Local cooperation
"Republished with permission from The Charlotte Observer.  
Copyright owned by The Charlotte Observer."

Years-long effort cracks bureaucratic walls, saves money

Sometimes, government gets it right. And sometimes, when that happens, citizens and taxpayers barely hear about it. Consider this an effort to share news of a local success.

For years, the school system, park and recreation department, libraries, police and fire departments and other agencies went their own ways, buying land and building new facilities when and where they were needed, with little regard for other agencies. This led to such things as school gyms sitting empty on weekends in neighborhoods desperate for recreation centers. Most of us recognized this as nuts, but the bureaucracies involved seemed incapable of solving the problem.

In 1995, after years of local grumbling, the Charlotte City Council, county commissioners, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools and Central Piedmont Community College approved a joint resolution to set up a local "joint use" task force.

We joke about Charlotte's passion for committees, but in this case, the tactic worked. Six years later, more than 20 local agencies are taking part. The Joint Use Task Force meets monthly and has been directly involved in about two dozen instances of local agencies' sharing buildings or property. Some examples:

The new technical high school under construction on Alleghany Street will have, on campus, a shared school media center-public library.

A 20,000-square-foot "services center" to be built on North Tryon Street near Sugar Creek Road will offer a public library, a job-finding agency and a police station for the David 3 district. The building will be in the parking lot of an old Kmart, now being used as a charter school, and only a few blocks from a new elementary school on Craig-head Road.

Irwin Avenue Elementary School, an uptown magnet school, will have on its campus an indoor water park and family fitness recreation facility. Its gymnasium - a full-scale gym dating to the days when Irwin was Harding High School - is a recreation center with evening and weekend as well as daytime hours.

Plenty of other examples exist, and more are planned. Voter approval of the 1999 land banking bonds, engineered by county commissioner Darrel Williams, has boosted sharing efforts, since the agencies must talk to one another to be eligible for the bond money.