chance.  Meanwhile, 58% of Republicans and 57% of Tea Party members think that really isn’t a problem.

Another divide is that 54% of Americans in general, including 62% of Democrats and 54% of Independents, believe that hard work and determination no longer guarantee success for most people…55% of Republicans and 56% of Tea Party members disagree.

As for overall work ethic, the percentage of Americans who think they  can get ahead without working hard and making sacrifices has fallen from 63% in 1999 to 56% in 2013.

Big majorities of Americans across all political persuasions, religious affiliation and ethnicity believe that promoting freedom, liberty and to live responsibly are very important guides to economic policy.

There is a gap however between Democrats and Independents and Republicans and Tea Party members about the importance of promoting equality and fairness when it comes to economic policy.

We generally vote by districts for elected officials but all of this suggests that we all probably need to vote as well with an eye to balancing the make-up of elected bodies in keeping with opinions among the electorate.

Apparently, it no longer goes without saying that governance is of all of the people, not just narrow interests.

It seems no longer likely that we can rely on elected bodies to vote based on the make up of electors which leaves them vulnerable to special interests and narrow ideologies.

Or we can become a true democracy and cut out representatives.  To me, when they study nuances with the objectives of doing what’s right, they perform an invaluable service.  It just seems like today, representative bodies are vulnerable to being high jacked by special interests that do not represent the majority of the people.

Maybe what we have to fear is no longer tyranny but hubris. 

A Pivot On Behalf Of Billboards

Following a recent presentation to people with tourism interests, during which he repeatedly stressed the value of the state’s scenic beauty, the Democratic candidate for governor, Walter Dalton, was asked where he stood then on recent state legislation that now permits out-of-state billboard companies to clear-cut with impunity more than 70,000 publicly-owned trees along state roadways that are worth a lifetime value of $11 billion in ecosystem services alone.

Dalton, who has long been a major beneficiary of campaign contributions from billboard interests, dodged the question, even when it was reiterated, by performing what is known as “the pivot.”  Probably knowing that audiences rarely catch on to this trick, he chose to answer a question that hadn’t been asked.

He explained instead why, even though it had won approval by the courts all the way to being denied a review by the U.S Supreme Court, he spearheaded state legislation on behalf of the billboard industry to take away amortization as a tool for local communities to remove the eyesores.

Lt. Governor Dalton asked rhetorically how the audience would like it if they were only given seven years to extract the value of their house?  It must have been obvious to Dalton, a former county attorney, that he was comparing “apples and oranges.”

Basing the construction value on the property tax paid on an individual billboard and the average revenue value reported per billboard in Inc. Magazine, which is wholly and parasitically reliant solely on the value provided by the public roadway, a billboard company can more than retrieve the value of a board in just five years.

As early as 1918, ten years after the roll out of the Ford Model T, courts established the constitutional right of communities and states to protect themselves from the blight created by billboards as well as the harm they create by lowering real estate values while destroying trees and the economic, environmental and public health benefits they yield.

Fortunately, Dalton’s opponent, Republican candidate Pat McCrory has proven that he understands the importance of billboard control and the right of communities to be billboard free.  If elected, lets hope he can better inform his colleagues who are in control of the North Carolina General Assembly and begin to put out-of-state billboard companies back in their place.

“Rewarding Pragmatism, Compassion, Working Together, Compromise and Sincerity”

As even casual observers of this blog know, I truly am a moderate Independent when it comes to political ideology.  I voted both for Republican Pat McCrory for Governor of North Carolina, where I have lived for nearly 25 years, and to re-elect President Barack Obama.

To me, they are both moderate realists, a group that could be credited with making a significant difference in their election victories.

I frequently read commentary on both the right and the left to keep informed, but I personally identify with one published last week by Rob Ellsworth, a moderate and former Republican.

We share links with my native state of Idaho and adopted home of North Carolina as well as a love of English bulldogs and I too have been disturbed by hyperbole on both the left and right following the outcome of the Presidential election but more so with that coming from the right.

Exasperated with his former colleagues Ellsworth lamented that:

“Your inability to reason, compromise, or let new facts and evidence challenge your predetermined outcomes led millions of moderates to no longer be able to stand on stage with you.”

But he also cautioned that “there isn’t a mandate for Democrats in this election. Liberalism wasn’t rewarded in this election. However, calm pragmatism, compassion, working together, compromise and sincerity were rewarded.”

Nor was there a mandate for Republicans in 2000 when they lost the popular vote and only won the White House via the electoral vote aided by a determination from the US Supreme Court that split along party lines.  Liberals then may have only been slightly less disrespectful than conservatives are today who are now as they fly the American flag upside down to demonstrate their dissatisfaction with last week’s election.

I have no doubt that Mitt Romney, who was a college classmate of mine, would have made an excellent President. Both he and President Obama are moderate realists.

In the end, I was ultimately swayed not by any particular difference between these two gentlemen but by the fact that I just felt less comfortable with extremely partisan forces surrounding Romney.  I doubt that even the seemingly more resolute Presidents Reagan and George W. Bush could have survived the drag created by these “wackanoodles,” to use the term used by a Republican operative attributed to their ilk.

I grew up a Republican when a moderate Republican, Dwight D. Eisenhower, was President, but in the 1960s I supported both a Democrat, John F. Kennedy, and a Republican, Barry Goldwater, both of whom were more moderate than either is often portrayed.

In the 1972, the first election in which I was eligible to vote,  I supported the late Democrat George McGovern because I thought he was more sensible and moderate, especially about the war in Viet Nam.

There is some substance to the perception that I became Independent because, in my 40-year career in community-destination marketing, it was a wise career choice and a way to avoid the ebb and flow of local partisanship, even in communities where elected office is supposed to be non-partisan.

Once or twice over the years, in places where registered Independents were not eligible to vote in primary elections, I’ve even briefly changed my affiliation so that I could vote.  I’ve probably supported as many Republicans as Democrats, with moderates always being the common denominator.

I truly wish the value political parties bring to the electoral process could be supplanted by a “No Labels” approach to which I subscribe, but that paradigm-shift will take decades if ever it occurs.

Voting itself, which was one of the first moves by government to be participative (the creation of trial juries by England’s King Henry II being the first) is too slow and infrequent.  Social networking initiatives such as crowdsourcing is being used by the US Patent office and may provide a window into what to expect in the future.

Moderates dating from George Washington, our first President, have cautioned about the dangers of hyper-partisanship.  I am persuaded by pieces such as one posted by Dr. Robert Reich a day before last week’s election and entitled “We the People, and the New American Civil War.”

While America is known as “the land of opportunity,” the emergence of the middle class is a relatively recent phenomena as shown in this Pew Research Center graph published last summer in The Atlantic.

The middle class emerged in the 1950s and 1960s during a time of moderation and bipartisan cooperation.  During the 1970s, it sputtered for a decade, fueled by the inflation created by the war in Viet Nam and two oil crises.

During the 1980s and 1990s, tax cuts and technology fueled the markets and the growth of the investment class but not the recovery of the middle class.

I agree with Reich who summarizes his election eve assessment by writing that:

“So we come to the end of a bitter election feeling as if we’re two nations rather than one. The challenge – not only for our president and representatives in Washington but for all of us – is to rediscover the public good.”

However, I am even more persuaded by a post-election assessment by conservative columnist David Brooks.  After a wonderful job of giving historical context to the obsessive suspicions many Americans have over the size of government, Brooks makes an observation about the values of some Americans who made a significant difference in last week’s election:

“The Pew Research Center does excellent research on Asian-American and Hispanic values. Two findings jump out. First, people in these groups have an awesome commitment to work. By most measures, members of these groups value industriousness more than whites.

Second, they are also tremendously appreciative of government. In survey after survey, they embrace the idea that some government programs can incite hard work, not undermine it; enhance opportunity, not crush it.

Moreover, when they look at the things that undermine the work ethic and threaten their chances to succeed, it’s often not government. It’s a modern economy in which you can work more productively, but your wages still don’t rise. It’s a bloated financial sector that just sent the world into turmoil. It’s a university system that is indispensable but unaffordable. It’s chaotic neighborhoods that can’t be cured by withdrawing government programs.”

Numerous sensible and moderate solutions (many by Governor Romney such as capping tax deductions) have been proposed to each of the problems and challenges our country faces if as Americans we can rise above the only obstacle, partisanship.

Maybe we should also listen very carefully to some of our newer Americans who made the difference in this election.

The Travesty on Sandy Creek

Tree canopied hills, dales and ridge lines dominate the landscape of Durham, North Carolina, where I live.  They are contoured by scores of streams that feed rivers and lakes and provide drinking water here and for many other communities downstream.

Durham is an activist community and nowhere is that more apparent than in the restoration of streams and wetlands, but thousands of volunteer-hours and the collaboration of scores of public and private organizations such as Duke University are now violated by outdoor billboard companies.

Sandy Creek is a Durham stream that drains nearly the entire campus system of Duke University where researchers study aquaterrestrial biogeochemistry including the urban stream impairment plaguing all communities and threatening water supplies.  The restoration of Sandy Creek has even appeared recently in scientific journals.

Overall, 1,400 acres of the community drain into Sandy Creek as it makes its way to merge with New Hope Creek and then flow into the drinking water supply stored in Jordan Lake.

Upland, Duke has made some amazing provisions to restore and protect Sandy Creek as it passes the president’s house and down through the university’s acclaimed hotel and golf course, while volunteer groups, neighborhoods and local governments have worked to restore and protect the lowland floodplain and wetlands through which it flows after passing under US Highway 15-501 Bypass just south of Cornwallis Road, including recreation trails and the conversion of an abandoned treatment plant into an education center.

Now that collective work has been desecrated by four huge billboards erected along that highway by out-of-state companies which have been enabled by new legislation forged by a handful of their advocates in the NC General Assembly.

These companies can now clear cut football length areas of trees and vegetation in either direction from these billboards as well as in front of and behind the unsightly structures.

As shown in the series of photos linked here and to the image in this blog, the action by this billboard company, which happens to own half of the fewer than 90 that still remain here after billboards were banned in Durham in 1984, has also denuded the banks of Sandy Creek wiping out the trees and vegetation that were preventing soil erosion and slowing run off and preventing sediment from the impervious surface of the roadway from polluting this environmentally sensitive stream and making its way into the water supply. 

Aware of the overwhelming objection of North Carolinians to the measure, particularly the 8 out of 10 opposed to sacrificing trees for billboards, advocates for the legislation enabling this travesty claimed at least twice on the floor of the General Assembly that respect for local ordinances and efforts such as Durham’s would be protected from the abuse.

But in fact, as those assurances were uttered any such provisions respecting local efforts in communities such as the restoration of Sandy Creek were being stripped out of the final version of the bill by a small conference committee of just 12 legislators, one of whom ramrodded the legislation and another a now federally-indicted owner of billboards himself.

Many in the legislature are only now waking up to the havoc being wreaked across the state by this billboard legislation including another particularly egregious threat to water quality in Charlotte.

There are many other examples but it all adds up to the fact that all of this destruction of tax-payer-owned green infrastructure commons is being permitted to an out-of-state enterprise over the strenuous objections of 8 out of 10 North Carolinians just so the already-visible structures can be sure to be seen by the 8% of motorists who may still use them in a given year.

This travesty led Republican candidate for governor, Pat McCrory to call attention to the legislation in the first debate even though the measure was sponsored by a powerful leader in his own party while his Democratic opponent remained mute perhaps because he has taken thousands of dollars in campaign contributions over the years from out-of-state billboard interests.

According to the most current annual Gallup poll on the topic, by nearly 8 to 1, Americans greatly worry about pollution of rivers, lakes, reservoirs and drinking water, and this concern has remained consistent over the past 10 years, even through the economic difficulties of the last five.

Spurred by the Federal Clean Water Act, communities such as Durham with stakeholders such as Duke University understand that it is economically far more efficient to prevent pollution and runoff with green infrastructure than it is to treat water with gray infrastructure.

However, the North Carolina General Assembly need not rely on federal legislation or public opinion polls to know that the new billboard legislation is against the will of the people.

Just over 40 years ago, by more than 7 to 1, North Carolinians voted to embed an amendment in the State Constitution:

“to preserve as a part of the common heritage of this State its forests, wetlands, estuaries, beaches, historical sites, openlands, and places of beauty” (Section 5, Article XIV.)