A Step Forward For Durham Trees, Maybe

My long ago adopted hometown of Durham, North Carolina justifiably prides itself on consistently garnering what is very likely the broadest range of accolades for a community of any size while also managing to cling to its sense of place.

So it has always been puzzling when officials let the community fall so far behind in areas near and dear, according to opinion polls, to Durham residents.

I suppose it is because thirty angry people haven’t shown up to meetings in orange shirts waving pitchforks (smile.)

There is an unfortunate tendency among elected bodies and executives at every level now to only move to action based on a vocal (or email) demonstration of anger (or at the request of special interests) rather than thinking strategically about what is best for everyone in the long term.

See for yourself.  Ask officials why they haven’t addressed something and you’ll be amazed how often you hear that it is because no one has brought it up or been upset about it.

One of the three areas where Durham has uncharacteristically fallen so far behind despite sentiment from a majority of residents just took the beginning of what could be a big step forward last month thanks to as request by the City Council initiated by Council member Steve Schewel.

The Joint City-County Environmental Affairs Board (EAB) issued a set of recommendations a few weeks ago that is consistent with earlier legislative priorities submitted by the Durham Appearance Advocacy Group, an independent coalition.

The report was assembled very quickly and under the circumstances is well crafted.  Though certainly not encyclopedic in scope, it is somewhat comprehensive in breadth.

From here the recommendations will hopefully be discussed in strategic meetings and then with any luck make it into the budget.  Frankly, I am heartened just to see it get attention.

I am puzzled, though, at to why the report deals only with the City portion of the tree canopy rather than county-wide as the joint city-county mandate of the EAB would have suggested.

Because it included a number, several news reports I read seemed to focus only on a recommendation that City government increase tree planting to 1,680 trees annually on its own property over the next 20 years, just to keep pace.

But that amount wouldn’t be enough to replace the trees along a tenth of a mile of the street where I live or to replace a day and half worth of the trees sacrificed each year to development here.

My calculated guess, based not only on information received from urban forestry but the average number of acres transformed each day to impervious surface,is that county-wide Durham should be planting more in the neighborhood of 8,000 to 9,000 trees a year.

But the number needed can be reconciled by implementing the first recommendation in the report, if performed holistically and according to best practices.

This seemingly far more strategic recommendation in the report is that the City adopt a proactive Urban Forest Master Plan including a city-wide inventory.

But then it seems the wording becomes contradictory to best practices for tree inventories and master plans of this type when city-wide and public property are used in the same sentence.

This inconsistent wording is reflective of differences of opinion among city administrators deep in the department responsible for urban forestry about whether to follow best practices or dumb down expectations to address only city property.

I suspect the primary author knew that inventories and master plans of this type deal with the entire tree canopy across every type of property but that a reviewer somewhere in the chain plopped in “public property” as a means to dumb down expectations.

It has been observed that this difference of opinion regarding scope among bureaucrats may be the chief reason Durham’s urban forest infrastructure has fallen into such neglect over the years.

Whether Durham finally addresses this neglect may come down to City Council members familiar with this critical difference and willing to be strategic.

Urban forestry experts at the highest level are clear:

“Comprehensive urban forest management considers all trees and associated elements across the entire jurisdiction to adequately address a heterogeneous landscape held by numerous land owners. A first step in developing a proper management plan is to assess the current composition and distribution of a community’s trees…”

The report also lists a few communities as best practices, chosen for proximity, to preempt comments such as “Durham isn’t (fill in the blank)” if truly best practice communities had been noted.

While residents overwhelmingly believe Durham is “where great things happen,” we must always remember that two our of every three people working here - including those working in local government - don’t live here, making it seem as though Durham doesn’t believe in itself or expects less than “great things.”

I say, “Bless their hearts,” to use a southern euphemism for “How pathetic!” or worse (smile.)

It is also very puzzling that the report deals only with the city, rather than the entire single-city county of Durham, the purview of the joint EAB which issued the report.

It is hard to believe the nature of the request led to a less than holistic treatment.  Urban forest exists in the county even if it doesn’t have an urban forester per se and urban forestry experts are clear that management plans need to address both the city and county.

Hopefully, members of the City Council as well as senior management will not just skim the report but will go as far as to read between the lines and reach out to include the Board of County Commissioners and County manager in the discussions.

A good inventory and master plan such as the assessment performed for Wilmington, Delaware and the surrounding county of New Castle will provide local governments, including land-use planners as well as private property owners and developers, tools such as:

• A baseline for the number and age of trees and the percentage of each species as well as their overall health and management needs to minimize risk.
• In-depth, ground-up augmentation that can dovetail with the more superficial, top-down satellite measures of just tree canopy, including the intriguing EPA approach for which Durham is currently a beta.
• Quantification of the overall value of the urban forest and overall green infrastructure in a variety of ways including carbon storage, air and water purification and climate control, all calibrated to local climate and other variables.
• Pinpointed areas for tree retention and reforestation.
• Optimization of tree ordinances and planning decisions.
• Information to inform residential, landowner and developer decisions as well as guide urban forestry maintenance.

As Durham has done recently with other types of neglected infrastructure, the only advantage of coming from so far down is the opportunity to truly leap frog to becoming a best practice.

One resident has even recommended a break on property taxes for upkeep and improvement of tree canopy on private property.

The Decade of Insight Behind Today’s Accolades

One of the things running through my mind recently while helping a friend clean out a garage in the Buckwater Creek neighborhood of Durham, North Carolina where we both live was how forward thinking the Durham native was to leave huge stands of trees.

By the mid-1990s when that neighborhood was completed, Craig Morrison’s Cimarron Homes had been developing neighborhoods for more than a decade.  Craig was a “green” developer decades before it became cool.

He grasped what some homebuilders down in Raleigh didn’t when along with other special interests their whining spurred a bill to ban development related local tree retention, preservation and reforestation ordinances.

Good developers know that trees improve property values and help sell homes and lease commercial property of all types more quickly.

Trees also provide a number of ecosystem services that affect the entire community such as evapotranspiration, a process by which trees slow, capture and cleanse storm run off and put the moisture back in the atmosphere.

In Minnesota, instead of banning tree ordinances, the state is developing a system of credits for retaining and planting trees with the formula calibrated to trees as they grow, canopy, impervious surface, soil type, temperature, rainfall and other variables.

Unfortunately, the only credits that will be given in North Carolina if a few regressive lawmakers have their way, are those designed to incentivize deforestation.

In South America, some outdoor billboard companies are bragging that with new technology, this form of sign blight could cleanse up to 25 gallons of water a day in countries where clean water is still hard to come by.

But in thousands of acres of roadside where North Carolina lawmakers are now permitting out-of-state billboard companies to clear-cut the length of a football field, each would cleanse 400 gallons per day if permitted to remain.

Anyway you slice it, the giveaway makes no sense and runs in the face of an amendment to the state constitution.

The variety of calculations that economists and forestry researchers are now placing on the value of trees may one day help lawmakers understand how foolhardy it is to public health alone to ban tree retention and preservation ordinances.

Even in some highly acclaimed cities such as Durham, where the challenge is cleaning up urban streams that flow into water supplies, an obsession with not raising taxes is obscuring services that are lacking and hollowing out others.

For example, neither the city nor county of Durham has an agency tasked with keeping these streams clean or following up to find polluters.  Instead, we rely on episodic clean ups by agencies, non-profits and volunteers such as Creek Week that barely make a dent.

Maybe local as well as state officials should be required to publish a list of services that are being neglected or hollowed out whenever they take credit for not raising taxes or even cutting taxes.

The public has a right to know that what we take for certain is more often actually being neglected.

Durham was renowned for investing in its future especially from 1900 into the 1940s thanks to forward thinking leadership and visionary public servants such as John C. Michie, William M. Piatt and Dallas W. Newsom in the period that led the way to professional management of cities and counties.

Then Durham suddenly descended into another period not dissimilar to the one we are in now where an obsession with holding the lid on taxes took precedent over preparing for the future during the late 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s.

Durham was held back during this span even as state and business leaders from here laid the foundation for the transformation of North Carolina’s economy to what it is today.

The costliness of that era when Durham was around a third the size it is now is made strikingly apparent by what happened during a remarkable decade beginning in 1982.

It is this decade that truly laid the foundation for making Durham known worldwide today for where great things happen.

It began when now-Mayor Bill Bell, then just in his early 40s was elected chair of the Durham Board of County Commissioners and joined by community activist Becky Heron about the same time Cimarron Homes was founded.

An incredible generation of students who had graduated from college in Durham in the 1970s has stayed here and had begun to be elected to the Durham City Council, including Wib Gulley who would go on to serve two terms as mayor and several as a state senator.

In 1983, Orville Powell was recruited as city manager, followed a year later when Jack Bond was recruited as the new county manager for Durham.

Together, these managers and elected officials all with fresh eyes, decided to make it clear to residents what they had been missing during the four-decade obsession with not raising taxes rather than investing in the future.

These are also the years when local officials also grasped that by forming a community-destination marketing organization (DMO), which I was brought here to start in 1989, they could also grow the local tax base through attracting visitors.

It is also the decade when Durham banned billboards and cleaned up other sign blight, first initiated adaptive reuse of historic factories and warehouses, grew organic districts such as Ninth Street, and established tree preservation ordinances and scenic overlays along major highways, all by fostering the community’s unique sense of place and authenticity.

In the years and months before I arrived, these Durham city and county officials also asked residents to approve two huge bond issues designed to catch Durham up and lay the groundwork for the future, followed by several subsequent bond issues.

In response, realtors and developers in neighboring communities began to hammer Durham as having higher taxes failing to mention that Durham’s city taxes were 19% higher because after running utilities to make Research Triangle Park possible, corporations there were subsequently exempted by the state from paying a full share of Durham taxes.

These detractors also obscured the significant difference between “tax rate,” “tax valuation” and actual “tax burden”which must be factored into any comparison.

In response, Durham’s fledgling marketing agency fueled the local and surrounding news media with better information, but the damage had been done.

Some Durham voters had become confused by the constant misrepresentations, especially in the more conservative unincorporated areas of the county.

Jack Bond retired from local government in 1991 and after a stint in state government and on the governing board for Durham’s DMO, he passed away in 2001 about the time Bill Bell moved over as mayor.

Bell had been briefly replaced as a Commissioner in 1994 because he had supported school merger and while he was soon re-elected, some conservatives were also elected in the early 1990s whose rhetoric deepened suspicion among residents about taxes.

As it still is today, this changed the conversation from taxes as investment and it set Durham back again to the regressive thinking of the 1950s and 1960s, a preoccupation that quietly began again to hollow out initiatives such as upkeep and refocus attention only on the near term.

One conservative elected official during that transition even asked me in a hearing, when we would have enough visitors and wouldn’t need visitor spending or resulting tax revenue.

“Uhhh…never,” I replied, “Not if we want Durham to thrive.”

By 1993 Gulley had gone on to the state senate and in the mid-1990s, Orville moved on to teach at Indiana University’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs.

Durham has passed bonds since then and has had many good leaders, but the obsession with capping taxes at any cost has systematically hollowed out local government while simultaneously blinding residents and probably some elected officials to what isn’t being done as a result.

The revitalization of downtown today, a remnant from that decade of forward thinking, belies the fact that we’re no longer keeping the community up as a whole or investing in the future.

All of this is to say, that Durham needs leadership to stand up again and level with Durham residents and business owners about what is needed to prepared Durham beyond our current terms of office and lifetimes.

Durham can’t sit back and rest on today’s accolades, most of which are really the result of strategic groundwork initiated in the 1980s and early 1990s, while the community silently slips behind again.

Nor do we have to sell Durham’s unique character out to the highest bidder so we don’t have to ask residents to shoulder this investment.

We just need another period where preparing Durham for the future is considered an investment, not a burden.

Environmental Injustice

I felt slightly better when I rode the Harley Cross Bones again past the devastation I wrote about last week.  It had already been reforested by acres of loblolly pine seedlings.

This pine plantation will never replace the mixed forest that was clear cut, including hardwoods that had been growing there for a hundred or more years, but pines grow fast and will be timbered again before long.

A church owns the property and used the sale of the timber to earn funds.  To its credit, the congregation retained a consulting forester as well as receiving a management plan from state foresters assigned to each county.

All foresters aren’t abreast of the benefits of holistic approach to urban forestry that meticulous research by the U.S. Forest Service has so thoroughly documented over the last 25 years.

Those educated earlier still view trees only as commodities to be harvested and urban forest as merely street trees.

Ironic, that in a state for whom trees are pivotal to its brand, tax incentives drive property owners to deforest rather than retain forests.

Likely aided or enabled by some old school foresters not up to speed on the science behind urban forests, a few “regressives” in the state legislature now want to also take away the ability of communities to foster retention of urban forest canopy.  .

Science, public health and local resident values be damned.

Still, foresters assigned to each county usually do their best, for now, to abide by local ordinances and to be respectful of local values.

The fact that these huge areas were completely denuded of all trees and vegetation reflects that Durham tree, soil and watershed ordinances in both the city and county are far from adequate.

I’m sure the property owner in this case was advised on the option of selective harvesting which, if done properly, would leave a mix of mature and growing species and still leave room for reseeding pines.

In the end, in their own interest, but not the community’s, it was the owner’s choice to be so drastic, mitigated by immediate if not biodiverse reforestation.

This example, along with one a few months earlier down on New Hope Creek (where replanting apparently was never contemplated) confirm that Durham doesn’t even require something county-wide as simple as retention of a few feet of token tree buffer along all roadways.

This would not just be for scenic preservation and visitor-centric appeal, but more importantly, to slow storm runoff, cleanse and sequester air pollutants and inhibit particulates.  It would also protect the reforested seedlings.

The soil erosion ordinances also seem less than adequate.  It will take decades now before trees will be able to safeguard the earth.  If you take this lightly, look again at what clear cutting caused in Oso last month.

Both clear cutting and selective cutting are legitimate techniques but must be done judiciously with a full awareness to mitigate any harm to others or the environment and the preservation of groves.  In an urban area clear cutting just has too many downsides.

Of course, even if Durham’s ordinances were “best practice,” any outcome would be totally reliant on how the passion and energy with which they were communicated and enforced, something found far too lacking among most of today’s public servants.

Regulations protect the public as well as guide property owners to mitigate actions shown to be harmful to others.  This at the very nexus of liberty and individual rights laid out at the dawn of this nation by John Stuart Mill.

Environmental justice is an important issue today in urban forestry, “an ethical principle that environmental benefits and burdens should be equitably distributed across society.”

This includes tree-planting programs such as the joint city-county initiative “Trees Across Durham.”  A new study sheds light on why a few in the legislature seem bent on deforesting all of North Carolina, beginning a few years ago with roadsides and now honed in on the urban forests of cities and counties.

A review of campaign contributions for these individuals recently reveals the outsized influence of special interests, including out-of-state billboard companies, formula or chain restaurants and power companies who begrudge communities struggling to preserve the vestiges of sense of place and appeal.

These special interests “vote” each and every day as they buttonhole legislators in the hallways of the people’s chamber while the “people” are limited to voting every few years.

Whenever I try to understand lawmakers bent on destroying forests and North Carolina’s sense of place I am reminded of insight given by the author of “The True Believer”:

"A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business."

The reason Eric Hoffer’s pocket size book is still popular more than six decades after it was published is that it provides keen insight into movements such as the regressives who control North Carolina today.

He sheds light on why this movement was able to seize power by playing rural North Carolinians against its cities, which over the span since The True Believer was first published, had turned the state’s image around.

Noted in Hoffer’s book is also why the less affluent and educated fall victim to movements such as the one bent on dramatically reversing North Carolina’s image as a place to live, visitor or do business to one as backward.

Recent research by foresters even found this phenomena present in a study of volunteers who tree-plant in urban forests.  They found that “a volunteer tree-planting program has more success in areas of higher socioeconomic status which already tend to have more, and better maintained, environmental amenities.”

As happened to so many parts of North Carolina, the benefits from decades of progress were unevenly distributed.  But rather than emulate the places propelled forward, their emissaries now seek to pull everyone in the entire state back several decades.  And what better way than to wreak havoc on the environment?

There is no evidence that those at the state level seeking to improve North Carolina’s brand mean more than just switching out a superficial logo and tagline, more a change of clothes than marketing.

But regardless, their efforts have already been made nil, undermined especially along roadsides which make the state’s first and last impressions on visitors, including the prospective deliverers of new jobs.

Of course this desecration is in violation of state and federal law as well as an amendment voters overwhelmingly approved to the state constitution more than four decades ago.

Special interests such as billboard companies have made any enforcement mute, if not lethargic, by hamstringing executive action and pushing lawmakers of all persuasions with financial incentives over that same span to apply what experts call “legal corruption.”

But even if federal law, which limits placement of billboards to areas deemed commercial in the mid-1960s were enforced, you would find them creating environmental injustice to those with lower socioeconomic status.

Even as barriers to Civil Rights were being taken down back then, urban housing policies began re-segregating the poor, stranding them in “out of sight, out of mind” tree, food and transportation deserts.

The current news media fixation is on gentrification as the culprits, but this fails to understand what housing policy expert and “City Notes” blogger Daniel Hertz describes, which is that it is impossible not to be a gentrifier today.

While racially segregated when they were created, historic neighborhoods in Durham like the one where I live were otherwise and purposefully a far better mix of poor, middle and moneyed classes.  As racial barriers dissolved, underlying policies re-segregated them using social economics.

Durham, which is highly regarded for its ethic and socioeconomic diversity, may have been no exception.  Its first “poor neighborhood” created by a mill closing in the early 1930s was a “white neighborhood.”

Today it is still poor, but integrated.  It is also the site of a billboard and deforestation recently enabled by the state legislature.

But judging by resistance to tree-planting efforts there, we can’t rely on poor people to always see through this environmental injustice or to get through the manipulation by regressives.”

Reclaiming Yesterday – A Signature 1990 Cemetery Project

It was painful last month listening to a city administrator, one of the best, explain to city officials in Durham, North Carolina where I live that our community’s cemeteries have once again fallen into neglect.

The reason?  Because its funding has been short changed funded over the years similar to nearly every area related to general upkeep and appearance, so much so, that there had only been barely enough to cover burials.

It is emblematic of 75 years of neglect that is threatening Durham’s sense of place and the economic development potential it leverages.

I learned recently from Ellyn Shea, a certified arborist and urban forest activist who blogs on Green Infrastructure and Arborism that in 1825, park-like cemeteries as we know them today evolved even before urban park systems as a fusion of nature, art, reverence for the dead and education.

They are an important part of our urban forests, sequestering carbon, controlling climate, and cleansing air and storm runoff; a gift of life to those of us who remain from those who have passed on.

Cemeteries are also places to get in touch with the roots of a community, which is why we included them in inventories of things for visitors to see and do.

An element of Durham’s sense of place is not only the historic cemeteries such as Maplewood, White Rock and Geer - a slave cemetery - but hundreds of small, rural-like family cemeteries sporadically located in roadside groves throughout the city and county.

Their neglect is a lesson taught many times but never learned in any enduring way by city officials, dating back decades before my relocation here twenty-five years ago to jumpstart and lead Durham’s first official community marketing agency.

We were charged with protecting Durham’s sense of place by leveraging it into visitor-centric economic and cultural development, a career from which I retired nearly five years ago.

At that same time, Durham officials organized the Durham Service Corps (DSC,) a year-round program for young adults ages 18-23 as one of twelve across the nation to adapt lessons learned from the Civil Conservation Corps of the 1930s to help at-risk youth.

Reclaiming Yesterday -The Geer Cemetery Project was just one of a number of remarkable DSC projects before it faded a few years after from lack of funding and capacity, a victim of Durham’s fixation with grants-driven projects, an approach that leads to the thinning, if not cannibalization, of sustainability.

A summary of the DSC project survives thanks to a recap placed in the archives of the Durham Convention & Visitors Bureau (that is my handwriting when I had handwriting, asking a co-worker to place it in “backg” for backgrounders.)

It had been passed to me by a wonderful DCVB board member and City Council member at the time, Betsy Robb who is buried in Maplewood Cemetery here.  Looking down the names of DSC board members listed on the cover sheet reminds me that I worked over the years with many of these individuals.

From day one, the organization has made a practice of archiving content that would be used to deepen and enrich what is now know as “content marketing,” an array of 16 tactics that has since surpassed advertising in both use and effectiveness.

The DSC Geer Cemetery project is an excellent example of fusing community clean up with curriculum development while teaching at-risk young adults about life and career skills such as analysis, project and time management, strategy-making as well as how to interview and synthesize information.

In this project, the participants literally had to resurrect the names and backgrounds of the former slaves buried in Greer Cemetery, which isn’t on Geer Street but on Colonial Street between McGill Place and Camden Avenue.

It also exposed them to careers in landscaping, research, archiving and curation, urban forestry and data management as well as instilling a respect for heritage, community, nature and sense of place.

A deficit of the latter may be why officials before and since have failed to adequately fund upkeep of the community.  The report is very through and many today would benefit from the three lesson outlined.

The project’s success is based on several principles including that pre and post discussions surround skill building as much activities.  Once grounded, deep learning is stimulated by related activity and then writing about it as well as evaluation.

While Durham allowed being on the forefront of this movement to slip away, organizations such as DSC have continued to thrive elsewhere and their effectiveness is regularly documented.

For fifty years after the Geer Cemetery’s closure, it suffered neglect by officials.  It is painful to read just how deep that neglect had become in the DSC project recap.

Of course this was just one of many intriguing DSC projects during its brief existence including clearing urban streams, painting public facilities, building compost bins, restoring structures at state historic sites, blazing nature trails and mentoring troubled youth.

Cemetery neglect is just the most irreverent example of how neglectful Durham has been overall concerning its green infrastructure going back at least eight decades, with the exception of one stretch.

From the mid 1980s until shortly after the Geer Cemetery project when DSC was allowed to fade away and neglect once more took hold, Durham rose up against blight, banning billboards, curbing other sign blight and executing a remarkable, “best practice” scenic overlay over a major new highway.

Taken together though, urban forests, waterways, parks and open spaces, grounds around public buildings, roadsides and medians have suffered as much or more than cemeteries both before and since so much so that for many it has become a norm.

Most disturbing is that no other area of local government responsibility touches more areas of community including poverty, public safety, racism, public health, economic development, community engagement, property values and neighborhood vitality.

The most significant testament to Durham’s sense of place is that is has endured in the face of this neglect.

But for how long!

Lessons From An Era

It is a bit disingenuous for the landlord of Research Triangle Park in Durham, North Carolina to call the only hotel actually located there an an “eyesore” during an announcement that it has been purchased with the objective of closing and imploding it by year end.

A word spoken in haste, I suppose.

When the Governors Inn was built in 1972 by Durham’s famous Teer Family, ownership did not include the land where it stood. That was retained by the Park’s landlord, making the hotel more like a concession “in holding.”

This also made it extremely difficult to leverage in order to finance improvements or replacement as hotels often must do.

It is a testament to its three general managers that it remains in good shape, if somewhat dated by its overall 40-year-old layout.

Selflessly, two of these individuals were also at the center of helping Durham launch its first community destination marketing organization.

When the hotel was built, Durham had about 1,500 lodging guest rooms, 38% of which were downtown and very few, if any, around RTP, which had been carved out of Southeast Durham farm and pinelands just four miles from the city center a little more than a decade earlier.

The Park exists in a special Durham County district restricted to research.  It is encompassed by the City of Durham. While it relies on Durham utilities and services, tenants there are exempt from paying a full share of property taxes.

When the Governor’s Inn was erected, both the City and County of Durham were just over 40% of their current population.

Today, even netting out the 198 guest rooms that will be lost with the closing of the Governors Inn – now called Radisson RTP - Durham has 7,500 commercial guest rooms with more than 300 set to come online next year alone and another 1,700 under development.

Within a couple of years, Durham will have nearly 9,500  hotel rooms, six times the number there were when the Governors Inn first opened.  But as savvy developers will tell you, hotels all come “out of the box” empty.

These businesses don’t generate visitation by their sheer existence, they harvest visitation generated by the community where they are built.  However, there is a good reason the number has expanded in Durham three times faster than the overall population.

In 1986 Durham officials went to the NC General Assembly to secure permission to levy a special local option tax on the hotel room rate paid by visitors staying overnight in commercial lodging.

The special tax had been pioneered a few years earlier by the General Assembly as a self-funding mechanism for promotion of Asheville and Buncombe County with 100% designated for community marketing.

Used for marketing, economists note that the special tax would act as a pump to fuel a much greater amount of local tax revenue from increased overnight and daytrip visitation.

But instead, Durham and many other communities sought the funds with no strings attached, hoping to augment general funds.  However, the legislature insisted that as a provision, Durham at least establish an official marketing arm.

With no track record in Durham at the time, it was hard for local officials to see that when used as marketing as intended, the new funds would spearhead a 17 to 1 return, 6 to 1 fueled directly by the new marketing agency alone.

Many in government at all levels fall into the trap of thinking only in terms of slicing up the pie and that revenue generation comes merely from raising the rate of taxation.  But it doesn’t.

So inclined, local officials often fail to reap the bounty that can be leveraged by promotion of visitation. They also misread the medieval proverb about “a bird in the hand.”

It doesn’t confer wisdom on taking the funds out of promotion.  In fact, it refers to falconry and that a hunter is worth far more than any amount of prey.  Community marketing is the hunter that will bring back a far greater return than can be wrought by cannibalizing it.

Durham Representative Paul Pulley, who passed away earlier this month, insisted that until the Durham Convention & Visitors Bureau became operational at the very minimum, at least 25% of the special tax be set aside for start up after which time the rest of the tax could be then be moved over for its intended use.

Within a year, a committee chaired by Karl Lack, the first general manager at the Governors Inn, recommended that DCVB, as Durham’s official marketing arm, be chartered as an independent, public authority.

Less than a year later a joint-city-county formation of the new marketing arm’s governing board was announced and less than a year after that,  I was been brought on to oversee its start-up, which I had already accomplished in part for two other similarly-sized communities.

However, by then, 3/4ths of the new funds meant to prime the pump to generate revenues for Durham from visitors had disappeared into general funds of local government where local officials had grown too reliant.

Start up took on the task of also rallying private and public support to persuade the General Assembly to partially re-compensate for the revenues lost to general purposes by increasing the rate Durham could levy.

Frustrated, while increasing funding for DCVB, Durham legislators, Kenneth Royall and George Miller hardwired its use this time. Legislators correctly anticipated that there would always be a group of three or four individuals including a complicit official or two who would scheme to pry it away.

Because this was often the case not only in Durham but statewide, they also worked with other legislators to embed legislative guidelines to restrict the use of future funding of this type across the state.

And they warned local officials that the next time Durham’s legislation came before the General Assembly, its overall use of the tax would be conformed to use guidelines with 100% going back to its community marketing organization, no less than two-thirds to be used for marketing and up to a third eligible for other tourism purposes including capital projects.

Until such time, all of DCVB’s existing funding was legislatively restricted to only marketing.  It even went so far as to define marketing in order to dissuade work-around artists.

But less than a decade later, this surprised and frustrated local lobbyists desperately attempting an end-run to increase the special visitor tax meant for promotion to get funding instead for the Durham Performing Arts Center.

After demonizing DCVB, deriding its board, chasing members down on hospital gurneys, lobbyists learned to their chagrin that Durham’s marketing organization would need to write a letter to the legislature on behalf of the project requesting an exemption and a delay in the conformation of Durham’s use of the tax.

Otherwise, the intriguing project would have no chance of approval.

DCVB’s credibility and track record, by then well proven, withstood the assaults and to the credit of its governing board, they were not distracted from giving the project full  and dispassionate consideration.

But DCVB proposed a different calculus, one that would be far more win-win.  Those responsible for establishing the special tax as a way to leverage far greater taxable spending were also aware that the question wasn’t about the theater itself but about the funding.

If, as eventually authorized, $1.4 million in funds intended for community marketing were used for debt service instead, the facility could possibly be an ingredient in leveraging about that much in local tax revenue.

But if the amount was used as originally intended, to increase community marketing, it would generate five times that much local tax revenue, enough to fund the proposed theater plus another $7 million each year to help assist other cultural facilities and events.

Proponents of the project, as Durham officials did so long ago, pushed instead for the money up front, shorting the community of at least $210 million in local tax revenue by short circuiting the economic model upon which the special tax had been founded.

Seeing how stubborn the skepticism is among local officials everywhere regarding the strategic fruits of community marketing, other industries vigorously oppose adapting the special assessment formula to self-fund other uses.

As one local official threatened in a closed door session, if the legislature tried to conform use of the tax meant for marketing, local officials would just repeal it entirely and moth-ball Durham’s community marketing organization.

This “nuclear option” gives new light to the proverb about “cutting off your nose to spite your face,” as does leaving $210 million on the table.

The taunts and slights are long forgotten and I don’t regret that decision to request a waiver,  except for the fact that Durham again walked away from reaping revenue so desperately needed for other uses.

A more strategic calculus could have so easily been both/and.

Durham’s marketing arm has now long been recognized as a best practice worldwide.  Its the first in North Carolina and among the first two dozen anywhere to  receive International accreditation.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t still a few individuals as there always will be angling to undermine it or pressure officials to try and siphon off funds for pet projects.

Ironically, funds from the tax that would be eligible for grants are right there in local government general funds.  If those aren’t growing fast enough, well they can only blame themselves.

A pump can only generate so much at less than half power.

Helping DCVB garner unparalleled approval ratings among local stakeholders, including opinion leaders, are many such as Governors Inn executives who have helped safeguard the integrity of Durham’s community marketing now for 20 of its soon-to-be 25 years.

Now among its most ardent supporters is Wib Gulley, a friend and former mayor who after serving two terms on DCVB’s governing board including four or five years as an officer and two as chair, proclaims to other officials that while he was among the most skeptical when it was founded, he finds no other use of public funds as well spent.

DCVB earned that accolade the old fashioned way.  I remember meeting with Wib the month I arrived.  I was given a few minutes to explain how destination marketing works to fuel the business climate and tax revenues while Wib juggled his baby boy Paul, now grown.

I had to talk over some great rock and roll at Satisfaction’s which was in Lakewood at the time, not in Brightleaf Square where it has been for many years.  Wib has become a a good friend but not because we hang out or golf on weekends or see each other socially.

It is the type of friendship based on principle and trust.  In all, over the years, we’ve probably exchanged less than a thousand words, usually when Durham’s marketing arm was under duress.  I could always count on Wib to help me see beyond the sliminess of a given circumstance to a win-win outcome.

So when they start swinging the wrecking ball in the next month or two, I’ll be toasting the Governors Inn and all that it has symbolized for Durham including Research Triangle Park.

There are now more than 25 hotels in the portions of Durham encompassing the Park.  Many legitimately use RTP as a locator because they are within two miles.

But they all owe a great deal to the old Inn.

A Hollowing Out of North Carolina's Brand

When I first moved to North Carolina a generation ago, there was justifiable pride in our state roads, enough to warrant the nickname, “the good roads state.”

Dating to its roots in 1915, the NC Department of Transportation (NCDOT) was, by the time of my arrival in Durham, responsible for the largest system of roadways in the nation because it includes care for all county roads.

Roads in rural northern Durham, where today I frequently ride my Harley, exhibit a level of engineering that often seems lacking on modern roadways and some background may explain why.

NCDOT and its capacity to engineer roads had been first spurred by formation of the North Carolina Good Roads Association by towns and counties following a 1902 “Good Roads Train” tour around the state sponsored by the Southern Railway Company and the national Bureau of Public Road Improvement.

The first state highway commission had been established in 1901 but lasted only for a few months.  In 1911, the legislature appointed a “central highway committee” to work in cooperation with counties, to establish a central route through the state along what is now US 70 (formerly Route 10.).

Before this, roads were solely a county function which was inconsistent at best.

But formal organization of what is today called NCDOT, and development of its vaunted engineering capacity was incentivized by a new federal matching grant program for road construction and then soon matched by a $50 million state bond issue.

In 1913, there were 10,000 motor vehicles in North Carolina or about 1 for ever 220 residents.  By 1919 there were 109,000 or more than 1 for ever 22 North Carolinians.  Over the next 10 years, the state would spend $200 million increasing total road-miles to 6,000.

But by then, North Carolinians, shocked by roadside desecration. were already clamoring for its highway agency to do more than just lay down roadbeds.

Studies had already documented tourism as the fourth largest segment of the the state’s economy and confirmed that pleasure driving and scenic sightseeing were the foremost reason for road use nationwide.

By 1930, Tar Heels were up in arms at the blight from roadside billboards, litter and other roadside blight.  Residents called for highway programs to incorporate litter removal and roadside tree planting.

Governor O. Max Garner agreed, and North Carolina lawmakers responded, but legislation similar to other states was narrowly defeated by those insistent that agency engineers focus narrowly on only roadbeds, as it seems so many still do today.

At the same time, many state and federal highway engineers including public roads chief Thomas McDonald were calling for an outright ban on roadside billboards.  A statewide survey tallied in North Carolina by a highway engineer showed there were more than 2,500 along cross-state Route 10 alone.

His report computed that at the average speed of 40 miles per hour back then, between Beaufort and Asheville, the view drivers hoped to see was blocked every 13 1/2 seconds by a billboard. 

Little did I know as I arrived here back in 1989, that North Carolina’s heralded engineering expertise at building and maintaining highways was already in the process of being systematically hollowed out in favor of private contractors.

That once vaunted source of Tar Heel pride has been all but dissipated in less than a generation.  Where once, North Carolina was regularly tapped to resolve national issues, it is now known more for “worst practices” than “best practices.

The outcome is not lost on a bewildered general public, nor is it just related to road surfaces.

In jurisdictions where expertise is still retained, roadways are now viewed holistically as ecosystems, a critical element of sense of place.

As a result, true innovation and best practices around roadway design have shifted from states to cities where roads represent 80% of public space.

Tree canopy along right-of-ways is valued not only for scenic preservation, increased property values and economic vitality, but as is scientifically validated , crucial for public health.

At the state level, it isn’t just engineering capacity that has been hollowed out.  It seems that even regulators have largely surrendered enforcement.

Often not only have the “foxes” been given charge of the proverbial “henhouse” but other “foxes” are overseeing the “foxes.”

Those who gain high office on the premise of rolling back regulations are chagrined once elected to find how much lack of enforcement and corruption, even if legal, has already made them irrelevant.

As the Revolutionary War began, there were so few engineers that General Washington hired engineers from France’s King Louis XVI.  Thus was established the mostly “French” U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

It wasn’t until 1835 that The Rensselaer Institute offered the first engineer’s degree in America outside the U.S. Military Academy.

Environmental engineers date to Egypt around 1580 to 1200 B.C. but it wasn’t until more than 3,500 years later that in 1958 Rensselaer also became the first to offer that degree in America.

This was barely two years after President Eisenhower successfully completed hostage negotiations with members of Congress including those in his own party including the father and grandfather respectively of both Presidents Bush over construction of the Interstate Highway System.

Included was innovation of a funding mechanism called the Highway Trust Fund by Democratic Congressman Hale Boggs that helped achieve buy-in from special interests such as the trucking and automobile associations, which helped salvage the Interstate Highway System.

The highway system was actually launched in the 1930s by President Roosevelt who envisioned it as a series of toll roads, as did Eisenhower.  In 1960, when President Kennedy succeeded Eisenhower, calls to end the Interstate Highway system were once again reaching crescendo.

It was under attack on three sides, from conservative Republicans due to cost, from Democrats due to private sector graft and racism related to route selection, and from bipartisan conservationists.

To once again rescue the Interstate system, Kennedy called on North Carolina Governor Luther Hodges to head the Department of Commerce, which oversaw highways.

Hodges brought in Rex Whitton to head highways and together they took steps that required state agencies to deepen staff engineering expertise and oversight.

Kennedy moved quickly to renew Eisenhower’s Interstate legislation which was set to expire while also noting his dislike of billboards:

“The Interstate Highway System was intended . . . to enable more Americans to more easily see more of their country," not "to provide a large and unreimbursed measure of benefits to the billboards industry.”

In August 1963, Whitton, a former highway chief in Missouri, also announced the first standards requiring that federal and thus state highway construction be sensitive not only to roadbeds, but to the ecosystems through which they ran.

Following Kennedy’s assassination and stunned by the roadside desecration he witnessed during his own election campaign in 1964, President Johnson told Congress that action was needed to make highways better stewards noting that they wipe out the equivalent of a 50-acre park with every mile.

He directed the Commerce department to ensure landscaping was part of all “Interstate and Federal-aid primary and urban highways.”  The President also announced plans to introduce legislation on effective control of billboards, junkyards and other blight.

Roads chief Whitton told the annual conference of state highway officials that:

“Esthetics should be one of the basic elements in the design of highways. When an otherwise beautiful stretch of highway is spoiled by unsightly scars, let's do the necessary surgery”

He went on to call for trees to screen out visual blight, planting of vines and bushes on barren slopes, contours to blend with the land and easements for scenic preservation of roadsides boosting the profession of environmental engineer.

President Johnson organized a White House Conference on Natural Beauty and tapped North Carolina highway chief, Dr. William F. Babcock, to chair it.

Bill Babcock at the time was midway through a 12-year leave from an engineering professorship at North Carolina State University, where in the late 1970s he helped found and direct the Institute for Transportation Research and Education.

The White House Conference called for planting of “trees to screen objectionable, blight-producing areas such as junkyards, billboards, and the like.”

As a result, highway beautification legislation was passed in 1965 “to promote safety and recreational value of travel and preserve natural beauty.”  Slowed by securing letters of agreement with each state, such as this one with North Carolina, the first billboard didn’t come down until 1971.

This was when Bill Johnson began his famed career as an environmental engineer at NCDOT, serving under Democrats and Republicans alike and forging North Carolina’s famed wildflower, tree planting and scenic byways programs.

Long before smartphones did, the highway beautification act created the exit logo sign program to make billboards irrelevant.  But relentless billboarders set out immediately to circumvent the beautification act to which they had agreed.

In 1978, a report by the General Accounting Office reported that “in many States, motorists still cannot see significant improvement but despite efforts by billboard companies to undermine it, the Act was credited with reducing the number of billboards per 10 miles from 33.5 to 9.8.

But billboarders pushed through federal legislation that year tying the hands of state and local governments from using zoning ordinances to remove and dinging taxpayers to clean up billboard blight even if they weren’t on federally-aided highways.

This created a sort of gridlock over billboards that continues today.

Again, a North Carolina highways chief and former mayor, Thomas W. Bradshaw Jr. was tapped to lead another inclusive 3 year analysis but repeatedly billboard interests and tourism allies in tourism were able to hamstring the group though a thoughtful report was delivered to the Reagan Administration.

It was further proof that many in tourism failed to grasp the importance of sense of place and scenic preservation, prompting many to ask “why does tourism kill the things it loves.”

President Reagan and his successors including President Obama have failed to enforce billboard regulations although Reagan supported an amendment proposed in 1986 that would have ended the gridlock the billboard industry had pushed for and won in 1978.

By the end of 1986, 22 years after the Beautification Act and 12 years after its implementation, 114,000 billboard had been removed but 320,000 had been erected.  The Billboard lobby and its allies defeated the new measure even though it had drawn support from both Reagan and the Sierra Club.

In states such as North Carolina, billboarders stalled by repeatedly agreeing to compromises but then using campaign contributions to renege.

Today, North Carolina has lost its place of leadership and influence on the issue of billboard blight both because the capacity of its roads agency has been all but eliminated or seduced and because North Carolina lawmakers now disregard agreements and enforcement of laws meant to curb blight.

Instead lawmakers here recently ignored the wishes of 8-in-10 North Carolinians by granted out-of-state billboard companies permission, free of charge, to clear-cut $5 billion of publicly-owned roadside forests and tripling the cut zone to make the blighting even more apparent.

Adding to the injury to taxpayers, many of those sacrificed are among the 5 million trees NCDOT environmental engineers had planted since 1970.  The measure has not been extended to interchanges and measures meant to even undermine control by local communities.

Proving that roadways are ecological in nature, today roadside environment engineers for the national highways system alone oversee forest acreage that is the equivalent of 14 national forests, enough alone to sequester 91 million metric tons of climate changing carbon.

Trees along the national highway system alone are enough to counter the carbon emissions of more than 30 coal-fired power plants.  They are equal to the entire forest canopy of Pennsylvania.

Roadside engineers clearly understand they are in the forestry business.

It has been 84 years since the nation’s chief highway engineer, an Iowan, publically condemned roadside billboards as “national disgrace” and called for them to be banned.

It has been 56 years since repeated scientific national and state opinion polls including Gallup have confirmed that the engineer’s sentiments are shared by more than 7–in-10 Americans.

Before It’s Too Late

The write-up in the local newspaper on May 24th did a nice job of putting Durham, North Carolina’s growth rate into perspective.

However, growth has never been a challenge for Durham.  According to the millennial census, the city was even the fastest growing of all major cities in North Carolina during the decade of the 1990s.

That was also a decade during which Durham’s community-destination marketing organization spearheaded a dramatic image turnaround among residents of neighboring Raleigh and Chapel Hill, clearing the way for transformation in some of Durham’s districts during the last decade.

For the nearly 25 years I’ve lived here, the clock has been ticking on what are Durham’s real growth-related challenges.

The state’s fourth largest city is shoehorned into a county of the same name with the state’s 17th smallest land area.  Approximately 30% of the city is covered by impervious surface and tree canopy here has shrunk to 40%.

A third or more of Durham County has been set aside in watershed, much of it without recompense so that nearby (and three-times-larger) Wake County could populate.  Durham County is already the fourth most-densely populated in the state and on track to become third over the next decade or two.

Durham’s challenge remains not to keep pace with its growth rate but instead to take long-ago delinquent actions to preserve its sense of place.

However, rather than becoming more strategic, Durham appears to becoming even more siloed and anecdotal.  Critical areas such as urban forest, historic preservation and open space are not being pursued holistically or with a sense of urgency.

Each should be indexed by now based on what is needed to offset growth factors such as sustainability, optimum density and impervious surface.   Instead there is evidence of denial.  These and other strategic needs are becoming even more trapped into anecdotal decisions.

It is good that local governments here are conscious of shifting from over-reliance on property taxes to fees and other funding tactics that could address growth.  However, their application seems siloed as well.

Good arguments were made for social justice when a $1.80 monthly trash fee was assessed on households but not on apartment complexes and businesses.  Winning the day was the argument that those excluded make other arrangements for pick up.

However, a strategic argument for assessing the fee across the board is that these dumpsters are also tremendous sources for litter that blows out into the community at large.  They are also in areas where recycling needs to be amplified.

The whole argument for selective fees brought to mind the myopic causes for the problems with deferred street resurfacing from which Durham just emerged at great cost.

Well-run cities and counties are not just about transactional leadership and day-to-day operations.  We also need these organizations to worry about tomorrow.

With glaring exceptions for general upkeep and appearance, Durham local governments are exceptionally well-managed.  But in my opinion, they aren’t worried nearly enough about “tomorrow.”

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?

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.

First Glimpse At A North Carolina “Roadside” Best Practice

I first put eyes on North Carolina 23 years ago this month and through what turned out to be a fortuitous mistake my first glimpse included a 40-mile span of I-40 roadsides that illustrated both the desecration and blight created by outdoor billboards and the sublimeness of their absence.

I flew in to RDU to interview as the start-up CEO for Durham’s first-ever official community- destination marketing organization (DMO) but I was picked up at the airport by an old friend from Washington state,  Dave Heinl.  He and I first got our start in destination marketing in the 1970s, he as director of sales in Seattle, west of the Cascades and I in the same position for Spokane in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains to the far east.

Waiting our turns to make competing presentations to host large conventions back then had given us time to become acquainted and earn one another’s respect in both victory and defeat.  Yes, occasionally much smaller Spokane would prevail and I was asked to lead that DMO.

Having successfully transformed it into a stand alone organization, I went on to head the DMO in Anchorage for most of the 1980s while Dave headed off to similar positions in Hartford and Portland, Oregon before jumpstarting the one in Raleigh, a post from which he eventually retired a few years before I did from the post in Durham two years ago, more than two decades after accepting that position.

He was excited to pick me up at the jointly-owned airport located midway between the two very distinct cities because he anticipated correctly that I would be a good fit for Durham and we both wanted to catch up.  Busy pointing out assets that had been claimed by Raleigh but really belonged to Durham, Dave missed the turn for I 40 onto the Durham Freeway that would've taken me downtown to my hotel.

We were so busy talking as we traversed across southern Durham that Dave also didn't detect that I 40 W had just opened and we were halfway to Greensboro before we realized it and turned back.  I realize now that Dave’s preoccupation and oversights that day gave me the perfect “with and without” introduction to the state’s struggle to protect its roadside view sheds and vaunted sense-of-place from billboard blight, one that continues to this day.

As we turned around in Burlington to head back to Durham I saw a worst-case example in that otherwise delightful little town of what happens along an interstate that is undefended from the excesses of billboards and development without regard to sense of place.  It remains the perfect example of what not to do and how precarious sense of place is in a scenic state such as North Carolina.

The effort that ensured that I 40 through southern Durham remains a spectacular “best practice” example of what can happen when roadsides are protected began in the mid-1980s, four years before I arrived here, with the encouragement of the Durham Chamber of Commerce, which ironically and inexplicably but unsuccessfully tried a few years ago to aid the overturn of Durham's nearly 30-year-old ban on billboards.

Ironies such as that illustrate the importance of organizational memory to insulating sound decision-making from he whims of powerful special interests.  This was illustrated again just last year when so many proposals in the legislature appeared ignorant of Section 5, Article XIV of the North Carolina State Constitution and the voter-embedded policy “to preserve as a part of the common heritage of this State its forests, wetlands, estuaries, beaches, historical sites, openlands, and places of beauty.”

Back in 1984, as a very forward-thinking Durham City Council was first enacting a communitywide billboard ban, a jointly City-County-established planning committee of Durham residents was working to successfully create what is called a Major Transportation Corridor District or overlay to protect the roadsides of I 40 as it was then planned to dissect the southern portion of this community (351.8642 in the Durham Main Library.)

The committee was chaired by Barbara V. Smith, a Duke development executive, who would later serve as the chair of my DMO’s governing board and still lives here at The Forest at Duke.  Her committee included recently retired 30-year Durham County Commissioner Becky Heron, who also went on to serve on my governing board, as well as City Council member and Republican Jane Davis, who spearheaded the citywide billboard ban.

In consultation with land owners along the route of the proposed I 40 through Durham, the committee successfully spurred local legislation that prohibited billboards on that stretch, but also established very effective screens including trees, setbacks, landscape standards, sign standards and other elements to also preserve and protect environmentally sensitive and historical assets.

Drive that stretch of I 40 through Durham today and less than 40 miles from the desecration seen as the highway passes through Burlington, you will see how all roadsides in North Carolina could, should, and hopefully will one day look throughout the state of North Carolina.

It is on the shoulders of visionaries such as Barbara, Becky, Jane and other members of that committee and that far-sighted, mid-1980s City Council and Board of Durham County Commissioners that many of us in a statewide organization called Scenic North Carolina stand today in defense of North Carolina's public roadsides as NCDOT moves to permit clear cutting of hundreds of thousands of publicly-owned trees by the outdoor billboard industry.

The legislation enabling this give-away is also a direct attempt to override and violate local values and standards along state roadways as they pass through cities and counties and a disgrace to the North Carolina Constitution.

Strategic Planning Is Organic, Not One-And-Done

I've created a few strategic blueprints and supervised the process for others during my now-concluded career in community-destination marketing management.  So I understand a little bit about what a Herculean effort it must've been, even with consultants to produce strategic plans recently for both the City of Durham and Durham County.

I remember how stunned I once was when a consultant told me that the plan I had written and supervised in 1992 and then updated each year for a much smaller organization was recognized internationally as best practice.  I also remember how stunned he was to learn it had been produced internally.

I was even more stunned when he told me in front of my governing board at the time that it would have cost $100,000 or more if you import done externally.

Of course the strategic plans produced for the City and County are not nearly as in depth as the one with which I was so closely involved  because it was a much tinier and more narrowly-focused organization but also in my view the City’s and County’s are sub strategic plans sandwiched between the overarching Durham Comprehensive Plan and soon-to-be created tactical plans for each of the 20+ agencies that make up each of these large organizations.

As I thoroughly read and enjoyed the individual plans for the City and County which have been accepted/adopted by their respective governing bodies, I hoped that enough flexibility had been built in to the process for the management and staff of these organizations to infill things that are always overlooked in any process of this size.

Plans such as these should be organic anyway.  Even though by nature they are multiple-year plans, they are much stronger and improved if small modifications can be made ongoing rather than one-and-done.

For instance, it is probably just an oversight that Keep Durham Beautiful and the Durham Appearance Advocacy Group were not included under the excellent list of community partnerships that were begun near the end of the City plan.  I also see “appearance” listed as a priority in the SWOC section (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, challenges – more typically referred to as threats in private sector plans – or SWOT) but seemingly not addressed in the action portion.

It may be just my take but ironically, it seems that infrastructure has been broadened to include “green” infrastructure in the older, bigger-picture Comprehensive Plan but may still be somewhat limited to traditional references in plans specific to the City or County.

A helpful addition to each plan for residents might be to modify the respective mission statements so that the inherent division of effort between the City and County is more apparent.  This would particularly help those who are under the mistaken impression that the the organizations are unnecessary duplications.

It would be a shame and a waste of time if small details like this can't be remedied without going back through City Council, which for a governing board is far too involved in day-to-day minutia.

I was pleased that both plans include visitors as external stakeholders and customers, something overlooked by many communities.  I was also impressed that both plans included a central role for communications and marketing and that things such as community image and pride were mentioned.

I was also pleased to see both plans include a statement of core values, especially one in the County’s plan about “building consensus through give and take.”  Had that value existed during my now-concluded career, I would not only have far fewer tire tracks up my front and backsides, but many win/lose decisions would have been more win-win with even better results.

It is a little puzzling that these two plans don't more explicitly connect the dots back to the equally excellent but much longer-term and bigger-picture Comprehensive Plan that is just completing a midcourse update and overarches both organizations.  I hope it's not a case of the overarching plan being “siloed” and that I'm just missing something.

An example would be the comprehensive plan’s goal and objectives for”Roadway Image” in Chapter 4, Community Character and Design.  There are places in both the City and County plans that could've easily tied back to the two areas in particular where residents have recently given the community negative scores on scientific surveys such as roadside appearance and communitywide wayfinding.

That same segment in the Comprehensive Plan seems to signal that expanding the Urban Tree Canopy, street tree replacement and buried utility lines should be noted in the individual strategic plan for each organization. These are just examples and of course related to passions of mine, but they aren't isolated.

I think the creation of these two strategic plans is a huge step forward and a real tribute to the many excellent public administrators who worked so hard to create them and many more who will now be expected to not only execute them, but keep them current.

Different Rocks- Deep In Any Community's True Personality

Geologically-speaking, Durham, North Carolina, where I live has a split personality. The majority of the land area within the urban growth boundary falls in what is known as a Triassic Basin.  As geologic time periods go this part of Durham was born about 200 million years ago during the era when dinosaurs first evolved from reptiles.

So while the incredible life-size replicas on the Dinosaur Trail at Durham's Museum of Life and Science may be from more recent eras, they are definitely symbolic of Durham's temporal personality or brand.  On the downside being located on a Triassic basin is putting Durham squarely in the bull's-eye for fracking.


Much of the northern part of Durham County, which includes one of the state’s most varied scenic byways and where I often take motorcycle rides, is underlain by what is known as the Carolina Slate Belt which is more than twice as old the Triassic part of Durham and is characterized by very primitive but diverse life forms such as trilobites.

Both formations provide Durham with its reputation for unique and unusual fossils.

For anyone tempted to go “one big region” on me, they should know that the Triangle is not only a family of diverse and distinct communities, but they also have “different rocks” with Durham sharing formations with its fellow- Metro Orange and Chatham counties and the Metro to the east underlain by formations such as the Raleigh Belt and the Eastern Slate Belt.

Reflecting their distinct personalities even today, much of Durham's geologic formation including Research Triangle Park and RDU are volcanic in a rift originating from the creation of the Atlantic Ocean while Raleigh’s were the result of intense pressure.  Sorry, the puns are irresistible.

It's too bad that so many people, including many in the news media, still seem to have such a superficial understanding about what a brand is and isn't, and usually believe that it is restricted only to the most shallow caricatures such as a tagline or advertisement.  In reality the community’s brand isn't about marketing.  But marketing should always be about the brand.

When it comes to a community’s brand or personality, it can never created, it must be distilled.  And that personality even includes a community’s geologic formation.  “Branding” isn't the brand itself, it is merely one of many elements of marketing that should be viewed and  used as a means to preserve and protect, and yes, promote the community's brand, it's innate, distinctive and temporal personality.

A community’s brand must reflect its deepest and most enduring traits and values, including both its inherent character, including flaws and its aspirations.  Absolutely every touch point and detail of a community's market should reflect it's brand or personality.

For example, if a community's personality values include a revulsion to outdoor billboards then not only should it’s official marketing organization refrain from using billboards either locally or in other communities or states where it may be pursuing potential visitors or newcomers or relocating businesses, but it should also advocate for other local businesses and organizations including hotels and restaurants to follow suit.

Similarly, if the community values green infrastructure such as trees and scenery, then it's marketing should first do no harm.

If an area’s marketing organization produces material or promotions that don't reflect that community’s truly inherent brand or personality and values, then that community would be much better off having no marketing at all.

Siloing Reflects Community Attention Deficit

Communities such as Durham, with innovation intertwined deep in their DNA, can, like humans, also suffer from attention deficit.  When I observe this, it reminds me of how an organizational behavior consultant helped me understand a trait that was inhibiting the success of one of my staff members in an organization I managed in another city nearly 30 years ago.

An organizational psychologist from RHR, a management consulting firm, helped me understand that a staff member of mine did not carry knowledge, experience or learning from one project to another as I wanted because he viewed each project as a silo.

Sometimes innovative communities suffer from what looks like attention deficit because they never seem to fully exploit the success of a project by populating it to the entire community and instead leave them stored or “siloed” while they hurry on to the next panacea usually accompanied by some related matching grant.

Neglect of roadsides and medians is actually one of only two areas where Durham's internal stakeholders give the community overall a negative rating in scientific surveys.  The other negative-to-positive ratio is for street signage and wayfinding.

Communitywide wayfinding was first proposed to the community in the mid-90s.  Impatient for officials to grasp a more holistic approach, and to his credit, the head of Durham's downtown advocacy organization and a friend successfully pushed wayfinding into a plan to update street amenities in one of his downtown neighborhood’s five districts.  It has slowly been populated to the other four but not communitywide where it is the most needed.

But as successful as wayfinding has been in that one tiny geographic area and as inexpensive as it would be now to populate throughout the city and county, community leaders have left it siloed there while other communities in this state and across the nation have leapfrogged them to a countywide approach.

One can speculate on the reason why communities silo projects.  Often there is a lack of an overarching strategic direction.  Instead, officials seem to become addicted to anger-fueled adrenaline fixes or grant-chasing and neglect to grasp that something successfully implemented in one area can be extended even more cost effectively to have an even greater effect communitywide.

As has been incorrectly surmised about roadway neglect, one might expect that negative resident opinion scores on Durham’s street signage and wayfinding might be driven by newcomers, especially because Durham is rated so highly and consistently as a place to live, work and to business as well as visit.

But that isn't the case.  While residents who have lived here three years or less give street signs/wayfinding a 3 to 1 negative to positive ratio with nearly 40% unsure, the percentage of residents who have been here 11 to 20 years show an increased negative rating up from 45% to nearly 60% and less than 25% are unsure.

The state transportation executive was definitely mistaken when he told me two decades ago that Durham didn't need a correction to some inaccurate signs because “anyone here already knew where they were going.”

Communities such as Durham with a highly irregular road pattern, a terrain of never-ending hills and dales and a heavy tree canopy, but with no singular defining features such as a broad river or mountains, are in desperate need of a coherent communitywide system of wayfinding signs that will also simultaneously eliminate up to half of existing sign clutter.

There are few if any other improvements that will make such a dramatic impact on the day-to-day lives of people who live in a community or commute to work or travel here to visit than coherent communitywide wayfinding.

For Durham the hard part has already been done.  Taking a solution that has already been show to be successful in one neighborhood and extending it throughout the community as a whole does not have to be as complex as noted last week by Emily Badger in Atlantic Cities.

And as my friend and fellow blogger Bill Baker recommended when he guided me to Badger’s post, Durham's need for communitywide wayfinding has already been identified in what he calls visitor readiness reports by Durham's official community-destination marketing organization as a top priority for increasing Durham's visitor-centric cultural and economic development.

For officials this means that populating Durham's wayfinding across the community will be self-funded by the growth it helps spawn to the nearly $40,000,000 that visitor spending generates each year in local tax revenues that are then split by the City and County.

This includes the nearly $4 million in City and County general funds that is clearly eligible to be used to fund wayfinding under North Carolina General Assembly guidelines for local use of revenues from a special tax paid by overnight visitors.