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It was an old-school meeting - very Charlotte old school. Forty or so attendees, each with a significant bottom line, gathered in an uptown room to hear about and presumably solve a crisis facing Charlotte's charities. The affluent cavalry, ready to rescue its city, again.
It was April, in the teeth of the recession. Michael Marsicano, president of Foundation For The Carolinas, had suggested the meeting to retired Bank of America CEO Hugh McColl Jr., who put out the word. That word, even now, carries great weight: The room was jammed with corporate executives and philanthropic giants. "I've never seen a meeting that was so filled by the players here," says one such player.
It has been, for decades, how much was accomplished in Charlotte - small groups of business leaders charting visions, fashioning solutions, launching arts efforts, sports franchises, city facilities. For better or worse, leading.
But perhaps, some worried at that April meeting, this was a last hurrah. Not a month before, while accepting a 2009 Vision award from Charlotte Center City Partners, McColl had jarred another uptown gathering by saying of Charlotte's big banks: "We no longer have two rich uncles we can turn to. It's time to let those days go - completely."
The "two uncles" line has since been on lips throughout the city - part rallying cry and part fret about the future. If those uncles won't be there for Charlotte, then who will?
"This is being talked about everywhere," says Marsicano.
The questions come as Charlotte welcomes its first new mayor in 14 years - and as the city adjusts to losing the headquarters of one of its two big banks, Wachovia. The other, Bank of America, is looking for a new CEO, prompting fears that it, too, might find a new home. All this has happened against the backdrop of the recession and devastation of the financial sector, which has drained significant income and wealth from the city.
Charlotte's leadership, however, had been changing long before this difficult year. Its once-local corporate giants had become global institutions, with far-flung interests demanding the attention of executives here. Its power structure - once a handful of business leaders - evolved into a diverse group of ethnic, religious and neighborhood voices that didn't always appreciate the benevolent attention of an uptown few.
All of which is what happens, experts say, when a big Southern town becomes a mid-sized American city. And so, at that April meeting, the 40 or so were grappling not only with the urgency of a nonprofit crisis, but the larger issue of how Charlotte will go about solving its problems. How would we move on from the rich uncles?
Because, says Marsicano: "Nothing has really replaced what was."
The Group
They were called The Titans or The White Guys or, simply, The Group. Two decades ago, they met outside uptown at the Lance snack food plant, where they would go through the cafeteria line, plot their city's future, then head out to bend the necessary ears and write the necessary checks to make it happen. Or so the legend goes.
Except, says the group's most prominent member, "There wasn't any damned group, truthfully."
That would be Hugh McColl, 74, who spends more time outside uptown now, including here, in a second-floor room at his Dilworth art gallery. He is, still, the name that's in the first breath of stories about how Charlotte was built - the bank exec who thought big picture but also walked the streets, thinking about details.
Son of a South Carolina farmer and banker, McColl took a bank trainee job here in 1959. It was, he says, "the most boring town. That was the first thing I wanted for Charlotte - whiskey by the drink." That didn't happen until 1978, when McColl was president of North Carolina National Bank.
Within a decade he was CEO and a member of The Group, which had first formed in the 1980s after First Union chairman Cliff Cameron saw a similar collection of elites on a trip to Pittsburgh. Such groups were not uncommon in post-World War II America, where business leaders in cities like St. Louis, Baltimore - and Charlotte - concluded that the old industrial focus on rail-centered transportation was not the path to prosperity.
Those leaders usually came from the cities' biggest businesses, like banks and power companies, says Clarence Stone, an author on city power structures. Often, there was a big department store in the mix, and bringing business to downtown was in the best interest of all.
In Charlotte, by the 1980s, the banks were on their way to becoming regional powers, and the city had entered a true boom. The Group first included McColl and First Union's Ed Crutchfield, along with Duke Energy CEO Bill Lee, Charlotte Observer publisher Rolfe Neill and others.
Memories differ now on exactly how often The Group met, or for how many years, but there's agreement that little actually was decided at Lance. What happened more often was that one member would call another with an idea to launch or problem to solve, and the pair would take a walk downtown for coffee and strategy. "We'd see something that needed to be done and, hell, we'd do it," McColl says.
When downtown railroad tracks needed to be abandoned so a convention center could be built, Duke's Lee made the calls. When the call went out to finance a possible NBA team or get a land deal done for an NFL team, McColl took the ball and ran. It was efficient, if not inclusive. "They ruled by money and insider influence," says Robert FitzPatrick, a Charlotte native and community organizer. "It was not by public participation. They didn't encourage that and they didn't respond to it very much."
Neill is unapologetic: "By having the top decision makers, you get instant decisions. Nobody goes to a committee. Nobody has to ask anybody's permission.... I don't think anybody could cite anything that we worked on that was malevolent or not in the public's interest."
It helped that a member of the group, department store magnate John Belk, also happened to be mayor of Charlotte from 1969 to 1977. Subsequent administrations also understood the value of working with the second decision-making body in town. Harvey Gantt, mayor from 1983 to 1987, remembers projects commonly being discussed at dinners and awards banquets. Richard Vinroot, who served from 1991-1995, remembers one cocktail party at the Charlotte City Club. McColl was there, and he expressed impatience about the city's lack of a transportation center.
"I said, 'Well, we've got some land to do it. We don't have the money to do it. We don't have the political will to do it.'" Vinroot remembers. "He said, 'Well, if you furnish the land, I'll furnish the money and we'll build it.'"
The extraordinary result: A $10million, privately constructed transit center on a $7 million piece of uptown public land.
Time of transition
For decades, such public-private collaboration was made easier by Charlotte's at-large municipal elections, with no district representation to pull in perspectives from the edges of the growing city. "The political players came out of the same socioeconomic group as the business leaders," says Schley Lyons, a longtime UNC Charlotte political science professor and dean. "The power was concentrated in Myers Park."
But as the banks and businesses grew - and Charlotte along with them - so did the divergence of voices that wanted to be included. In 1977, a referendum divided city council representation into seven districts, with four at-large seats. "When they did that, the governing body got a lot more diverse," says Lyons.
In turn, getting things done became more challenging for the business elite. Voters initially rejected bonds to expand the Mint Museum, start a coliseum project and, later, efforts to build an arena uptown. Charlotte began to wonder if power was shifting; after the first arena debate in 1997, county commissioner Hoyle Martin boasted that the uptown crowd failed because of its "bully tactics."
Still, what business wanted, business usually got. The Mint Museum expansion, coliseum project and uptown arena all eventually came to be, despite some continued public opposition. By the turn of the century, however, The Group was aging and retiring. At the banks, Ken Lewis emerged at Bank of America, Ken Thompson at Wachovia. They were not seen as the paternal leaders McColl and Crutchfield were, but Lewis was the force behind the Arts & Science Council and ImaginOn campaigns, and Wachovia brought a heralded PGA tournament and launched the new office and cultural complex on South Tryon.
Charlotte also was blooming with mid- to large-sized business successes, and those executives sometimes joined the bigger hitters at a still-exclusive leadership table. Allen Tate CEO Pat Riley remembers one meeting of 35 businessmen at the Park Hotel in the early 1990s. "It was something about schools, maybe bonds," he says. "It was, 'Who's in?'" He makes the motion of writing a check. "$10,000," he says. "The decision was made in 30 minutes, and we were out the door."
Business, however, was changing. Banks and other corporations had outgrown their local and regional footprints, becoming national and global institutions that commanded the attention of their executives. Nonprofit boards, which once boasted the presence of the McColls and Crutchfields, now settled more often for someone further down the flowchart.
The city, too, had changed - not only growing in population, but spreading that population into well-to-do neighborhoods away from uptown. Unlike northern cities, where suburbs tend to be outside the city limits, Charlotte developed Ballantyne and SouthPark and other communities that pulled power away from the central business district.
Those newcomers, and those neighborhoods, also had different ideas about how cities should operate, including an aversion to crosstown busing to achieve racial balances in schools. "These people were used to sending their kids to school around the corner or up the block," says Gantt. "And that caused a change ultimately in how we send our kids to school."
It is, say power structure experts, a natural phenomenon. Cities grow. People bring new ideas, different voices. Leadership fragments. "You don't have the same kind of very powerful, high-cohesion groups you had earlier," says Stone.
Many voices in the future
The windows, says Pat McCrory, might be what he'll miss most about the office. His was a corner view - south and southwest - from the 15th floor of the Government Center. For 14 years, Charlotte's mayor looked out at an uptown changing in subtle and visible ways.
What hasn't changed? People are still worrying about leadership, he says. When he took office in 1995, Bill Lee had retired at Duke Power. The other business titans were aging. The uptown crowd wondered: Who will lead?
Now, McCrory says, he hears the same wistfulness, the same worries about a future that is already here.
His advice: "Get your head out of the '70s."
For more than a decade, most major initiatives in Charlotte - including Johnson and Wales and the NASCAR museum - have been accomplished not only with the nods of the corporate leaders, but from teams of people tackling important issues and projects, he says. Those teams were small - usually 5-10 people - with interchangeable parts, sometimes clergy or legislators or, yes, someone from uptown.
This, says McCrory and others, is how Charlotte will inevitably move forward - not with one small table for the powerful to sit at, and not even with a larger table that invites others to the discussion, but with several tables - urban, suburban, faith, ethnic - that have a voice in Charlotte's future.
"The leadership of Charlotte entering the first decade of the 21st century will have to find additional partners within the private sector," says Clifford Jones Sr., pastor of Friendship Missionary Baptist, whose members include Gantt and Mayor Anthony Foxx.
Those partnerships will likely include the faith community, which historically helps combat the social ills facing growing cities - especially in a difficult economy. Neighborhood groups and grassroots organizations also will need a greater voice in decisions, most say, for those decisions to be sellable across the city.
"I think it's going to be less efficient," Marsicano says. But: "It's worth the price, because politically today we have to get a large majority of people on board."
But such consensus is difficult these days, many say, given how power in Charlotte has fragmented into islands of self-interest. "What seemed to happen was there was a pull-up-the-drawbridge mentality," says Mary Hopper, executive director of University City Partners. "It's almost as if the communities and the neighborhoods have become silos, taking care of their own areas."
Others despair at a more partisan political climate that hasn't spared Charlotte. "It astounds me that we can part along party lines on mass transit," says Loy McKeithen, a Charlotte attorney active in several initiatives since the 1980s. "Until Charlotte fixes that, we will suffer for it."
Who can bring the disparate interests together? Many point a hopeful finger toward Foxx, the leader most often cited in a recent Charlotte Observer survey about the future. Says Gantt: "As a city gets much more diverse, with all these different voices out there, we need - I don't want to call him a consensus builder, but somebody who can hear all those voices and fashion a political solution."
Says Foxx: "I think we're seeing Charlotte shift from a top-down style to a bottom-up approach in which the voices in the community will be strongly encouraged to be at the table."
Others point to a different kind of convener - one who can match vision with money, problems with problem solvers. Such leaders might naturally emerge from Charlotte's nonprofits, and at the top of several leadership wish lists is the head of Foundation For The Carolinas and its $725 million in assets.
Marsicano, the second most popular choice in the leadership survey, says bringing all the voices together will be difficult for any individual to do. "That's where the community foundation comes in," he says.
"Grassroots leadership doesn't have access to resources to make it happen. Corporate leadership can't do it alone in a politically viable way now. They need each other. The question people are asking is, how is this all going to come together?"
McCrory, at his 15th floor window late last month, says it's already happening. For decades, Charlotte has embraced and wrestled with newcomers, new ideas, new energy. When has the city not worried about what was next? "It's always," he says, "been a transitional time."
The money problem
A few miles away from that window, just outside uptown, Hugh McColl is doing business on his mobile phone. "I don't talk to anyone during Panther games," he instructs the caller. He hangs up. "It never stops, you know - raising money," he says.
And money, he says, is a problem now for Charlotte. The recession has taken a disproportionate amount of wealth from a city built on banking money. Everyone lost net worth, he says, including him. "By some staggering margin...," he says. "I don't have as much money to give away."
In the Observer survey of city leaders, McColl didn't make the top 10 of people expected to lead Charlotte in the next 10 years. But power, he told someone recently, is how many people show up at a meeting you call. In April, at the Foundation For The Carolinas, everyone showed.
McColl ran the event, but not "Marine style," he says. He wanted input from everyone on what could be done to stave a collapse of nonprofits, prompted by a United Way scandal and the recession. It's how solutions will have to come for Charlotte, he and others say.
"We can't look to those parent figures," says Emily Zimmern, president of Levine Museum of the New South. "We have to figure it out collectively."
Some are heartened by Charlotte's history of citizen activism - the revitalization of Fourth Ward began in the mid-1970s with the Junior League - and that Charlotte Memorial Hospital and the Mint Museum were built in the last great financial calamity, the Depression. "Innovation often emerges in a time of crisis," Zimmern says. "Somebody said that crisis is a valuable thing to waste."
As is the business crowd - says the business crowd. Just last week, Wells Fargo announced a $6million donation to help some struggling Mecklenburg charities. "These business leaders in the past, whether you liked them or not, whether they were a bunch of uptown white guys or not, they were committed, they led and they were effective," says Carroll Gray, president of the Chamber of Commerce from 1984 to 2005. "And somehow that capacity has to be reloaded."
McColl is encouraged by the emergence of the Levine family, Family Dollar store founders, who made sizable donations this year to rescue and sustain Mecklenburg's nonprofits. "That inspires other people to play," McColl says. It is, McColl knows, an old-school Charlotte solution - the affluent cavalry - and not long ago, that's what might have come out of a meeting like April's. But instead of a checkbook altar call, the group decided to form a committee, and out of that committee came the Community Catalyst Fund, which rewards nonprofits that come up with innovative ways to save themselves.
The fund has swelled thanks to gifts from the Levines and the Spangler Foundation, but decisions on distribution will be made by a group of diverse voices.
An old-school meeting, nods McColl. But: "The solution - totally new."
And messy, he acknowledges. And difficult. For at least 30 years, Charlotte largely looked to him and the business elite for its vision, its swagger, its emergency half-million dollars, its answers. Now, in this room, old and new leaders were discussing and disagreeing and, ultimately, deciding they wanted others to help, too. And in that, Charlotte was possibly forming another answer.
Who might replace the two rich uncles? No one. And everyone.
