SALISBURY — As it wound up its two-day retreat Wednesday afternoon, Salisbury City Council placed a high priority on six goals:
• Come up with a city-specific economic development focus that also keys on Salisbury’s broadband infrastructure — the Fibrant utility.
• Work with Rowan-Salisbury Schools in fostering a school model as successful as the Drew Charter School in the East Lake section of Atlanta.
• Consider general obligation bonds for infrastructure needs in areas across the city.
• Improve animal control services and consider taking them back from Rowan County. (See the accompanying story).
• Take a two-pronged approach toward addressing neighborhood blight and revitalization. One focus would involve dealing with 118 boarded-up houses and 750 vacant lots throughout the city. The other would look at setting up a pilot neighborhood revitalization project patterned after the Cooke Street redevelopment in Raleigh.
• Establish a Downtown Rehabilitation Grant and a Downtown Residential Living Grant as incentives for growth in people and tax base for the central business district.
“These are not little goals,” the retreat’s facilitator, Warren Miller, said toward the end of the day Wednesday.
In his 17th year on council, Mayor Paul Woodson lauded the staff and presenters for the two days of discussion. “I didn’t get bored one bit in this retreat,” Woodson said.
Councilman William “Pete” Kennedy, on the council for 21 years, said this year’s 29th annual goal-setting conference was “one of the best I attended.”
Council members had several outside speakers joining them Wednesday, including Danna Bailey, who spoke on Chattanooga’s success with its fiber-optics network; James Sauls, who described Raleigh’s focus on economic development; former Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin, chairwoman and chief executive officer of Purpose Built Communities, who touched on a holistic approach to reviving neighborhoods; and Carol R. Naughton, also with Purpose Built Communities, who reviewed the success of the Drew Charter School in Atlanta.
The goals council set Wednesday will be fed into the spring budget process coming up.
Councilman Brian Miller expressed some concern that council wasn’t putting its goals in a financial context. Was the city going to set aside $500,000 or $5 million for downtown incentives, he asked as an example.
The downtown incentives and the possibility of taking back animal control responsibilities will have to be addressed in the upcoming budget.
Voters would have to approve any general obligation bonds, and city officials have yet to spell out the specific projects bond money would be used for.
City Manager Doug Paris asked that he and his department heads be given a chance to put a budget together with some suggestions on what to spend on the goals.
Financial Services Director Teresa Harris briefly gave council insights into Salisbury’s financial picture heading into the 2014-2015 budget year, which begins July 1. She said the city would be “holding our own,” with only slight revenue growth.
“We will hold expenditures down,” Harris said. “It will not be easy.”
Mayor Pro Tem Maggie Blackwell asked if Harris’ report was “codespeak” for “don’t make a lot of fancy goals that cost money.” Blackwell said she did not want to go through the staffing cuts the city made a couple of years ago when its financial picture was bleaker.
“Our operation is sized right now to our ongoing revenues,” Paris said. And he indicated there could be room in the upcoming budget to start work on the council’s new goals, especially because they represent investments in growth and the city’s future.
On the goal related to looking for a better schools model, Woodson stressed the council wasn’t trying to run Rowan-Salisbury Schools. The city just wants to improve schools overall, he said.
Council members said a new model doesn’t necessarily have to be a charter school, as the one described by Naughton in Atlanta.
“I like the results,” Councilwoman Karen Alexander said after Naughton’s presentation, but she emphasized again the Drew Charter School didn’t have to be the only approach.
But council members were intrigued by the public charter school’s turnaround in student performance, its ability to attract good teachers and administrators, the melding of arts into the curriculum and how students end up spending 20 percent more time in the classroom than their public school counterparts.
Children attending the Drew School from kindergarten through the eighth grade wind up being in school two-and-a-half years longer, just because of their longer school day and lengthier overall schedule.
Blackwell said the full council should meet with the school board and “talk candidly about where we need to go” and how to get there.
A larger-than-usual public audience, including Superintendent Dr. Lynn Moody, attended the session related to the charter school.
In referring to riverfront development successes Chattanooga has seen in recent decades, Kennedy said Salisbury doesn’t have a Tennessee River, but it does have a plentiful water supply and the Fibrant utility as key assets.
With Fibrant, Miller added, “We have an asset here we have to fully leverage.”
Council received strong reinforcement of Salisbury’s fiber-optic cable utility in hearing how Chattanooga has used similar infrastructure to gain national attention as the “Gig City.”
The promotion of Chattanooga’s ability to offer internet speeds of a gigabit per second has attracted lots of interest from technology entrepreneurs.
Bailey serves as vice president of corporate communications for EPB (Electric Power Board), Chattanooga’s city-owned electric utility.
EPB uses the fiber-optic network as the backbone to its “Smarter Grid,” which pinpoints power outages faster and finds ways to restore the grid much quicker.
The use of fiber optics saves the company millions of dollars annually in travel and fuel expenses, reduces power outages by 60 percent and saves the equivalent of 19,000 acres of U.S. forestland and 52 million pounds of carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere, Bailey said.
Chattanooga advertises its internet speeds — the fiber-optics internet component was launched in 2009 — as the fastest in the western hemisphere.
In 2010, EPB became the first company in the United States to announce the ability to offer internet speeds of a gigabit per second, and Bailey said Chattanooga immediately drew interest from national companies.
The gigabit-per-second speed is essentially 200 times faster than the national average.
Fibrant General Manager Mike Jury said he calculated only 5 percent of EPB’s customers are “in the gig,” and the utility essentially put them there without their demanding it.
The fastest speed Salisbury offers at present is 100 megabits per second, but if a large company came in and needed the gigabit speed, Fibrant could provide it, Jury said.
For now, the power of the gig is the buzz it creates, Blackwell said.
Woodson agreed.
“I think it’s just getting that word out that we have it,” he said. “It should be one of our biggest selling points as a city.”
Sauls, Raleigh’s economic development manager, reviewed some of the city’s business recruitment successes, especially in fields involving software, gaming, mobile networks, telecom, bio tech, nano tech and green tech.
Raleigh can quantify the addition of 3,100 jobs related to tech companies and their spinoffs over the past two years, Sauls said.
The companies include Purolator, Red Hat, Citrix, Allscripts, HQ Raleigh, American Underground, Think House, Bandwith Labs and Seventh Generation Ventures.
Raleigh tries to create a business culture — a place where companies and their employees want to be. It promotes the cost of living, housing choices, quality of life and the area’s 12 colleges and universities.
A special effort has been made toward start-ups and small businesses.
Sauls recommended that Salisbury city officials dig deep into their community and find out what the business needs are.
Alexander said she was excited about the rapid growth Raleigh — and the downtown, in particular — has seen in a relatively short time. It’s inspiring and should give Salisbury hope it can build on its strengths — maybe even find ways to barter on its high-speed internet.
Kennedy said Salisbury has to become known as a digital city.
Contact Mark Wineka at 704-797-4263.