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CHARLOTTE — From the 59th floor of the Bank of America Office Tower, one thing is instantly clear: Greensboro will never look like this.

For many people in Greensboro, that’s a relief.

It may not be our fate to build corporate towers, shiny metro trains, a wondrous football stadium and a tendency to mow down the past for an endless Tomorrowland.

But leaders here envy one thing about that city: Charlotte works.

Its government, business and nonprofit leaders can set a goal and reach it through creativity, professionalism and tenacity — traits that all too often fall short in Greensboro, many say.

As a result, Charlotte attracts more people, jobs and companies than many other cities in the nation.

Two bus loads of Greensboro leaders invited by the community development group Action Greensboro toured Charlotte earlier this week and talked to its leaders about the workings of a successful city.

“I’m just very excited about that attitude about what can be done. And I think that scales perfectly for Greensboro,” said Skip Moore, president of the Weaver Foundation, one of the groups that bankrolls Action Greensboro.

Greensboro’s often inefficient governing boards and reclusive major corporations also stood in stark contrast to Charlotte, many on the trip said.

Charlotte employs about 25 people on its city staff to identify property or businesses that need redeveloping. They seek them out and offer tax incentives that ultimately bring more tax dollars into the city budget.

“We’ve got to do a lot of talking,” Moore said. “One of the things I think the chamber and city manager and county manager said down there was that the community had high expectations for the government for development of the city there. And we have to have high expectations.”

Cecelia Thompson, executive director of the Guilford Green Foundation, which serves the gay, lesbian and transgender communities, admits that she is not entirely prodevelopment. But she wants to see Greensboro’s downtown flourish, and she wants to see good jobs for young people. And she is consistently disappointed with city and county government.
“They’re not aggressive and they’re more reactive rather than proactive,” she said.

Charlotte’s top city and county executives, business leaders and elected leaders meet monthly to talk about a wide range of issues, and they say they never stop talking until they find solutions to problems that might range from development rules to tax policies.

Greensboro and Guilford County have a long way to go before they’ll get there, Greensboro leaders say.

“And as long as we elect persons who are dysfunctional and lack professionalism, we will always trail more progressive communities,” said Bob Braswell, president and chief executive officer of Carolina Bank and chairman of the government affairs committee for the Greensboro Partnership, the parent group of Action Greensboro.

“To obtain the caliber of person that we need on any of our elected political bodies, there’s going to need to be radical change,” he said, “because a business person who has been trained in their respective profession and performs at a high level is not going to put up with the monkey business and shenanigans that some of our elected officials are famous for.”

“It’s true that we could always get a better handle,” said Kirk Perkins, chairman of the Guilford County commissioners. “We do have a little problem being reactive.”

But he points out that his board just passed a new economic-development policy suggesting that the county push new companies that want incentives to offer health insurance and day care for their workers.

The county has offered incentives to Lenovo, FedEx Ground and Polo Ralph Lauren in the past year.

Hugh McColl, the former chief executive of Bank of America and considered by many to be the bulldog who built Charlotte, spoke to the Greensboro group over lunch and told them that the city would not function without the aggressive work of executives from every company.

“We draft people to the team and make them welcome,” he said. “We treat everybody like they’ve been here 50 years.”
But the recruitment style is stern, he said.

“If you want to make it as an executive in this town you have to play,” he said. “You must. Or else you’re a nobody.”
Greensboro’s leaders have tried to recruit more local executives to pitch in, but it hasn’t been as successful. Top chiefs from such companies as RF Micro Devices, New Breed Corp., and many others keep a low profile.

“I know that there have been tremendous efforts and attempts by a variety of organizations to engage these folks,” Braswell said, “and for any number of reasons they have chosen not to. And that’s disappointing.”

Greensboro needs to make a better case to those executives and explain why they would benefit from becoming more involved.

“We’ve got to come together,” said Jeanie Duncan, president of the United Arts Council of Greater Greensboro. “I think there are plenty of us. We’ve got a good contingency of those kinds of people here. You’ll attract those people that are here into leadership positions if we demonstrate our ability to take action.”

Action takes a vision, McColl said. Like a road map, a city should not deviate from that if it wants to get somewhere, he said.

Greensboro has not done a good job of that either, Duncan and others say.

“It’s about trust, relationships, working together, creativity, perseverance, vision,” she said. “They’ve applied all of those things consistently for a couple of decades (in Charlotte.) And we’ve got to focus on those basic principles and reapply it over and over and over again to move our vision.”

Perkins wants the commissioners to meet regularly with the Greensboro City Council to hash out ideas that could become part of a plan for economic and community development.

Moore said a plan could begin with simple, practical goals.

“Even if we take X amount of area and we got somebody to go in and identify every piece of land two acres or more that is not fully developed and we begin to say, 'What can we begin to do to put something on this land that would raise the tax value of the land?’” he said. “Everybody’s talking about High Point Road. Nobody’s doing any planning on High Point Road. Let’s sit down and do something.”

The final impression for many on the trip was that Charlotte’s leaders are often more “professional” in demeanor than many in Greensboro.

“The collaboration, willingness to negotiate and brainstorm — it was just such an interesting group of people,” Thompson said.

In contrast, Thompson said, some local officials didn’t appear to her to catch the same enthusiasm from the trip.

“Even on our bus there wasn’t an excitement ... between people,” she said. “We had city and county government leaders on our bus and I thought they would be going up and down the aisle surveying people and saying, 'Is there some sort of common ground and common excitement and are you willing to join our team?’ It didn’t sound like the City Council even wanted to start conversation.

“It should have been a social atmosphere at the end. You’re having a beer on the way home. They were just getting ready to go home.”

Contact Richard M. Barron at 373-7371 or richard. barron@news-record.com