Blight’s Costly Drag On Business Appeal

City, county and state governments bemoan the cost of litter removal while continually cutting back, but the drag on businesses is 7 times greater.  It is a factor for this sector equal in concern to regulation.

I love North Carolina.  I’ve lived here for more than 25 years, nearly as long as I lived in my native Rockies.

While my now concluded career was community promotion, for me, that always included the responsibility to candidly assess weaknesses in the three destinations I served, including the latter half of my career in North Carolina.

I must admit that based on 35,000 miles of cross-country trips since I retired, traveling roughly 14 different routes, with the exception of states directly south, North Carolina is one most billboard-blighted states in America.

There are exceptions.  As Mugs, my English Bulldog and I departed last month on our latest cross country venture, a Western Tea Party Senator suggested the Federal Government just turn Federal highways over to the states.

No thanks.

That Senator hails from a county in Utah where I attended college.    Back then it was dotted with little towns where sense of place as well as the dramatic landscape was clearly visible even from the highway.

Now it has become the most blighted stretch in the country.  For the most part, that state is billboard free but its cities, towns and counties have ruined vast stretches such as Utah and Salt Lake Counties.

In most states, it appears to be the cities, towns and counties that enable billboard blight, but in North Carolina, the state piles on by sanctioning another 8,000 billboards along its Interstates.

Because of the blight and deforestation they create, billboards are known as “litter on a stick” because they are just a larger form of that same blight.

While enabling greater billboard blight in North Carolina, Republican legislators have obsessed with gutting regulations as a way to help businesses, something to appease the 1-in-3 businesses pressing them about that issue.

Ignored is the finding in another survey of business and economic development agencies finding that roughly that same ratio of businesses cite upkeep and cleanliness as a major influence during decisions to locate, relocate or expand.

An even greater percentage find that litter has an impact on how a site is perceived when evaluated, and nearly 1-in-5 believe it presents a negative picture of the governments responsible for these areas.

If legislators want to lower the cost of doing business, one of the important ways they can do it is to eliminate roadside blight, starting with billboards.

As of 2009 when I retired, businesses nationwide shelled out $9 billion annually to remove litter, nearly 80% of all direct costs associated.  This represents a drag of $80 per employee, a cost 7 times the collective amount spent on litter removal by cities, counties and states.

Many argue that businesses should shoulder the entire cost, like the purpose of regulations, because the market failed to incorporate the cost of clean up from careless disposal of the residue from the products they sell.

A relatively small percentage of the population is responsible for the 5 million tons of litter dumped on America each year, about 17%, 4% intentionally and the rest through carelessness and being too lazy and possibly obese-prone to walk over to a receptacle.

Seth Godwin is the entrepreneur who first signaled the end of “interruption marketing,” also known as “spam” such as billboards.  To paraphrase, he believes the mindset of those who litter see property as either theirs or not-theirs.

To me, this is the same mindset of people who feel they have the right to let their dog poop on your lawn or in public spaces without picking it up.

These are also the folks who ignore a line of merged traffic to bully their way in front, or clear cut instead of being selective when timbering or run their cattle into rivers and streams polluting watersheds or across public lands where prohibited or without paying fees.

Or blighting neighborhoods and roadways with billboards to freeload on publically funded and owned roadways.  They feel free to vandalize because there is no “ours” in their world view, only “screw or be screwed.”

Removing blight does not mean doing with less.  Fewer billboards is about scenic preservation.  As Godwin notes, reducing litter is about the self control to hold on to it until we come to a receptacle.

Over the years, ignoring the importance of appearance has been bipartisan in the North Carolina legislature, dating back at least 200 years right up to the present.

While Republicans have been on a blight offensive in recent years, it was Democrats who stripped the state’s cities of the court-approved ability to utilize amortization for the cost-effective, win-win remove billboards.

Billboards have no intrinsic private property value because they are totally reliant on taxpayer funded roadways for value, something the courts label as parasitic.

The courts had sanctioned their removal by a process where cities seeking to become more appealing could give these out of state companies seven to ten years to recoup their costs before billboards were removed.

The Democrat who led the charge in North Carolina to override the courts, giving cities no alternative but to wait until billboards fall down from disrepair, argued in a meeting in Durham which banned billboards in the mid-1980s that “billboards are good for the economy,” not to mention campaign donations perhaps.

Tourism may be one of the biggest industries in North Carolina and  scenic beauty given lip service as a part of the state’s economic development appeal, but that attribute has been under constant attack from the legislature since at least the early 1800s.

Scenic beauty was the genesis of tourism to North Carolina in the 1820s when it drew wealthy planters from the lowlands of South Carolina and Georgia to its mountains, the highest and most dramatic in the Appalachians as they stretch from New England to Alabama.

But within a few decades, the legislature here sacrificed tourism by selling out to out-of-state timber interests creating wholesale deforestation.  Photos of the Blue Ridge Parkway under construction show the devastating effects four decades later.

By that time, North Carolinians were under siege by another kind of blight, billboards.

In the late 1960s, America cracked down on litter including billboards.  Intensive efforts reduced litter by 60% and billboards were to be restricted to commercial areas already blighted by that time.

But through a mix of legislative subterfuge, regulator complacency and corruption as well as choking off funding, blight continues to drag on home values, neighborhood vitality, public health, scenic appeal and much more. 

Today, even though they are used by only 3% of small businesses with consumers rapidly migrating to GPS including apps on smartphones and tablets for both navigation and local search, legislators continue to enable billboards to deforest the state and undermine its appeal.

We can continue to delude ourselves into thinking our state is somehow inherently irresistible, but visitors, newcomers and relocating business executives can see the widening gap between claim and reality.

If you don’t believe me, just take a road trip.

Devolving To Local Government by Delegation, By Neglect

Many people, rather than insist that local governments do the jobs for which they were created and are best suited, seem to harken instead back to the late 1700s.

Back then, rather than handling general upkeep, local governments would issue ordinances obliging each person in the city to clean or repair that portion of the street abutting their house or shop.

Researchers call this period “government by delegation” or “government committed to a policy of externalizing the costs of action.”

That all changed after the American Revolution but it seems that local administrators in communities such as Durham, North Carolina where I live are trying to return to the era of “government by delegation” by neglecting community upkeep while pushing it off on volunteers.

In 1800, near the end of George Washington’s two terms as the first president of the United States, there were still only “thirty-three towns with a population of 2,500 or more, and only six of these urban areas had populations of 10,000.  Only 5% of Americans lived in cities.”

“By 1820, the number with over 2,500 had increased to sixty-one, but only five had populations over 25,000 and 7% of Americans lived in cities, while a third of England did with a comparative population.

Within that span, New York City had also exchanged its Royal Charter to transform as a municipality under the authority granted by the state legislature.  It had also set up a public work force to clean its streets and wharves.

Rather than relying on the inconsistent efforts of residents by eternalizing those responsibilities, NYC had “become an institution financed primarily by public taxation to handle public concerns,” beginning with community upkeep.

By 1805, it had done the same with public health.

In short, following the Revolution, cities and towns moved from externalizing “shoulds” upon residents to implementing scalable, consistent solutions in the public interest.

Today, there are 89,004 local governments in the U.S. including 3,031 counties (down since 2007) and 19,522 municipalities (up since 2007) and 12,884 school districts (down since 2007.)  The majority are special-purpose districts such as fire, water etc.

Local government concern for overall community upkeep upon which these institutions were originally anchored more than two hundred years ago, may have peaked following a spike of renewed emphasis during the Progressive Era, which also gave us city manager forms of government, planning, beautification and urban forestry efforts etc.

Today, local governments seem more likely to neglect community upkeep or to leave it to elected officials as a one-off add on or hope that residents who cite it as a high or very high priority overall in scientific polls will become fed-up and try to fill the void.

Local governments have devolved back two hundred years into “government by delegation,” forgetting the lessons of their origin and the American Revolution.

Rather than fall back to well-meaning efforts by volunteers to fill this void which, while cathartic, are never adequate or scalable enough, maybe we need another Revolution.

Or maybe we need historical exhibits like one in San Francisco right now entitled Urban Olfactory which recreates the smells of neglect in cities past to remind us of the gaps local governments must fill.

One of the major reasons for this current state of neglect is that local government accounting never connects the dots between sources of revenue and areas of expense.

This is why periodic reports are so inconsistent and incomplete when they report that various public facilities have or have not resulted in a deficit.  They only rarely incorporate tax revenues generated by facilities beyond their doors.

Blinded the news media fails to dig down into the numbers.

Durham local governments are again pinching down efforts at community upkeep this year due to a problem that is self-inflicted.

Ostensibly, the reason is to avoid tax increases even for items of neglect.  This way of thinking resulted in bonds to repave streets recently at many times the cost to taxpayers that periodic tax increases would have meant.

Those of us who have worked to pass bonds over the years, did so based on computations of the miniscule increases they would mean to our taxes.  But this is where the problems plaguing local governments today begin.

Instead of immediately increasing taxes after a popular vote, local administrators and elected officials cross their fingers hoping that economic growth will absorb the costs instead, which it sometimes does.

But instead of levying the increases when voters approval was given and then issuing a refund if and when the revenues aren’t needed, local officials walk themselves into a trap when growth in the economy is not sufficient to hide the costs.

Plagued by looming debt service, they don’t want to explain to tax payers that the cost of bonds weren’t levied after each favorable vote and now need to be levied years later when memories have dimmed.

So instead, they double down the squeeze on things they think we won’t notice such as community upkeep.

Only we do notice.  And left no explanation other than ineptitude, we are left mumbling to ourselves that local officials just don’t get it or they lack political will or they fail to connect the dots between community upkeep and curb appeal to economic development and increased valuation.

Only they do get it.  They are just mired in a trap of their own creation, one that is inscrutable to residents.  Rather than fix this paradigm, they say things like, “if it matters enough, people will get angry and let us know.”

And that is the stuff of revolutions.

Calculating Durham’s Goal of 8,800 Trees Annually

I am responding to a challenge I took this morning to what were kiddingly referenced as “my statistics” regarding a benchmark I computed last October for the number of urban trees that should be planted each year in Durham, North Carolina, where I live.

Appropriately, the comment surfaced indirectly during the meeting of a group with which I have the pleasure of interacting every other month named the Durham Appearance Advocacy Group, aka DAAG.

Members include a cross-section of business leaders and representatives of community groups concerned about appearance, paired with an equal number of public agency representatives with missions that include issues such as appearance and recycling.

The collaboration charges itself with identifying performance gaps and collaboratively advocating solutions to close them but it is wholly reliant on the willingness of participants to ask tough questions.

To respond to the comment in the form of an answer to a question, below is how I came up with my calculation that Durham should be planting as many trees each day as it currently plants in an entire year.

• Currently, according to the City of Durham, 350 trees are reforested each year while about 200 are removed for disease etc.

The net is 150 additional trees per year.

• According to estimates by Joint City-County Planning, county-wide, Durham has 51% of its tree canopy remaining including 40% remaining in the city.

 

• Durham has lost 1 million trees over the past 30 years, and according to analysis by the UNC-Charlotte, it is losing an average of 4 acres a day to development and impervious surface.

 

• Using the UNC-Charlotte data shown over time, the ratio of trees remaining to impervious surface in Durham County has eroded to a ratio of 3 to 1 and 1.4 to 1 in the City, threatening appearance and sense-of-place and surrendering hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars in ecosystem services.

 

• Nationwide, according to the National Forest Service, urban foresters replant one tree for every three that regenerate naturally and the survival rate for natural regeneration is 1 in 20.

 

• My calculation then that Durham needs to plant 243 trees a day for at least the next thirty years is based on the need:

To gradually replace those lost over the last thirty years during the next thirty years by plant each day –    91 trees

To replace those removed each day by development, net those that may naturally regenerate by each day planting –                                                                   152 trees

Equals a daily urban forestry goal of–                  243 trees

Adjusted for the .41 trees currently planted –      242.6

Even if Durham’s urban forestry was to surrender any responsibility for the community and continue to restrict its focus to just city property, the number of trees planted each year should be at least 1,400.

But my hunch, based on surveys showing that things such as trees are a priority by 6 to 1 and based on those who strongly agree 19 to 1, is that Durham residents would favor the more holistic approach, or more than 8,800 tree plantings per year.

There are many ways to reach the goal but setting the goal is primary.  Hatching tactics that aren’t illuminated by a goal that is based on a strategic analysis and sources such as those cited above is a well-proven recipe for activity traps.

A goal such as the one computed above can be re-calibrated by future in-depth analysis if performed but there is no reason to wait and get even further behind.

Currently, there are some isolated efforts, other than urban forestry, that can and should be counted against the goal including adopt-a-tree, soil conservation tree sales, minimum zoning requirements for tree retention or replacement.

There should be metrics developed and maintained for each of these and the results accumulated to help inform progress toward the goal and closing the gap.

And whoever said I am a bit defensive?

Benchmarking Roadside Appearance

By nearly 4 to 1, residents of the city and county of Durham, NC, where I live, rate appearance and physical upkeep a high community priority.  The ratio of those who feel strongly that way is 6 to 1.

The challenge of meeting this expectation is compounded by the fact that the state’s sixth most populated county swells each day with commuters who hold three out of every five jobs here (a far greater net proportion than the vast majority of other communities) along with nearly 7 million visitors each year.

While after years of neglect, residents who live within the limits of the City of Durham perceive some incremental improvements, with 2.7 to 1 satisfied with the overall appearance of the city, with 8% very satisfied and 18% or nearly 1 in 5 dissatisfied or very dissatisfied and nearly a third uncertain.

While city residents ranked cleanliness and appearance of roadsides an area to increase emphasis, in an anonymous survey last year residents of the city and county combined disagreed by more than 3 to 1 with the statement that Durham roadsides are attractive and litter free.  Those feeling very strongly disagreed by nearly 5 to 1.

There are also some other disturbing signs that tolerating neglect and failing to maintain best practice levels for appearance for so many years has been demotivating.

Durham is the 6th most populous county in North Carolina and nationally known for its volunteerism, but it ranked only ninth and very nearly fell to 11th or 12th in terms of volunteer hours devoted during the 2011 NC Big Sweep litter clean ups.

Even so, with fewer than its share of volunteers and volunteer hours compared to its share of state population, the Durham participants were able to clear away its proportion of litter at 5.5 tons compared to nearly 193 tons statewide.

While Durham is slightly less than 3% of the state’s population, enforcement agencies here issue only 1.8% of litter citations statewide and win an even lower proportion of convictions.

Though sixth in population, Durham ranks 9th out of the ten most populous counties in litter citations and convictions.

Nearby Wake County is 3.4 times Durham’s population, spread out over a geographic area nearly three times larger, but agencies issue nearly five times as many citations for litter there.

While Durham residents are as much as 15 times more passionate about their community than the benchmark for other communities, a pivotal predictor of attachment, by several measures there are indications Durham is falling well short of residents’ expectations for overall appearance.

As volunteers for Keep Durham Beautiful spread out through the community on July 12th to conduct the annual Durham roadside litter/appearance index, it is important that city and county officials take heed.

Volunteer clean up efforts are a means to supplement not substitute for a backbone of day-to-day maintenance expected of local governments here. Without that, volunteer enthusiasm wanes while it is likely that agencies have less incentive to approach enforcement with the same intensity even though the link between neglect, environmental disorder and crime is so strong.

The North Carolina Department of Transportation does an excellent job each year of documenting interagency and non-profit litter clean up and enforcement including roadside beautification.

It is an excellent template for consolidated reporting upon which cities and counties along with related non-profits would be well advised to expand so the picture is even more complete.

NCDOT manages 79,330 miles of roadside including county roads throughout the state, the second largest of any state.  Even with reductions in resources, NCDOT employees picked up litter along 150,410 shoulder miles last year filling nearly 400,000 bags.

The State Adopt-A-Highway program leveraged 4,631 groups to adopt 9,100 road miles and deploying nearly 450,000 volunteer hours to clear 12,157 roadside miles of more than 1700 tons of litter and debris, recycling 327 tons.

Together with 33 others around the state, affiliates such as Keep Durham Beautiful rallied more than 72,000 volunteers in 258 communities to clear another 12,564 miles of roadway of 454 tons of litter and debris and another 5,497 acres of park and public land and 122 miles of shoreline.

All of this effort still falls well short of keeping state and local roadways clean enough to inhibit litterers.  In the words of the late Charles Kuralt, “Two Americas meet there: the ugly one and the beautiful one. And of course, Americans of their own free will created them both.”

The blight of litter is caused by just 4% of the population who intentionally litter and another 17% who are oblivious such as the worker at a Virginia I 85 rest area shown in the photo in this blog who, while on break, sat casually smoking cigarette after cigarette during my recent stop, throwing the butts at his feet all within five feet of a canister for that purpose.

Is it only coincidence that the percentage of people who litter is similar to the percentage who still find roadside billboards useful, even if for just a few times a month.

Those who litter intentionally may feel empowered by the fact that some in the North Carolina General Assembly still advocate on behalf of the nearly 8,000 billboards along just its major highways alone, often referred to as “litter-on-a-stick” by many of the nearly 8 of 10 North Carolinians who consider them a desecration.

But the good news about litter is how far we have come, thanks to the efforts of the dedicated agencies, organizations and volunteers in the NCDOT report.  Through their diligence and commitment we can be inspired by the words of Kuralt:

“I am persuaded of this with all my heart, ordinary Americans want a beautiful country. We are proud of the amber waves of grain and the purple mountains majesties.

And we are not powerless…”

Anatomy of an Airport’s Scenic Best Practice

He was midway through his 10-year tenure on the RDU Airport Authority when I met second-generation Raleigh-native and developer Smedes York in 1990.  At 6’ 5”, the former Mayor of Raleigh and NCSU basketball player wasn’t hard to miss.

I remember how warmly he wished me well just six months into my challenge to jump-start Durham, North Carolina’s first community marketing organization destined within just a few years to help fuel the largest market share of visitors drawn through the airport.

Aided by research, I’m able to recall how Smedes led the charge just about the time of my arrival in Durham 23 years ago, to create dramatic landscaped entries to the jointly-owned airport that cement spectacular first and last impressions of North Carolina for travelers as well as for the co-owner communities of Durham and Wake counties and the cities of Durham and Raleigh.

The Authority governing the airport, which is located midway between Durham and Raleigh, has been served through the years by a  grandfather-father-son legacy of construction-developers who understood the importance of appearance, none more than Durham native Robb Teer, currently immediate past chair and his famous grandfather, the late Nello Teer, whose company laid the airports runways in 1939.

Smedes’ father Willie, who immediately preceded him on the Airport Authority, famously led the charge to remove all outdoor billboards on airport property.  More than a decade earlier during a stint as head of the state agency overseeing tourism and economic development he had learned that billboards were a blight on trees and other elements of North Carolina’s sense of place and attractiveness for economic development.

Top American Airlines executives flying in to place a then-hub at RDU a few years before I arrived had emphatically reinforced the importance of trees as central to North Carolina’s unique scenic character and economic development potential when they met Smedes and recently-retired airport director John Brantley, both engineers by training.

This was also not lost on Durham officials who had already enacted a communitywide ban on outdoor billboards and were in the process of creating a best-practice overlay to protect the tree-lined visual character of a span of I 40, which was nearing completion, as it leads through their community to and from the airport which is immediately  east of Durham.

In 1987, less than two dozen months before my arrival, RDU officials saw the reaction to some modest plantings placed at exits to and from the airport in advance of a US Olympic Festival co-hosted by surrounding cities and counties, so the Authority used funds of its own to add spectacular landscaped hills and dales to the FAA-funded creation and rerouting of roadways and bridges leading into and through the airport.

RDU followed a best-practice landscaping plan created locally and overseen by Willie Hood, a principle at Jerry Turner & Associates, and his associate and JTA VP Lynda Harris and they extended the landscaping to parking areas as well.

To make it all possible, control of the area was passed by NCDOT to RDU and then back during a time when my friend, the legendary Bill Johnson was State Roadside Environmental Engineer and also creating North Carolina’s award-winning scenic byway and wildflower programs.

The result is arguably the most dramatic gateway impression made by any airport in the world, something unfortunately lost today on NCDOT and the way it maintains the other gateways that carry the more than 80% of travelers who arrive and depart the state via highways.

The Vow That Enlisted An Outburst

Usually the Durham City Manager is pretty stoic, but he was visibly cheered a few days ago when applause erupted during one of several  confirmation vows to the community taken by participants at the second annual “Marry Durham” street festival in the NoCO District.

That particular applause was in appreciation for the repaving of Durham streets, maintenance of which had been neglected and is now being rapidly returned to standard thanks to voter-approved bonds.

Residents will be even more expressive when the visual impression created by maintenance of roadsides, medians and right-of-ways is similarly restored to best-practice standards.

Detailed under “Roadway Image,” this element is part of “Community Character,” Chapter 4 of the plan that overarches both the City and County of Durham and their respective strategic and agency tactical plans.

Standing just at the periphery of that crowd that was cheering on the City Manager a few days ago was a booth for Keep Durham Beautiful, a non-profit whose management is embedded in Durham City General Services, the agency that will need much better funding if roadsides are to receive similar cheers in the future.

Every year Durham residents’ perceptions of roadside maintenance are benchmarked in two ways.  One is a scientific, anonymous opinion survey of residents of both the city and county.  Another way is an eyes-on Index of litter and other forms of neglect conducted by resident volunteers and coordinated by Keep Durham Beautiful.

As can be seen by clicking on each of the links in this sentence, both the Index and the opinion survey illustrate that this is an area both the City and County must improve if they are to meet the extremely high expectations of residents in this regard.

Click here to receive details about or to volunteer to participate in the 2012 Index which will be conducted on April 19th.

3 Canons of Community Appearance and a Case for NIDs

For me a thorough study of research on littering behavior, such as that commissioned by Keep America Beautiful, helped reveal three canons about community appearance (in my words):

• Beautification that is not preceded by basic and sustainable day-to-day routines for cleanup of public areas such as roadsides is like proverbial “putting lipstick on pig” and a waste of resources

 

• Episodic “deep-clean” events, no matter the degree of volunteer involvement and enthusiasm are a complement to, never a substitute for, on-going, day-to-day systemic maintenance, and

 

• Beatification efforts only when layered on vigilant cleanup routines will extend their effectiveness and provide an inoculation against carelessness including littering. They also inspire and beget diligence from agencies at other levels of government.

Involving volunteers in community clean up can be a great way to get by-in and to create or deepen shared values, but far too many communities use these episodic events as a substitute for what should be sustained day-to-day baseline maintenance of a community’s trails, public areas, roadsides and medians.  It should be both/and, never either/or.

Even worse is that some communities seem to often view volunteer efforts as an excuse to divert funds from day-to-day routine maintenance or as a means to compensate for failure to put a light under uninspired bureaucrats.  It should be both/and, never either/or.

Volunteers, even in places such as Durham, North Carolina where they seem almost temporally embedded in the community’s DNA, should never be taken for granted.  But only in very small towns is volunteer effort truly scalable and sustainable as a means to serve community-wide needs.

Durham where I live is struggling with the issue of cleanup vs. beautification.  Among many transcendent superlatives, roadside appearance is the only area to which residents give a failing grades, one for general cleanup and day-to-day maintenance and the other for roadside directional signs.  Officials appear to often misinterpret the negative scores only in terms of “beautification.”  Photo op anyone?

Drew Cummings, a young Assistant County Manager for Special Projects and perhaps the best public administrator I’ve ever known (and I’ve known and worked with hundreds and many of the best during my now-concluded 40-year career in community-visitor-related economic development) took a much more in-depth look at 25 different roadside stretches and interchanges referred to as gateways.

As part the Durham Appearance Advocacy Group (DAAG,) a gap-closing team of appearance activists and organizations along with appearance-related local agencies, Drew teamed with City staff and methodically indexed these “gateway” areas according to miles and acreage as well as status of deterioration and difficulty of terrain and estimated that, collectively, it could require as much as half a million dollars or more to reverse the effects of neglect and restore them to a status sufficient to support  beautification.

For safety reasons volunteers are not an option to do the work, but this doesn’t mean volunteers can’t oversee the work.  In my opinion, local, neighborhood direction and oversight of clean up and beautification efforts through “Neighborhood Improvement Districts” (NIDs), makes just as much or more sense as the more common “Business Improvement Districts” or BIDs, especially if established and governed by “popular vote” of all those living and doing business within the district boundaries including both renters and homeowners as well as business building owners and tenants.

Controversy over BIDs, including one proposed for Downtown Durham is usually more about the lack of a popular vote and how it will be governed than it is about the creation of the BID itself. To me it seems that a vote by secret ballot is essential and a “no-brainer” regardless of whether or not it is required or not by law.  Public hearings are no substitute.

Each NID could also be granted, upon majority vote, the right to request the levy of a special assessment to augment and amplify services such as cleanup and beautification above and beyond the base services provided community-wide but never as a substitute.

Unfortunately, NIDs and local neighborhood oversight may be the only means to prevent cities and counties from becoming blinded to neglect and to the overall importance of community appearance and its overarching relationship to property values/tax base, public health, crime prevention, economic and workforce development, solid waste reduction, education, facility maintenance and to the quality of water, air and life.

To adapt the words of semantic researcher Dr. Frank Luntz - NIDs could very well be a paradigm-breaking, game-changing breakthrough for community appearance!

First Responders For Community Appearance

Durham North Carolina's tiny 8-member Rapid Response Impact Team is the hidden force behind much of what is often credited only to neighborhood associations or organizations like Keep Durham Beautiful.

Headed by Durham native, Daryl Hedgspeth, as part of the City’s Neighborhood Services Improvement Department, the Impact Team was responsible in the past calendar year alone for:

• Removing nearly 9000 instances of graffiti and related symbols and scripted words.

 

• Removing 324 displaced shopping carts that had been driven away from the sites where they belong only to be abandoned and left to junk up roadsides and trails.

 

• Removing more than 1100 illegal dump sites created by people, both residents and nonresidents who travel to Durham to work, who couldn't be troubled to properly dispose of the refuse.

 

• Mowing 344 ‘weedy lots” and cleaning up debris from another 243 sites, nearly 746 tons in all.

 

In addition, the Impact Team facilitates individual neighborhood cleanup initiatives such as “big sweep” efforts focused on waterways as well as cleanup preparation for, urban gardens, clearing neglected right-of-ways, and dealing with costly-to-remove up huge bills such as paint and hydraulic fluids spills.

The Impact Team is also most likely the group that quietly distributes and retrieves barricades for parades, fundraising walks and runs, festivals and other community events.  They also supervise a team of two dozen young people over the summer it picked up 9 tons of litter in just eight weeks.

Given the fact that Durham residents gave only two failing grades to their community, including one for inattention to general appearance, the Impact Team’s remarkable effort is one area not yet scaled to the size of the task it faces.

This remarkable group doesn't get the attention it should because to do so would be to draw attention to neglect and raise questions about why community appearance is given such high priority among residents, but receives far too little attention from those in governance.

Residents who mount volunteer cleanup efforts in neighborhoods and along streams and trails or spy graffiti or illegal dumping or weedy lots or debris that are threatening the community’s well-being, including public health and safety, should call or e-mail Durham One Call for assistance but it is likely the Rapid Response Impact Team that they will thank in the end.

Where Hedge Fund Managers Retire To Grow Heirloom Veggies

You know that, as a now retired community/destination marketing executive, I thoroughly loved reading the part of the description below given for my adopted hometown Durham North Carolina in its recent ranking, which had it sandwiched between New York City and the Big Island, Hawaii, as one of the five great US destinations to visit during 2012.

“The beneficiary of tobacco barons, Durham is where Wall Street hedge-funders retire early to grow heirloom vegetables on riverside farms.”

Durham is no stranger to accolades from external stakeholders such as this, nor is the community a stranger to accolades as a visitor destination, which is a testament both to the prowess of its official community marketing agency, but also to the fact that Durham residents and businesses and organizations deliver on the brand.

That's why it would be hard to believe, if not for hearing it from so many different sources, that senior management at the City of Durham “doesn’t consider it a priority” to address the community’s aesthetic, even when residents have signaled in scientific polls that it is an area not only of high priority, but one where they overwhelmingly see their community falling short.

Durham is not only highly rated as a place to visit but also as a place to live and do business.  It is also highly rated for attracting and retaining talent so one might be tempted to conjecture this concern about aesthetics is just from picky newcomers. 

But as you can see by clicking this link or by clicking to enlarge the chart shown as an image in this blog post, the results from the poll conducted by Nanophrades on behalf of the Durham Convention & Visitors Bureau, as a community performance metric, shows that newcomers, as you would expect, are a bit more uncertain about whether Durham's roadsides and public are being kept attractive and litter free although more than 4 out of every 10 believe they aren't.

The percentage citing neglect steadily increases until it approaches 6 out of every 10 residents who have lived in Durham between 11 and  20 years and a negative-to-positive ratio of more than 4 to 1.  The sad part is not just that some of these residents report that officials are apparently unresponsive or that this is the only aspect of the community with a ratio in the negative for perception including perceptions of safety or public schools.

The pathetic part of this neglect is that even public administration professionals, of which Durham has some of the best but, who may have become understandably jaded by second-guessing, interference and micromanagement or may have retreated into the muted confines of bean counting or engineering cannot fail to grasp the symbolic and overarching significance of this type of neglect to residents.

But regardless of the reasons why it hasn't been addressed to date, the community is on notice from the vast majority of its most important stakeholders that its standing is at risk.

Durham’s Achilles' Heel

Durham NC, my adopted hometown, has an Achilles' heel.  It's not what you might think from some news reports.  By 4 to 1 residents feel or safe or very safe in their community including 5 to 1 among women and 5 to 1 among those who feel very strongly one way or the other.

The Achilles' heel isn't public education either.  By 8.5 to 1 residents have a high or very high image of Durham public schools, including  6 to 1 among newcomers who've been here three years or less despite being subjected to water cooler myths perpetuated by realtors in nearby communities and people who work but do not live in Durham.

Durham's vulnerability certainly isn't community passion, where residents are 15 times higher than the benchmark, nor is it community loyalty where residents are three times higher than the benchmark.

Durham's Achilles' heel is aesthetics, not related to its unique sense of place and architecture but to simple curb appeal in publicly maintained areas, which residents rate four times lower than the benchmark.  Emblematic, by 3 to 1 Durham residents disagree that Durham roadsides and medians are well kept.

The concern is not just about litter although the presence of litter is a predictor of not only more litter but underlying neglect. Resident concern about aesthetics includes the lack of mowing, overall landscaping and the general appearance of roadsides and medians including unrepaired ruts and damage too systemic to be overcome by some cosmetic flower plantings here and there.

The concerns are also about the aesthetics of the community as a whole, including both the City and County not just particular neighborhoods such as downtown.  Any remedy will also involve subsequently motivating the North Carolina Department of Transportation, which is responsible for many roads in Durham, to follow suit.

Resident perceptions of the community as a whole are informed in contrast by how extraordinarily well kept various Durham assets are such as Duke University, The Streets at Southpoint, Northgate Mall, Research Triangle Park, several Downtown districts and the co-owned airport.

Aesthetics is an Achilles' heel and critical for any community to address because research has shown it to be one of the top three drivers of community attachment, pivotal to attracting and retaining talent and economic vitality.

The good news is that just as curb appeal is critical to holding or increasing the value of an individual residence or commercial property, greatly improved aesthetic upkeep by the City and County can be viewed as self-funded by the increased property tax valuation it will generate for local government as a return on investment.

Predictors For Littering Behavior

Over the years I’ve learned through scientific research how a very few people can drive a significant problem, so I wasn't surprised when I read some new research on the behavior of littering.

For instance, during my now-concluded career in community marketing, only a little more than 11% of the residents of Wake County where Raleigh, the state’s second largest city is located have a negative or very negative image of Durham, where I live.

But those 1 in 10 who are negative generate enough noise to make nearly 30% of the population in that adjacent county believe that, based on the way people talk, they would expect a negative experience in Durham. They also create apprehension in another 30% and tranfer those impressions to businesses seeking to relocate to Durham and to visitors to Durham arriving through the jointly-owned airport and even via news reports.

Similarly with litter, a very small percentage of people can drive a problem that has serious consequences.

During 2008, for a report published in 2009, Action Research used observations, intercepts and telephone interviews to help Keep America Beautiful unwrap and target the behaviors behind littering.  In one segment researchers observed nearly 10,000 individuals across 130 different locations divided across 10 different states evenly split between rural, urban and suburban settings, including 30 different cities, and nine different types of locations including fast food, recreation, gas stations, city centers, rest stops, medical/hospital, restaurants/bars, retail, etc.

Even though more than 90% of the locations had trash receptacles located in plain view, 81% of the littering occurred with notable intent.  Four percent of the individuals observed were litterers and another 17% disposed but improperly.  Overwhelmingly individuals held the view that littering is wrong, even those who had just been observed littering.

Only two variables emerged in the findings as statistically significant predictors of littering, 1) availability of disposal receptacles and 2) the amount of litter already present.  The second of these is a wake-up call for officials in Durham, North Carolina, where I live.

Possibly lulled at some point in the past by the incredible levels of Durham resident pride, satisfaction, and image of their community, officials began to neglect general upkeep of roadsides and medians and public buildings and spaces.  In time the neglect became a standard operating procedure betrayed only by how well maintained the southeast part of the community encompassing Research Triangle Park and the nearby jointly-owned airport remained.

However, officials back then and since may have failed to account that litter is not just generated by residents, but also by 3 out of 5 people working in Durham, who are nonresidents and there are another 6.9 million visitors to Durham each year.  It is widely known that even individuals who are diligent about litter at home can be much less so when away from home, especially when litter begets more littering.

But most importantly, this now institutionalized permissiveness of neglect failed to reckon that neglect such as litter leads to other problems such as signaling to petty criminals that no one's in charge and even providing a screen behind which major crime can fester.

The lesson is that a very small part of the population can generate a  problem which has serious consequences such as litter, if not addressed. One of the nicest presents officials can give the residents of Durham in the new year is the resumption to best practices of the general upkeep of roadsides and public spaces to best practices.

Making Recycling Inclusive

Durham, North Carolina is having great success with the larger capacity rollout recycling carts but other than a experiment in the city manager's office, I'm not sure when we will move to reverse recycling.  I saw this in action during a visit to my daughter and grandsons in Salt Lake City, Utah where they now have the same large recycling cart, but a very small cart for garbage.

The other day I asked a recycling executive with the City of Durham why it is that I see businesses like dry cleaners collecting plastic wrapping for recycling but that our curbside recycling does not accept that same content like many other cities do. I didn't get an answer or even an acknowledgment that this doesn't make sense or that this will be remedied in the near future.

It isn't just dry cleaners. The same is true with recycling electronics.  It isn't enough to just ask people to take those items back to the store where they purchased them or to keep track of periodic recycling days held in store parking lots.  If communities want households to efficiently recycle, they need to make far more frequent and timely adjustments to the types of items they accept  at curbside.

In the meantime it never hurts to communicate with residents why it is the City can't take something curbside and how long it will be before that will be remedied.  Once people are educated to recycle it is natural for them to expect that everything that is recyclable will be included.

The Link Between Neglect And Burglary

Possibly reacting to headlines versus statistics, the Durham City Council was characterized recently as berating the police chief regarding the type of crime for which Durham is below average. But the angst was focused on the wrong type of crime and the wrong department.

The annual comparison of crime in 11 communities in the Southeast U.S. and 28 nationwide that are similar in size and make-up reveals once again that overall Durham crime is below or near average, with the exception of one type of crime - burglary.

Hopefully the Durham Police Department is deploying or will soon deploy best practices in what has come to be called “predictive policing” including algorithms and statistical linkages.  But there is reason to believe other departments should be held as much or more responsible for reducing burglary.

While Durham is rapidly catching up on long-overdue street maintenance, it wasn't just street surfaces that had been neglected. Durham has long overlooked and some residents think neglected the overall maintenance of roadsides, medians, parks and other public infrastructure including maintenance and upkeep around the public’s buildings and property.

If the City Council wants to ask some tough questions in pursuit of solutions to burglary, the only type of crime where Durham is above average, it needs to drill down into why the operating maintenance related to the community’s overall curb appeal has been similarly permitted to degrade.

For example, an analysis in Arlington, Texas has revealed that for every one unit of physical decay or neglect in or near neighborhoods there are six burglaries in that same area.  In fact, physical neglect is a means to identify at-risk neighborhoods for burglary.

One neglected building or home can put a block at risk but when public infrastructure, including roadsides and medians, are neglected as well then the risk for crime must be even greater. The City of Durham’s elected officials and senior management must come to grips with the fact that failing to maintain the community's overall curb appeal has ramifications far beyond just appearance.

As we eventually did to to overcome our denial about the importance of overall street maintenance, it is time to restore operating maintenance budgets for roadsides, medians , and other areas of visual neglect that are degrading the community's curb appeal and putting residents at risk.

Quantifying The Environmental Role of Roadside Trees

One way to value roadsides is the scenic views they provide, a window into the soul of the places through which they pass and a pivotal factor in facilitating 1.9 billion tourism person-trips and a trillion dollars of economic impact each year.

Another way to quantify the value of roadside vegetation is by its ability to sequester or capture and hold carbon emissions from escaping into the atmosphere.

According to a pilot study of the National Highway System (NHS) by the Federal Highway Administration, the 3.4 million acres of roadside vegetation including trees, grasses and shrubs in the unpaved right of way along 163,000 miles of Interstates and U.S. Highways is able to clean the air of the equivalent of the emissions from 2.6 million passenger cars each year.

If the voluntary Chicago Climate Exchange hadn’t been torpedoed by members of a particular party in Congress, at the hypothetical carbon price of $20 per metric ton, the sequestration by vegetation along just 4% of the nation’s roadsides would equate to a potential value of $8.5 to $14 billion.

Nonetheless, the value to our planet Earth remains priceless.

Nationwide, including all of the areas where they are so difficult to grow, trees (deciduous, conifer and mixed,) make up 25% of all roadside vegetation along the NHS or about 827,000 acres total.

Roadside trees alone, growing in the right of way of major highways, sequester half of the carbon emissions captured by vegetation or nearly 2 million tons of carbon emissions every year.

In part, because North Carolina precariously clings to 60% of its tree cover, a good deal of the roadside sequestration occurs in this state, where I live. But while other states from Oregon to Maryland are using transportation enhancement grants to plant millions of trees, two North Carolina State Senators, Harry Brown of Jacksonville and Bob Rucho of Mathews, did their best during the recent session of the General Assembly to win back North Carolina’s reputation for being backward.

Working on behalf the outdoor billboard industry, Brown and Rucho pushed through a bill that will soon enable the clear-cutting of 575 miles of publicly-owned roadside trees or enough to go from one end of the state to the other. This is on top of what had already been generously permitted so the 8,000 private outdoor billboards mooching off the North Carolina public right of ways could be visible and purposely distracting to drivers even though they are utilized by fewer than 1 in 10 North Carolinians.

Most of the clear-cutting in North Carolina will occur along major highways that are part of the National Highway System. While representing only 4% of the nation’s roads, the NHS carries 40% of its traffic including 90% of all tourism traffic nationwide, 81% of business travel and the 37 million visitor person trips taken in North Carolina.

It is impossible to speculate on the motives of these two senators but before you deem all North Carolinians as deserving of the epitaph, “backward,” remember the scientific polls showing that 7 out of 10 North Carolinians consider outdoor billboards to be a “desecration” on our state.

As home to programs such as the Green Plus Certification and the Center for Sustainable Tourism at ECU, North Carolinians do understand the triple-bottom-line of social, environmental and financial responsibility and that the outdoor billboard legislation fails miserably on all three measures.

It may not be long before North Carolinians rise up and reclaim control of our roadsides, but it will be decades before the damage from outdoor billboards is repaired and before the state optimizes the far greater value of its roadsides instead for the source of scenic beauty and a cleaner environment.

A Finishing Touch For The City’s Strategic Plan

I love the City of Durham’s new website for tracking progress under its new strategic plan. There is only one thing missing that would tie together the plan’s five goals:

• Strong and Diverse Economy
• Safe and Secure Community
• Thriving Livable Neighborhoods
• Well-Managed City
• Stewardship of City’s Physical Assets

All that’s missing is an overarching strategy that would interweave each of the goals into a “concentrated force,” the essence of good strategy. Strategy experts such as Al Reis liken an overarching element to a setting on a garden hose nozzle (in Durham it would be attached to a water barrel, of course).

Turn it one way, you have a fine mist that military strategists term “scatteration of forces”, turn it the other way and you have a powerful stream that can blast away dirt and grime.

After reading of the City’s goals closely, including the one named “Well-Managed City,” it seems to me that there is one overarching strategy that can tie each of them into a concentrated force.

It is called different things: aesthetics (one of the top three factors that predict resident attachment to a city,) beautification, appearance etc. I’ll use aesthetics.

By now City officials are sensing from resident comments about the number of newly re-paved road, just how much a different upkeep can make in perception. That’s just a fraction of what they will sense if they will just they tackle overall aesthetics with similar intensity.

Here are just some of the ways aesthetics can tie together each of the City’s goals:

• Strong & Diverse Economy – This one’s easy. There is a correlation between visual blight and economic decline just as there is between scenic conservation and economic growth, both the traditional form deployed by the City and the visitor-centric economic and cultural development it jointly leverages with the County through the self-funded Durham’s community/destination marketing authority.

• Safe & Secure Community – This one’s even easier. Both the well-proven “Broken-Windows theory” of crime reduction and prevention and Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) correlate good aesthetics to reduced crime and perceptions of public safety.

• Thriving, Livable Neighborhoods – Okay these are all easy. Prompt elimination of litter and graffiti, clean streets, sidewalks and vacant lots, well kept roadsides and medians are overall “environmental order” to reduce anti-social behavior including racism and stimulate social capital and increase property values.

• Well-Managed City – Of course, good aesthetics will address the first objective through increased reduction of litter through recycling but will also increase property values under financial management and the reaction employees will get from residents will encourage them to try harder and feel more fulfilled in their work, especially the majority whom don’t live in Durham.

• Stewardship of City’s Physical Assets – This is inherently about aesthetics including well maintained parks, landscaping around public facilities, clean streets and air and water pollution control is just good business and inspire private property owners to do the same.

To Durham’s credit, it was one of the first community’s to ban outdoor billboards way back in 1984, a bipartisan effort spearheaded by a Republican Council member from Hope Valley. Our community has done many things to foster and preserve sense of place. But we’ve really dropped the ball when it comes to aesthetics.

While some may think it may be too late to add an overarching strategy to the City’s excellent plan, the County is in a strategic planning process where aesthetics can be both adapted and/or then presented as an overarching strategy to tie both the City and County’s plans together.

Every strategic plan needs a overarching strategy that can synergize multiple goals into a concentrated force.

The Thin Line Between Funky, Gritty And Just Plain Seedy

Listening to a good friend, Bob Ingram, speak recently made me remember a line that “there is a thin line between funky and gritty, which are two Durham values, and just plain seedy.

That Bob is always so generous personally and now chairman of the North Carolina GlaxoSmithKline Foundation reminded me that he will be fascinated to learn about the science that has now confirmed that what is termed “environmental disorder” can be linked to why some individuals may be less willing to make charitable contributions in a cluttered environment which tends to ignite the anti-social behavior of stereotyping.

Bob Ingram is a vocal proponent for making “overall appearance” one of the things Durham must most improve and, as an example he points to another city where he has lived that has done a remarkable job of improving appearance, Cincinnati.

He personally understands the thin line between funky and gritty and just plain seedy.  Bob knows improving appearance isn’t contradictory but critical to retaining Durham’s historic neighborhoods like the one where he lived during his more than two decades here and intends stay.

Nor does improving appearance conflict with Durham’s unique architectural signature, inherent in historic brick factories and warehouses converted to residences, offices, shops and restaurants like the one in which Bob spoke this week.

Nor will it conflict with newer construction evoked by that architectural signature including drug stores, hotels, the ballpark and the fashionable Streets at Southpoint.

Banning outdoor billboards and stiffening sign ordinances as early as 1984 and 1985 was a great start by a very strong and insightful Durham City Council two and one-half decades ago after the community had become wallpapered with 209 examples of this long obsolete and desecrating advertising form that offers no content and no opt-out.  Attrition is removing the remaining 80+ ten times faster than the average including means such as when roadways are widened or improved.

While given lip service by nearly every Council since, none finer than the one we have today, in my opinion, that momentum to improve overall appearance hasn’t been sustained in other ways.

Bob and I first became friends not because we moved here about the same time nor just because my job was to stand up for Durham and he almost immediately bonded with this community like no other before nor because he rose to head Glaxo, one of Durham’s major and arguably most community-spirited employers, which he ultimately helped guide through two mergers to become GSK.

Our personal friendship formed around a mutual, life-long passion for old cars, in specific Porsches, of which Bob has an extraordinary collection. One of the prized gestures made at my retirement on the last day of 2009 is a personal letter Bob slipped into my pocket, after a farewell hug, inviting me to help exercise his fleet.

We were also both very early-adopters and vocal proponents of a new kind of regionalism, exchanging the imperialistic, homogenizing kind typically dominated by a self-proclaimed center for a much more organic and contemporary polycentric model that pluralistically celebrates the linkages of equals around very distinct and varied communities such as Durham.

It gives me hope that our community’s other leaders will heed Bob’s evangelism for appearance and they will coalesce around this very important need, one that touches more areas than any other including not only charitable giving but diversity and tolerance, property values, historic preservation, clean air and water, place-making, recycling, tax base, crime reduction, economic development (visitor-centric and traditional,) community engagement, public health and much more.

Just to be sure, I’m going to keep writing about it until they do.

An Example of Why “Anger” Has Become An Elixir For Governance

In stark contrast to that area of town in general, grass grew taller and taller for weeks at a house that was for sale at the entrance to Rockwood Park, but fortunately before it became a poster child for the now well documented “broken windows theory”, either the previous owners, the real estate agency or an annoyed neighbor mowed the lawn.

This apparently isn’t the philosophy of City Parks and Recreation or its mowing contractor. Even while trendy parks are opened, the turf in other parks has evaporated over the years from neglect even as their use has increased. Now, maybe to cover the neglect, the decision has apparently been made to mow only a portion of each park, allowing grass to go fallow making them virtually useless.

Poor decision, poor management, another victim of deferred maintenance and, where the buck always stops, poor governance.

Residents are given prompt citations, and should be, if they don’t take care to keep the city-owned right-of-way as well kept as their own property. Right-of-Way is the strip that runs between the street and private property, sometimes dissected by a sidewalk.

It’s also where “curb appeal” and resultant property values begin.

So residents are right to be indignant and demoralized, as my neighbors and many commuting to use the park are, that the City is so cavalier with its own upkeep including but not limited to the responsibility to keep recreational parkland not only mowed but free of limbs and weeds and well, recreational.

Unkempt areas attract not only litter but snakes and other vermin and bring them closer to residences and businesses, but they also are proven to provide a sort of psychological screen for minor crime, typically theft and quick to follow is major crime.

It doesn’t stop there. As well as eroding property values, unkempt areas, especially in urban settings, threaten public health, retard economic development and more. Nature areas have an important place but urban parks, adjacent to dwellings should be well kept. It takes much more than leaving the grass to grow wild to convert a recreational park into a nature area or convert it to a natural buffer.

Is the failure to maintain the roof on the picnic shelter or the cook-out grills also part of going back to nature?

It is terrific that reserves are being refunded for deferred maintenance of streets but Durham’s elected officials and public servants are being thick as a board on the importance of appearance overall, even if as one official quipped, “no one is calling to yell at them about it.”

Oh yeah, that’s why we elect people to govern our community, so they can sit by the phone keeping tabs on who gets angry enough to call them out. That’s just dysfunctional.

You want to know what gives government a poor image…just this kind of neglect and double standard. Government upkeep should set the example and begin with appearance and curb appeal, the most visible things residents can see.

Believe me, elected officials and administrators are not ignorant to how important this is…they’ve been shown scientific evidence as well as public opinion support time and time again…so when will they get it? When will someone step up and show leadership on this issue?

I guess when we all drop the unimportant lives we’re leading and get angry enough to call and tell them to get off their butt? Maybe its time to dust off the ole’ B.S.-O-Meter very effectively deployed in a former life to humorously shed light on condescension toward Durham, but this time B.S. won’t be Bum Steer and the “Bums” may be local.

A Hazard To Passions

I have a lot of passions but one of them isn’t outdoor billboards.

I blog in objection to billboards because I have a passion for “places” and the things that make them scenic and unique. I saw first hand during the near decade I lived in Alaska just how much better it is without outdoor billboards which were banned there in 1959, almost immediately after achieving statehood.

I also have a passion for riding a Harley-Davidson Cross Bones where you see first hand how distracted motorists can be in general, without something like outdoor billboards which are put in place for the sole purpose of pulling your eyes away from where they should be.

Looking away from the roadway is responsible for 70-90% of unsafe driving events such as drifting, swerving etc. In fact, ten percent of drivers are responsible for 50% of the crash risks and things that distract drivers from keeping their eyes on the roadway are among the highest causes.

Studies show that a two-second distraction doubles your risk of an accident. A study by the Outdoor Billboard industry showed that even in daylight, digital billboards draw your eyes away from the road for two seconds or more twice as often as regular billboards or no billboards at all.

It is no wonder they elected not to do a night time analysis.

Spokesmen for the current bills in the North Carolina legislature argue they are just trying to modernize and that they know of no other business prevented from doing so.

The fact is, even without modernization, these structures are safety hazards and there are tons of examples where public safety trumps this type of so-called improvement. According to scientific opinion polls seven out of every ten North Carolina voters agree and eight out of 10 oppose them.

North Carolina must reject these bills, not just because they will line our roadways with up to seven digital billboards per mile and swath away tree screens from public roadways but more importantly because they override local control and are a purposeful and unnecessary hazard to public safety.

The people working in or representing outdoor billboard companies are not demons nor any more flawed than the rest of us. From what I know of them personally, they are honorable people. But they are wrong and according to an interview in Planning Journal, the courts have ruled for many years that outdoor billboards do not derive their value from private land.

They fall under the what courts term the “parasite principal.” Billboards derive their value from the publicly built and maintained roadways and the public has a right to determine if and where they exist.

Judging by the value of their absence to Alaska, Vermont, Maine and Hawaii and thousands of cities and towns, in North Carolina, the debate needs to be whether we can afford to have them at all, let alone turn our roadways into a drive through yellow pages as the proposed bills allow.

Scientific polls show that 78% of Independent voters, 70% of Democratic voters and 68% of Republican voters all agree that outdoor billboards detract from community appearance.

To quote from a recent interview, “these entire states and thousands of cities and towns and counties have found that beauty and place-making are good for business; ugliness and excessive commercialism are not.”

For more information on the bills before the General Assembly, click here.

Some Observations And Perspectives On A Downtown BID

I guess it is no great wonder that people are bugging me for a take on the proposal by our Downtown advocacy organization for a Business Improvement District.

In the career from which I retired back in 2009, I was an executive overseeing BID-like Community/Destination Marketing Organizations (DMOs) first as a non-profit contractor in Spokane, then as a voter-designated non-profit in Anchorage and most recently as a public authority in Durham, as these organizations are established in North Carolina with yet another layer of accountability.

DMOs date back 115 years but didn’t really become BID-like until the 1960s and 70s about the time my career launched and near the same time the first traditional BID such as the one proposed for our Downtown originated in 1974.

Traditional BIDs designate a special district wherein owners of both personal property such as vehicles and real estate are are levied a higher tax to fund services to benefit only that district.

DMO’s are BID-like because beginning in 70’s they transformed from being funded by public grants and private memberships to being self-funded by a dedicated special sales-type tourism development tax levied on the rates paid by the 20% of visitors staying overnight in commercial lodging facilities.

The special tourism tax was pioneered and dedicated to funding community-wide marketing of the jurisdiction where they were collected (not just a specific types of businesses or sub-areas) by generating visitor-centric economic and cultural development back into that jurisdiction. DMO funding is now also increasingly supplemented by tourism BIDs or special prepared food and admission taxes to spread the cost over more of those who benefit.

In summary then, both types of BIDs levy a special tax either on a specific consumer or property owners in a specific district to fund services specifically to benefit only the jurisdiction (district or community) where they were collected.

Granted, I’m a bit out of touch since I retired but given my background, and after reading and listening to presentations here are what I see as a few pros (positives) and a few cons (concerns) regarding the proposal for a Downtown Durham BID:

First the Pros:

• As with anything Downtown Durham Inc. (DDI) does the proposal for a Downtown BID is very well thought out as well as open and transparent from what I have seen. Apparently tentative votes to approve have been secured but there is still time and I believe a willingness to embrace public comment and make adjustments.

• With the proposal to deploy 40% on overall appearance, DDI grasps something not yet reflected by our local governments. As a comprehensive overarching strategy, appearance can reduce crime, improve public health, extend the life of infrastructure, increase tax valuation, engender positive perception and pride, lower barriers to economic development and much more.

• DDI has good reasons for proposing to team with an out-of-state contractor to handle the BID services even though a local or locally-developed alternative, had they existed, would leverage more economic return for taxpayers. As BID-like organizations did under my watch for marketing intelligence services, it can be valuable to have outside perspective and objectivity or as a means to glean “best practices” when an endeavor such as the proposed Downtown BID is new to the community. This contractor appears to know its stuff.

• A BID is much fairer overall than piecing together public grants and memberships because everyone participates in both the costs and the benefits. It promises the level of maintenance for public space throughout Downtown equal to that now privately funded by developments like Brightleaf Square, the headquarters for Self Help and Measurement Inc., Peabody Place, American Tobacco, City Place, TND Partners and many others.

• The proposal promises to respect and foster the genuine and authentic texture so much a part of Durham’s unique sense of place and overall brand including Downtown. I trust that DDI’s current executive will embed that value so deeply that these funds will never be turned around by future administrators or governing boards who might be tempted to make Downtown too slick and shinny or Vegas-esque.

• The proposal promises to foster indigenous events that leverage Durham’s unique sense of place and BID funds give Downtown the means to be self-reliant while stretching resources by respecting and leveraging the strengths of other organizations with missions to be community-wide in scope.

Now a few concerns:

• Often elected officials across the country including a few here at home seem resentful of special, dedicated taxes. Money is power to them and a few always seemed determined to find crafty ways to undermine or redirect dedicated funding even when it subverts public policy. Ironically, some Downtown Durham interests have even been complicit in undermining the public policy marketing use for which the special tourism tax was meant to be dedicated. As opponents of this proposal fear, the integrity of a Downtown BID may be no less invulnerable as officials come and go in the future.

• Feelings are mixed about DDI being the City’s and County’s conduit for the BID funds. It has been a stroke of genius for local governments to underwrite the organization’s relentless focus on advocacy/public policy such as keeping officials and community-wide departments ever-vigilant of revitalization, closing gaps and overcoming barriers. I hate to see that focus diluted and maybe there are both/and alternatives that will allay some of those opposed where BID funds are administered by DDI while under the governance of an inclusive and publicly appointed, resident-only board, while DDI’s private self-appointed board continues to oversee its advocacy mission. Regardless it is time DDI underwent third-party accreditation.

• Understandably non-Downtown taxpayers are eager for the returns promised on investments from hundreds of millions of dollars shouldered community-wide by businesses and residents as well as visitors to get this small but significant geographic area back on its feet. Deservedly they may feel it is time to be recompensed if there is room for an extra assessment. But Downtown has a ways to go yet and as long as these non-Downtown taxpayers are shown respect and recognition by Downtown, I think they understand the need to be patient.

• The promotion proposed for the BID appears over-reliant on advertising maybe because it is simpler to explain and gives many an ego rush but ads are just one component of promotion and with limited credibility because it is “you talking about yourself.” Hopefully, whatever promotion mix is used with BID funds, will be comprehensive and data-driven and synchronized to leverage with the overall marketing of Durham. Ads can work fine to pull residents Downtown for events and as a very efficient “twofer” within the visitors guide to both harvest Downtown’s share of existing visitors and reach the nearly 8 in 10 business executives who, according to national studies, shop a community first as a visitor before making official contact about relocating a business.

For nearly a decade and a half, I have urged creation of a BID for Downtown Durham and while I truly do understand and empathize with the concerns being raised, I believe this is a sound, equitable proposal and the dawn of a new era.

Billboards Exemplify How Advertising Has Become Wallpaper

One thing has become abundantly clear to me as I traveled cross country on four different routes covering 12,000 miles and more than half of the states in the Union in less than half a year.

It’s really true that advertising is now so ubiquitous that it has become the very antithesis of its purpose, an invisible wallpaper, white noise. And the outdoor billboard form of advertising has become not only obsolete, it is also a blight on the public view-shed and now primarily noticeable only by its absence.

Well beyond community/destination marketing, where I worked for four decades, advertising is joining “selling” as the weakest and least credible (it is you talking about yourself) or essential sub-elements of the marketing mix because a person is now confronted with 3,000 advertising messages a day -- 1500 a day on television alone and more than a million annually.

For example, on television, where viewers are spread ever so thinly over more than 300 channels now and with stations increasing the number of minutes of advertising per hour, it takes a minimum of 3 placements of an ad to remembered and 7 to 11 highly targeted placements to motivate a target audience and that’s if you have the marketing intelligence to know your target audience and can isolate a medium that primarily reaches that audience.

It meant a lot to me when executives at national agencies like Foote, Cone & Belding, Ypartnership and Ogilvy would comment that “DCVB” (where I worked for 20 years until retiring back in 2009) really “gets it” when it comes to advertising or public relations or research or positioning or image or holistic marketing” maybe even more than the “best practice” accolades that organization racked up and continues to rack up.

I’m ambidextrous though so my left-brained executive side enjoyed the compliments about results, leapfrogging the competition, being data-driven, judicious use of traditional advertising and measurable performance, while my right-brain creative side enjoyed the compliments about grasping perception and a slow-build marketing mix focused on earned media and stand-out creative results.

In response to a blog I wrote about the myopia that keeps so many communities hostage to group sales, a long-time destination marketing friend of mine out west responded by asking why it seems that there are always one or two people in every community who obsess about advertising? Ad-dicts he called them and pardon the pun.

Some may stay addicted to ads because they go back as far as I do to a time in the last century before marketing became holistic and references were to “sales and marketing” or “advertising and marketing” as though these were separate and mutually exclusive activities. Another tell-tail sign of that dinosaur age is confusing branding and advertising.

One way to spot whether someone is serious about advertising is that they understand its limitations and its role in concert with other marketing activities and they grasp that marketing intelligence (research) must be increased when you do advertising.

Unless you have enough resources to fully deploy all other activities in the marketing mix, the role of advertising in community/destination marketing is now best reserved as a means to harvest inquiries.

Even ad agencies dropped the term advertising from their names decades ago while breaking free of the influence of over reliance on commissions paid by media outlets for placements in favor of a more holistic marketing approach on behalf of clients.

Most destination marketing organizations, which are mini-specialized marketing entities with the same skill sets but narrowly specializing in the full-time marketing of a specific community, moved to much more effective and efficient holistic marketing even earlier.

To many, the movement to holistic marketing vs. obsession with advertising or sales began as early as the 1960s. I picked up on it in 1970 at BYU while reading essays by Harvard legend Theodore Leavitt, the “Peter Drucker” of marketing so I’m sure the transition goes back to at least the 1920s.

It has come more into the open for non-marketing folks with main stream books like The Fall of Advertising and The Rise of PR written by famed marketing strategists Al and Laura Reis (father and daughter.) Al by the way writes a great column in Ad Age and Laura pens an informative blog entitled Reis’s Pieces.