New Data Supporting the Value of Independents

During a stop to pick up my daughter and two grandsons in Salt Lake City during my recently-completed 6,100-mile road trip last month, a newly completed study caught my eye.

Using detailed surveys from local businesses and data gleaned from the annual reports of restaurant and retail store chains, the study contrasts economic impact on one particular district as well as on the metro.

Chain restaurants recirculate a little more than 30% of their revenue in the community and metro area from which they harvest their customers, including visitors, while independent restaurants recirculate nearly 79% of their revenue in the region.

Recirculation by independent restaurants intensified to more than 83% at the district level.

For retail stores, metro recirculation dropped below 14% compared to 52% by independent stores.  The Salt Lake City analysis is one of ten or more conducted in various communities over the last decade.

Local governments, such as the city and county in Durham NC, where I live, documented to have a very high proportion of resident attachment and loyalty and passion, must be vigilant to preserve and foster unique sense of place including local, independent enterprises.

This includes being incredibly discerning when incentivizing or facilitating developments with infrastructure.

Independent businesses, and not chains, are part of the fragile fabric that not only differentiates communities for visitor-centric economic and cultural development but are shown in studies as being pivotal to drawing and retaining the talent necessary to attract start-ups and other employers to creative centers such as Durham.

It is important to consider how much leakage or retention or recirculation is involved with each type of enterprise and to use that information to inform and guide good decisions and truly optimize local economic impact.

But it all starts with residents.  People, such as me, who personally value and understand the importance of sense of place, and yet are drawn to the convenience and sheer speed of online shopping, must realize that their consumer votes may be killing the very thing they love.

The route of my recent trip was populated with remnants of communities, large and small, a few that seem to have learned this lesson and thrive and many that haven’t and are either fading away or becoming indistinguishable as places.

Click on Sustain A Bull help sustain Durham independents or click on movement, click on the Institute for Self-Reliance to learn more about this movement across the nation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Infographic - Arctic Sea Ice Compared to 1979-2010 Average

Infographic - Wild Weather Swings Since 1970

The Cost-Effective Strategy Missing In Most Carbon Plans

Ambitious community plans to reduce their respective carbon footprints, such as the one for Durham NC, where I live, are typically missing what experts say may be “…the second most important thing we can do right now,” plant more trees, according to Jim Robbins, a journalist who writes news articles and books about science and the environment.

According to an inventory by Virginia Tech’s Metropolitan Institute, there are 156 local currently in place, 26 of which are comprehensive, 55 establishing policy and 75 dealing with climate change plans.

The most inexpensive and likely the most cost-efficient action a city and county such as Durham could take in the pursuit of the goal of reducing local government greenhouse emissions by 50% and community-wide emissions by 30% over the next 18 years is to fund urban forestry at a level consistent with the benefits provided by trees.

New and deeper research regarding trees, including studies conducted by organizations such as the Carnegie Institution for Science Department of Global Ecology, shows that forests have an incredible effect on global warming, far beyond where they are planted.

The studies suggest that urban forestry must be incorporated in sustainability planning and this includes aggressive measures to foster, encourage and maintain those trees that naturally regenerate.

Deforestation, even such as the clear-cutting being uselessly conducted along roadsides in North Carolina by out-of-state billboard companies, contributes not only global warming but also to drought.  Trees are not only a critical part of cooling the earth’s surface but also pivotal to the cycle that creates and sustains and regulates rainfall.

Killing trees creates a vicious cycle.  A recent study by the Carnegie Institution for Science on the dramatic loss of Quaking Aspen reveals that during drought die-offs, trees show a 70% loss of water conductivity.

Currently Durham only budgets about $6,000 each year to purchase on average about 350 trees for reforestation which just barely exceeds the average of over 200 that are removed each year due to damage or disease etc. for net reforestation of about 150 trees.

Even when the Durham forestation budget is augmented by another $4,000 from Parks and Recreation (highly constrained to a few neighborhoods), something just doesn’t compute.

The amount being reinvested here in urban forestation is totally inconsistent with the $162,000 value per tree reaped over a fifty-year lifetime in ecosystem services (188 times the purchase price) and even more if the right species are planted and maintained in the best possible locations.

And Durham isn’t even tracking how many trees are being subsumed each year or have been lost historically to development although that information could probably be mined from development site plans or other documents and probably numbers in the tens or hundreds of thousands.

Such a metric should be available to help inform funding and residential and commercial incentives for reforestation and afforestation (planting where they haven’t already existed) in numbers that will significantly increase carbon sequestration and more than compensate for the loss of forest infrastructure.

A good first step is the funding of an Urban Forestry Strategic Plan such as one advocated by Durham’s Urban Forester, an example of which can be found at this link for Santa Monica, CA where even the original developers in 1875 appear to have grasped the importance of forest infrastructure.

A plan for Durham could include deployment of well-proven technology utilized to much more accurately measure not only tree canopy but the amount of area under development and used for roadways or parking lots as well as to identify tree deserts in low income areas and areas that could be used for reforestation.

Of course urban forestry here spearheads a process below the national average of one tree planted for every two that naturally regenerate.  The survival rate for naturally regenerated trees is probably around 1 in 20 based on a recent study.

Unfortunately, unless incented otherwise, many of the trees planted residentially or commercially are invasive species that are not large enough or of the type that will yield the full benefits trees can yield while crowding out those that do.

The value of trees, including the nation’s 3.8 billion trees found in urban areas, becomes more apparent every day as revealed by scientific inquiry.  This far transcends the huge contribution they make to the aesthetics important to property values and sense of place, leveraged into economic development such as tourism.

It includes crime reduction, healthy immune systems, energy savings, water management, removal of toxins, soil and water remediation, prevention of soil erosion and biodiversity to name just a handful.

According to the evidence put forth in the fact-filled and insightful book Robbins published earlier this year, Durham’s forestry plan should include:

• Restoration forestry far in excess of what has or will be deforested by development, going forward and back 30 or more years
• Reforestation or afforestation of low income neighborhoods including neighborhood streetscapes
• Incorporating forest infrastructure along with other types of infrastructure as part of urban and suburban developments
• Afforestation incentives to encourage planting of trees where they have not existed historically or recently
• Agroforestry to marry agriculture and forestry to the benefit of both
• Use of trees as a much lower cost alternative and more effective approach to removal and remediation of toxins including polluted storm water

But there is no benefit from trees more critical than carbon sequestration, valued in a recent study of roadside trees as 16.6 million metric tons per acre, per year which is why they should be included in every local plan to reduce or mitigate a community’s carbon footprint.