Increased ferry tolls would be delayed yet again under a provision contained in a budget technical corrections bill tentatively approved by the House. The ferry toll issue, after receiving substantial debate over budgets passed this year and last, wasn’t even mentioned during House floor debate on Wednesday night. It remains unclear whether the Senate will go along with the House, which had opposed the higher ferry tolls in its proposed budget. The budget bill approved last week moved ahead with plans to increase the number of coastal ferry routes subject to tolls, while keeping ferries between Ocracoke and Hatteras islands and those connecting Knotts Island with mainland Currituck County free and delaying tolls for a ferry linking Cherry Branch and Minnesott Beach. That budget provision also said that Gov. Beverly Perdue’s executive order halting ferry toll increases was not to be in effect. The latest provision drops that language.

(THE INSIDER)
06/28/12

The public is invited to an informational session Tuesday on the “Moving Mooresville Forward 2017” initiative, sponsored by the Town of Mooresville, the Mooresville-South Iredell Chamber of Commerce and the Mooresville-South Iredell Economic Development Corporation.

The session is from 9-11 a.m. at the Charles Mack Citizen Center.

The initiative began last summer as community business and non-profit leaders joined area residents to begin crafting a vision of Mooresville’s business and quality-of-life landscape for the next five years.

The plan is also an extension of the 2006 Mooresville-South Iredell Comprehensive Economic Development Strategy.

Monday night, town commissioners will get a first glimpse of the renewed Moving Mooresville Forward 2017 initiative, when Mayor Miles Atkins, Chamber President Kirk Ballard and Economic Development Director Robert Carney make a presentation during their 6 p.m. board meeting at Town Hall. The three leaders will announce the creation of an independent leadership team designed to provide oversight for the program.

The leadership team will be headed by Jeff Steiner, owner of the Five Guys Burgers and Fries franchise in Mooresville. Steiner is a former executive in the motorsports, technology and land-use planning fields.

“Because the plan crosses several government and community organizations we felt we needed an independent team to hold us all accountable for its implementation and reports the progress to the citizens of Mooresville,” Atkins said.

Moving Mooresville Forward 2012 consists of five key initiatives, described by Atkins as:

* Economic Development – growing the local economy and tax base by focusing on new business recruitment and existing business retention and expansion;

* Small Business Enterprise – creating an environment that embraces entrepreneurship and provides appropriate resources to enhance the chances for success of new businesses within the community;

* Workforce Development – creation of educational curriculums that support the needs of new and existing employers as our business community expands;

* Transportation Planning – advanced planning of infrastructure to support strategic growth; and

* Quality of Life & Business Climate – active engagement of citizens in maintaining and enhancing the quality of life throughout the growth of our town including parks, neighborhoods, visual appeal of the town, and connection between the lake side and the town side of the community.

By: MOORESVILLE TRIBUNE STAFF
(Mooresville Tribune)
Published: June 14, 2012
Updated: June 18, 2012 – 10:34 AM

In the 1950s, the five-story brick Asheville Hotel in Asheville, North Carolina, started to fall into decline, presaging what would happen to most of the city’s downtown over the next couple of decades. A department store moved into the ground floor while everything above it sat empty. Then the building got one of those ugly metal facades that’s designed to distract from the fact that all the windows are boarded up. Here’s what it looked like in the 1970s, by which time it was completely vacant:

Twenty years later, the local real-estate developer Public Interest Projects set its sights on the building for a mixed-use retail and residential property. Local bankers and businessmen said they were foolish. No one wants to live downtown, they said. And so no one was interested in financing the project. Public Interest Projects went ahead with its own money and turned the building into this:

“Usually people like to see these before-and-after pictures of buildings,” says Joe Minicozzi, the new projects director at the firm who has now made something of a traveling road show with these photos. “And then we have the chaser of castor oil called economics.”

Minicozzi at this point starts pulling out bar graphs and land-use maps and property-tax calculations, because he’s not necessarily trying to make a point about the Asheville Hotel as much as he is about the fundamental math problem posed by modern cities in America.

In its vacant state in the 1970s, the Asheville Hotel didn’t contribute much to the public coffers. Today, though, that same parcel of land is responsible for exponentially more property tax revenue that helps pay for police, parks and city streets.

We tend to think that broke cities have two options: raise taxes, or cut services. Minicozzi, though, is trying to point to the basic but long-buried math of our tax system that cities should be exploiting instead: Per-acre, our downtowns have the potential to generate so much more public wealth than low-density subdivisions or massive malls by the highway. And for all that revenue they bring in, downtowns cost considerably less to maintain in public services and infrastructure.

“We really are kind of preachy, because we know it works,” says Minicozzi, who has performed similar tax studies in 15 cities across the country. “And the reason we know it works is because cities have been here forever. That’s all we’re saying: think urban. When I talk with people about urbanism, we as hairless apes have lived in these things called cities for thousands of years. Now over these last 40 years, we think we don’t need them any more?”

So, broke cities: Need money? If you’ve got underutilized buildings in your downtown, do anything you can to fix them up, because that’s where your wealth comes from. This is Minicozzi’s first lesson.
This property, an old JCPenney in downtown Asheville, sat vacant for 40 years before Minicozzi’s firm bought and remodeled it:

It’s now home to a beauty salon in the basement, retail on the ground floor, offices on the second floor and 19 condos above. In 1991, the taxable value of this vacant building was just $300,000. Now, this property that sits on one-fifth of an acre is worth $11 million.

The really interesting math, though, comes not when we compare derelict buildings to their refurbished selves, but when we look at unsung half-block offices alongside what we think are our big municipal money-makers: vast hotels, malls, big-box stores.

Asheville has a Super Walmart about two-and-a-half miles east of downtown. Its tax value is a whopping $20 million. But it sits on 34 acres of land. This means that the Super Walmart yields about $6,500 an acre in property taxes, while that remodeled JCPenney downtown is worth $634,000 in tax revenue per acre. (Add sales tax revenue, and the downtown property is still worth more than six times as much as the Walmart per acre.)

We look at miles-per-gallon, not miles-per-tank, because tanks come in all different sizes. We should look at buildings, Minicozzi argues, the exact same way.

This is the cognitive blinder we bring to the economics of land use: We tend to compare buildings to each other, without looking at their unit value. This would be like comparing the fuel economy of the tank of a Ford F-150 to the tank of a Prius. We don’t shop for vehicles that way, because that makes no sense. We look at miles-per-gallon, not miles-per-tank, because tanks come in all different sizes. We should look at buildings, Minicozzi argues, the exact same way.

“As a community, if you have a finite limit of land, would you want $6,500 or $20,000, or $634,000 downtown an acre?” he asks. “I tell people, ‘What would you rather grow: wheat, soybeans or marijuana?’ People understand that cash-crop concept, so why aren’t we doing that downtown?”

This concept is true everywhere. In Raleigh, for instance, it would take 600 single-family homes on a 150-acre subdivision to equal the tax base of the 30-story Wells Fargo Capitol Center downtown. And it sits on 1.2 acres of land.

All of this is also just looking at the revenue side of the ledger. Low-density development isn’t just a poor way to make property-tax revenue. It’s extremely expensive to maintain. In fact, it’s only feasible if we’re expanding development at the periphery into eternity, forever bringing in revenue from new construction that can help pay for the existing subdivisions we’ve already built.

Minicozzi made some of these calculations in a study of Sarasota, Florida. A downtown 357-unit multi-family complex on a 3.4-acre site there, he found, pays off its infrastructure in three years. A suburban subdivision on a 30-acre site will take 42 years to pay off. After two decades, that downtown multi-family complex will have made the city $33 million in net revenue. The suburban subdivision will still be $5 million in the hole.

“The thing is it all works fine when you have all this new growth and the new gap is met by all these new permit fees – that’s like free money,” Minicozzi says. “But if you and I go out and just keep eating McDonald’s french fries, we’re going to feel full, but is it providing enough sustenance for us?”

Cities everywhere are experiencing the collapse of that model now. But not many have caught on yet to the solution Minicozzi is talking about. If we look at the per-acre value of our land, and where that land is most valuable, cities could generate wealth not by raising taxes, but by better exploiting the economics of land use.

Downtown Asheville has been a windfall for the city since developers began reinvesting there, starting with the Asheville Hotel. This is how the taxable value of the property there has swelled in just 20 years:

The whole idea is pretty simple. But it’s sort of baffling that we haven’t been looking at our land this way for years. Cities, Minicozzi laments, are woefully ignorant about exactly which types of neighborhoods and development put the most financial strain on public coffers and which kick in the most money. This is why Minicozzi has been deploying every metaphor he can think of – cash crops, gas tanks, french fries! – to beat home the math.

His colleague Joshua McCarty has developed one other trick that could change how we look at our cities. This a three-dimension map of the property-tax value of downtown Asheville:

Those tall buildings aren’t necessarily tall in real life (the green ones are taxable, the red ones are not). But they’re the real money-makers for the city. That five-block wide low-slung green building on Spruce Street is in fact a 12-story Renaissance Hotel. But, per acre, those little office buildings across the street are actually kicking in more tax revenue. To get back on sound financial footing, cities ought to start looking at all their land this way.

by
Emily Badger
(The Atlantic Cities)
Mar 30, 2012

The rush to reach agreement on a city budget led to an awkward encounter between Mayor Anthony Foxx and Councilman Andy Dulin Thursday.

Mayor Foxx met with members of the media to outline the city’s capital needs.
Following the presentation, WBTV’s Melissa Hankins was interviewing Republican Councilman Andy Dulin to get his thoughts on what should be eliminated from the budget.

While Dulin was speaking about the need to eliminate wasteful spending, Foxx appeared and put his arm around Dulin.

“Hey you want to come upstairs and talk about this?” Foxx asked.

“I’d love to…I’da love to have been upstairs to talk you a little while ago,” Dulin retorted.

“C’mon, let’s go…we can go right now,” was Foxx’s response.

Foxx has called a special meeting of city council for Monday at 1:30 p.m. at the Charlotte Mecklenburg Government Center.

The mayor has scheduled a special meeting Tuesday morning at 8 a.m. in case he vetoes any portion of the budget on Monday.

Foxx said even through the economic downturn the city’s population has continued to grow exponentially through the recession and the city must respond to that growth by coming up with a solid capital plan for investment.

The mayor says the city needs to boost public safety funds due to more people moving into more sprawling areas creating longer response times for emergency services.

He also believes the city needs to spend more to relieve traffic congestion and to reduce rapidly rising commute times.

Republicans and Democrats have fought for months about tax increases. Two Republicans, Andy Dulin and Warren Cooksey, jumped to forfeit building and infrastructure plans.

“I’ve been very hesitant to start messing in other districts,” Cooksey said.

Council member LaWana Mayfield, represents an area where a lot of high-dollar projects were planned. Still, last week, she said she’d try to meet Barnes’ request to lose a few. Over the weekend, she changed her mind.

“There are very few projects in District 3 that are negotiable and I am not willing to shirk my responsibility to both District 3 and the city by not investing in an area that has invested in the city through their taxes for many years,” Mayfield wrote in a statement. “I will not say, ‘well this can wait.””

District One Rep Patsy Kinsey was another who said she’d try to come up with some project to cut by noon Monday. We asked what she came up with, and got no response.

But Kinsey has made it clear in the past that she won’t agree to eliminate the city’s plans for streetcar – a $119 million project Barnes says could go.

“There’s just not a lot of compromise I’m going to do on certain areas. Streetcar is non negotiable as far as I’m concerned. That’s a part of our community that’s been waiting for a long time,” Mayfield said.

He presented a budget scenario which would cut those expensive streetcar plans, a trail, a road maintenance facility, and a list of public/private projects, among other things. All in all, the scenario would shave $239 million from the city manager’s recommendation.

But it would still raise taxes by 2.5 cents. And Cooksey says he won’t vote for anything over 2.44 cents.

A city tax hike of 2.44 cents could be the magic number, though, because that is the same amount that Mecklenburg County will lower its tax rate, meaning property owners in Charlotte would see no increase in their joint city-county tax bill.

But, it will be difficult to get down to 2.44 cents if more council members don’t sacrifice projects.

Mayor Foxx did tell WBTV he is pleased by the progress he was making with other commissioners.

The next on-the-record budget vote is set for the June 25th council meeting.

(WBTV)
By Nick Needham

Townhouses and single-family homes are sprouting on old industrial sites in the heart of Southern California cities. In Florida, developers are coveting foreclosed golf courses in urban centers to put up new subdivisions. Builders in Texas are going after available land even near landfills for residential and retail development.

Why are the giants of the building industry, the creators for decades of massive communities of cookie-cutter homes, cul-de-sacs and McMansions in far-flung suburbs, doing an about-face? Why are they suddenly building smaller neighborhoods in and close to cities on land more likely to be near a train station than a pig farm?

A housing industry slowly shaking off the worst economic conditions in decades is rethinking what type of housing to build and where to build it. It’s a response to a new wave of home buyers who have no desire to live in traditional subdivisions far from urban amenities.

The nation’s development patterns may be at a historic juncture as builders begin to reverse 60-year-old trends. They’re shifting from giant communities on wide-open “greenfields” to compact “infill” housing in already-developed urban settings.

The market slowdown has given builders time to assess sweeping demographic changes that are transforming the way Americans want to live.

Young Millennials and older Baby Boomers are rejecting traditional suburban lifestyles in favor of urban living and shorter commutes. Many want to live near city centers so they can walk to work, shops and restaurants or take public transportation. They also prefer smaller homes because they’re single or have no kids and don’t want to spend their free time maintaining their homes.

“It’s the kids (ages 18 to 32), the empty nesters (Baby Boomers with no kids at home),” says Chris Leinberger, president of Smart Growth America’s LOCUS (Latin for “place”), a national coalition of real estate developers and investors who support urban developments that encourage walking over driving. “These two generations combined are more than half of the American population.”

The housing bust of the last five years hit hardest in subdivisions in remote suburbs, drying up financing for such development. At the same time, gas prices soared and so did environmental consciousness, giving consumers pause about living in distant suburbs away from services, jobs and entertainment.

California couple Maurice Turner and his wife, Preet Bassi, used to rent in the center of Anaheim. When they decided to buy, they found their choices limited at first.

“The majority of homes were single-family homes in the suburbs or older homes and multi-story condos in the city,” says Turner, administrative manager in a nearby city.

The 30-something professionals did not want to leave city neighborhoods and settle in a suburban subdivision. And they didn’t want to live in a multi-story condo building.

That was about the time Brookfield Homes, a leading developer of huge suburban subdivisions, began Colony Park — more than 500 single-family homes, townhouses and condominiums in Anaheim’s Historic District on a site that once housed industrial warehouses. Many of the townhomes are across the street from restaurants, entertainment and other urban attractions.

Turner and Bassi now live in a three-story, 1,700-square-foot townhouse where they and their neighbors make “a conscious effort to spend less time in your car commuting and spend more time in your neighborhood with friends, neighbors, family,” Turner says. “The urban environment was a big key to staying.”

Growth patterns shift

Developers are listening because the market has spoken loud and clear.

Latest Census data show that population growth in fringe counties nearly stopped in the 12 months that ended July 1, 2011, and urban counties at the center of metro areas grew faster than the nation as a whole, a USA TODAY analysis found.

Central metro counties accounted for 94% of U.S. growth, compared with 85% just before the recession and housing bust.

A recent Case Western Reserve University study found that Cleveland’s inner city is growing faster than its suburbs for the first time.

In January 2000, the highest price per square foot in the Washington, D.C., metro area was in the leafy suburb of Great Falls, Va., according to Zillow, a real estate research firm. Ten years later, townhouses in the hip and urban Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington were worth 70% more per square foot than property in Great Falls.

“These are the market signals we’re getting throughout the country,” Leinberger says. “The drivable suburban fringe is where the housing market collapsed — 80% of the collapsed market was there. It’s a classic case of the real estate industry overproducing.”

Most major builders have created “urban” divisions in the past five years to scout for available land in already-developed parts of cities and closer suburbs — even if it means former industrial and commercial sites or land that may require environmental cleanup.

This shift doesn’t mean the end of sprawling suburban subdivisions in onetime cow pastures and corn fields, but it does signal a notable change that could alter the housing landscape for years to come.

“There has been a huge shift, particularly in the last 10 years,” says Marie York, president of real estate consulting York Solutions in Palm Beach County, Fla., and a board member of the American Planning Association. “There’s an emphasis on walkability, an emphasis on health, an emphasis on commuting by bicycle … a shift away from blatant consumerism and the McMansion model.”

The shift is not temporary, says Gregory Vilkin, managing principal and president of MacFarlane Partners, a San Francisco-based real estate investment company building 170 units on the site of former parking lots and auto repair shops in South Lake Union, a new urban project in Seattle.

Vilkin headed one of the nation’s largest urban redevelopments while at the helm of Forest City Enterprises’ residential real estate division: Stapleton, a cluster of neighborhoods built on 7.5 square miles on the site of the old Stapleton International Airport in Denver. Developers built 11 units per acre compared with four per acre in traditional suburban subdivisions.

“I reject the premise that (the shift) is just because of the recession,” Vilkin says. “It’s no longer the American dream to own a plot of land with a house on it and two cars in the driveway.”

Adds Leinberger: “This is a structural change, not a cyclical downturn.”

Moving toward the center

Whether it’s temporary or a seminal moment in the nation’s development history, the housing bust and recession have prompted developers to set their sights inward. When property values drop, so does investment. And because values dropped the most on the outer edges of metro areas, developers are paying attention to sites they never considered before.

“It makes you not look at these large properties on the edge of the Earth anymore,” says Denise Gammon, president of the communities division of Florida-based Kitson & Partners. “There’s a dramatic shift going on.”

Gammon also worked on Stapleton, and Kitson hired her to develop their infill business. In Tampa, the company is building Bay Pines, which will have multi-family housing, hotel, grocery store and shops on 60 acres that once was the site of a mobile home park.

“It’s an area of Tampa that hasn’t seen new housing in 25 years,” she says. “The conventional model is obsolete. People are looking for something different.”

In California, KB Home built Primera Terra at Playa Vista, near Marina Del Rey, on the site of an old Hughes Aircraft site. The condos highlight energy efficiency, proximity to shops, parks and schools, and prices under $600,000 (no garages).

“It has drawn an incredible number of people,” says Steve Ruffner, president of KB Home Southern California. “People are very interested in technology in a home that’s not only good for the environment but saves them ownership costs —Energy Star, solar.”

Executives of Dallas-based Huffines Communities sensed a revolution was afoot after attending a builders’ show in Orlando in 2005 when they realized that investors were the dominant buyers of suburban housing — not consumers.

The company had nine so-called “master-planned communities” in the works that would go up on undeveloped land in outer suburbia.

“We sold six and kept three,” says Robert Kembel, Huffines president. The company redeployed its capital to redeveloping sites in cities. “If people prefer to live closer to the jobs center, the pricing you can command is higher and there’s less competition,” Kembel says.

Huffines is developing Viridian, 5,000 units on a 2,300-acre site in a flood plain near a landfill in Arlington, Texas. The project required lengthy and costly cleanup and wetlands restoration measures.

“Developers who have the patience to go to the city or county and negotiate public-private partnerships to help mitigate huge costs, those are the guys who win,” Kembel says.

No time for big yards

Suburbia is changing, too.

Established suburbs such as Virginia’s Fairfax County, outside Washington, D.C., are building town centers that combine residential and retail on greenfields. Rapid transit lines are expanding through Tysons Corner, site of two shopping malls and headquarters of major corporations. Plans are for dense, high-rise development.

Even traditional communities built on greenfields are transforming. In Southern California’s Inland Empire, an area where housing prices are lower and appeal to first-time buyers, Brookfield is building Edenglen in Ontario. The homes are built on smaller lots — 4,500 square feet instead of the more conventional 7,200 square feet — and priced from $200,000 to $300,000.

“We’ve seen a lot of single females, single males, couples without kids,” says Carina Hathaway, vice president of marketing. “They don’t really have time to maintain huge yards.”

But Kembel predicts infill development is the wave of the future. Military bases that have shuttered offer huge opportunities, and so do old subdivisions built when sprawling suburbia was born in the 1950s and 1960s, he says.

“For the first time in history, Americans have stopped pushing development to the edge,” says Robert Lang, professor of urban affairs at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas and author of Megapolitan America. “The shift is from the old crabgrass frontier to the new Main Street.”

By Haya El Nasser, USA TODAY Updated 5-21-12

Republican state lawmakers on Wednesday took quick and decisive steps toward repealing annexations in the works by Wilmington, Southport and other municipalities across the state and making it more difficult for cities and towns to annex residents involuntarily.

Two separate annexation bills were approved by two state Senate committees on Wednesday – the opening day in this year’s short legislative session. The bills were expected to be considered by the full, 50-member Senate as early as Thursday. The House also would have to approve them.

One bill would repeal annexations of nine areas across the state, including the Monkey Junction annexation by the city of Wilmington and Southport’s annexation of two adjacent areas. Under the legislation, Wilmington and Southport couldn’t attempt to take in those areas again for 12 years.

The other measure would modify state law to require a simple majority vote of registered voters inside a proposed annexation area to turn back an annexation attempt, making it easier for residents to thwart annexation attempts by municipalities.

“It effectively ends forced annexation, period,” said state Sen. Thom Goolsby, R-New Hanover, who supports both bills.

The proposed legislation wouldn’t stop voluntary annexations by developers or other property owners who want to become part of a municipality.

Both bills are opposed by the N.C. League of Municipalities and other proponents of the rights of cities to annex.

Kelli Kukura, a lobbyist for the League, wrote in a letter to senators that an annexation election that didn’t allow existing city residents to vote would allow a determined minority of residents of an area to kill an annexation favored by the majority. She agreed that the measure would “virtually stop all city-initiated annexations.”

“This is patently unfair to our current city residents,” Kukura wrote in a letter to senators. “At a time when our economies are struggling to regain solid footing, this decision will drastically reduce the quality of life for city residents, will subject city taxpayers to rising tax bills and will make North Carolina less attractive to business owners and innovators.”

The proposed referendum vote would replace the petition process enacted as part of last year’s annexation reform legislation. That process, which required 60 percent of property owners to sign petitions to nullify annexations, was successful in denying annexations across the state last year, including the Monkey Junction and Southport-area attempts. But a Wake County Superior Court judge recently deemed the petition process unconstitutional after several cities sued the state challenging it. That decision led Wilmington to declare the Monkey Junction annexation effective and begin providing police and other services to residents and businesses there.

State Rep. Susi Hamilton, D-New Hanover, who opposes both bills, said existing city residents should have a say in whether nearby areas should be annexed because they carry the tax burden for those who live just outside the city limits but use city roads and other amenities.

But a Republican bill sponsor made it clear that only registered voters of the annexation areas and not the whole municipality would be allowed to vote.

Dallas Woodhouse, state director for the conservative group Americans for Prosperity, said the bills should send a clear message to cities that sued over the new annexation laws not to mess with the Republican-controlled General Assembly, which has the power to draw municipal boundaries.

“It should be a humbling defeat for (Wilmington Mayor) Bill Saffo,” Woodhouse said.

But Sen. Bill Purcell, D-Scotland, warned that eliminating cities’ annexation powers could lead to declining cities that become a burden on the state.

“Each of these bills nibbles away at the various authorities that keep cities healthy,” he said.

In other first-day developments at the General Assembly:

Vehicle inspections
A transportation committee Wednesday decided not to recommend exempting the three newest model-year vehicles from state safety and emissions inspections, meaning it’s likely dead for the short session.

Sen. Bill Rabon, R-Brunswick, said the proposal still needs work.

Supporters of exempting the inspections said it would save motorists with newer cars money when they might need it most. Opponents argued that not requiring inspections could pose dangers on the roads harm the small businesses that perform the inspections.

Bills introduced
Legislation introduced Wednesday included:

House Bill 947 would provide $50,000 payments for the living victims of the state’s former eugenics movement, which sterilized residents against their will during parts of the 20th century.
House Bill 962 would eliminate increased ferry tolls from the state budget until at least July 2013.

Spotted in the hallway
Pender County Sheriff Carson Smith was in town for the annual sheriffs’ day at the General Assembly. Smith said he hopes lawmakers address the issue of metal theft, particularly copper. He said bills are being considered that would require buyers of metal to have permits or a waiting period before metal can be destroyed by buyers. That would give police more time to investigate thefts before the evidence is destroyed.

“As far as property crime, it is our biggest problem,” Smith said.

Former state Sen. Patrick Ballantine also was seen around the legislative complex. Ballantine, who represented New Hanover County in the state Senate for a decade before running for governor in 2004, is now president of Wilmington-based Ballantine Co., a lobbying and consulting firm.

He said he has a few lobbying clients and is looking for more.

“Just trying to get established,” he said.

Ballantine has no plans to run for office again.

“My wife would vote for my opponent if I ran for anything,” he said.

By Patrick Gannon
Published: Wednesday, May 16, 2012 at 8:01 p.m.
Last Modified: Wednesday, May 16, 2012 at 8:01 p.m.

Greenville leaders last week presented the city’s legislative initiatives to the area’s local legislative representatives for the May 16 State Legislature short session.

Sen. Louis Pate, a Republican, and Democratic Reps. Marian McLawhorn and Edith Warren heard from Mayor Allen Thomas, Interim City Manager Thomas Moton and City Attorney David Holec, who researched and drafted the initiatives for the city.

The city’s 2012 initiatives, adopted by the City Council April 12, are:

■Retention of the transportation fund equity formula to assure that eastern North Carolina transportation needs are addressed: The formula, created in 1989, requires that State Transportation Improvement Program funds be distributed equitably among regions of the state.
The Equity Formula has allowed areas of North Carolina which are not within major urban population centers of North Carolina to address critical transportation improvement projects, Holec said.

There have been proposals to adjust the equity formula which are anticipated to adversely impact the eastern region, including Greenville, Holec said.

■Preservation of municipal revenue sources: In past legislative short sessions, proposals were considered which involved transferring municipal revenue sources to state revenue sources, Holec said.
“Cities are reliant upon these revenue sources, such as portions of the sales tax, to provide services to their citizens. This initiative, also submitted by the city last year, is to ensure that those revenue sources aren’t diverted to balance the budget, which has happened in the past,” Holec said.

There has been talk in Raleigh, for example, of reforming the municipal privilege license fee formula, an important source of local revenues, he said. If so, cities, would be required to either increase revenues or reduce services provided to citizens.

“If there is reform, there must be measures to make sure cities’ authority is protected, or at least for them to be held harmless,” Holec said.

■Preservation or enhancement of existing authorities to enter into public-private partnerships: House Speaker Thom Tillis established the House Select Committee on Public-Private Partnerships to examine the appropriate authority and methods for state, regional, and local governments to engage in regulated public-private partnerships.
“This is funding that governments at all levels need to engage in a consistent, predictable process for public-private partnerships so the private sector can dedicate substantial time and resources to develop economic projects,” Holec said.

Public-private partnerships have been successfully used by cities in the state to facilitate development and create employment. An example in Greenville is the partnership which resulted in the Greenville Convention Center and the improvements to the Hilton hotel, Holec said.

■Continuation or expansion of state funding of statewide and regional organizations that assist in economic development efforts: In a recent address to government and business leaders, Gov. Beverly Perdue said local entities must think regionally to produce the most effective economic development policies. With assistance from regional organizations like North Carolina’s Eastern Region Economic Development Partnership and The North Carolina Rural Center, municipalities have an opportunity to effectively plan for their economic future growth with an eye on regional connectivity.
The Rural Center has a focus on job-creation programs and receives funding from the state. North Carolina’s Eastern Region Economic Development Partnership previously received state funding on a recurring basis as a component of the state budget.

The city has received assistance from both organizations in funding, and the Eastern Region partnership has served as a resource for the city for assistance in recruiting business and providing advice on structuring economic development initiatives. Continued, and possibly expanded, state funding of these organizations will promote economic development, Holec said.

(Daily Reflector)
By Michael Abramowitz
Monday, May 7, 2012

The city of Monroe has been named one of the Top 10 Successful Aviation and Aerospace Clusters in the South for 2012 by Southern Business and Development magazine.

Monroe has worked to diversify its economy following the Sept. 11 attacks. In the past decade, the city’s economic development department has worked to create the state’s largest concentration of aerospace companies, with about 3,000 jobs and nearly $600 million invested by aerospace companies since that time.

Aerospace now accounts for 26 percent of Monroe’s manufacturing labor force.

“It is such an honor to continue to receive recognition as a national leader in aerospace,” said Chris Platé, Monroe’s executive director of economic development and aviation.

From staff reports
(Charlotte Observer)
Posted: Tuesday, May. 08, 2012
Modified: Tuesday, May. 08, 2012

Greensboro, NC — Mayor Robbie Perkins is one of six American mayors heading to Israel for the 28th annual Israeli Mayors Conference.

They will meet with 45 mayors from around the world.

Mayor Perkins says we have a strong Jewish community, and he hopes the visit will help him sell the Triad and North Carolina as a great place to live and bring jobs.

“We also have schools that when kids grow up they speak Hebrew in the schools,” Perkins said. “That’s unusual outside of the major metro areas and gives us an advantage, I think, for recruiting Israeli based companies.”

Perkins leaves tomorrow and returns next Friday.
He will stay in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and visit Nazareth.
The group has a meeting scheduled with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

(WFMY)
5:36 PM, May 3, 2012

RALEIGH — North Carolina’s state government revenues remain slightly above projections used in forming this year’s budget after the all-important April tax collections arrived.

The N.C. General Assembly’s top staff economist told legislative leaders Tuesday to expect $233 million more than was originally expected for the year ending June 30, with slight changes possible. Barry Boardman said the revenue surplus is the result of improved income tax withholding amounts from paychecks. The amount remains barely 1 percent above this year’s $19.7 billion budget.

Boardman said the executive branch agrees with this revenue picture.

Additional funds could be used to close a Medicaid shortfall this year and carried over to next year to handle other needs. The Legislature returns in two weeks to adjust the second year of the two-year budget approved last year.

(News & Observer)
Published Tue, May 01, 2012 09:13 PM
Modified Tue, May 01, 2012 09:14 PM