Big Buck Bonanza in the Sunbelt

 

 

 

 

happened in the other shooting with the sheriff’s department. He was ready to prosecute in that shooting. So, I don’t see that as happening. I may be wrong. I think the leadership in the African American community is willing to wait and see what the results of the investigation are.

CCV: Pastor Utley downtown has been quoted as saying there’s a need for the police to be working with the community. There’s a need on both sides to work on the situation...

DELAIR: Oh... you have years and years of mistrust built up. And I don’t know what it takes to get out into the community... I see it as living in the community and making neighbors with people in the community. That’s what it’s about. You can’t do it on a nine to five basis and just kind of show up in your uniform in your car and talking to people. You’ve got to go and do things with people on the off times.

CCV: Why are we not getting policemen on the street?

DELAIR: In think the Chief said there’s a program they’re going to be implementing in June. To move more police onto the street, hopefully on a beat, hopefully beat cops.

CCV: So you think that’s on the way?

DELAIR: Yes, I think that was the end of the program. That was near the end of the program yesterday and there was a lot of information. But I think that was one of the things they were working on. To get more cops on the street.

CCV: Why did they stop?

DELAIR: I would think it is just a lack of manpower. I would guess...just operating too thinly.

CCV: You think Wilmington is not able to afford a police department? Can’t put people on the street? 

DELAIR: No. We should be able to afford that. We’re a growing community. I’m amazed that we didn’t talk too much about it in the budget.

CCV: So, if we don’t put people on the street, there’s a problem?

DELAIR: Recruiting is tough, and maintaining police officers. All the things that the Chief’s been doing since the guys could get the cars for individual police officers and bring them home and have them in the neighborhood where they live. Having that presence there. Getting out of that building over on Red Cross. You know, you’ve got younger people that are looking at a career in doing police work, and something you want to be proud of I would think. It’s part of any job, you want to be proud of any job. So hopefully all the small things that they are doing will help to maintain police officers. You know we are fighting small town thinking on everything. We still have this small town mentality on a lot of things. You know I was still... when we got SABLE, I was thinking, why do we need to have a helicopter in Wilmington? This is Wilmington. But the reality is, we need a helicopter in Wilmington. We’ve got crime, we’ve got big city crime. And we’ve got to stop thinking small town. People move here because they think it’s quaint and they walk the streets and everything. The fact of the matter is we’ve got drugs, we’ve got gangs, we’ve got all the stuff that big cities have. We’ve got all that crime. And we can’t deny it any longer. We have to say, hey, this is what we need. And the Chief is very clear about what he needs. And the last couple of councils have finally said, you’ll get it. And we’ll support you.

CCV: So you think the people sitting on the city council are aware? Do you think they see the need to get the police officers out on the street and develop the good community relations? Do you think they are going to act on that?

DELAIR: I don’t think so. In their hierarchy of things, I don’t think that’s one of their priorities. At least not to actually do something. They may say that crime is important to control, but.... I think they will devote the money to the police department to get things done.

CCV: To get things done? What does that mean? Do they understand the problem?

DELAIR: We have a few people on the council who probably understand. A lot of it is time issues. How much time do we have to devote to council to doing this. The tough thing about council is that you have to have a full time job. Plus being on council. And if you’re doing council stuff the way that it’s laid out for you there’s tons of things to do. You could work full time on council too. And that’s also a bad thing because it means you can only attract certain people to this job.

CCV: Are the people of this area getting the message, hey, maybe we need to improve the quality of government here?

DELAIR: I think you’re seeing that. I think you do. One of the things we’re struggling with is getting good candidates. Obviously. The county commissioner race last time was ridiculous. The fact that Bill Caster and Bobby Greer could walk back into their seats. And there’s so much complaining out there about their performance. And it’s amazing to me, but no one really went out there, Randy Crow was the only person who went out and tried to get that seat. And we need to have quality... it’s very hard. It’s such a tough job, and people ask, Why should I bother doing this? I mean, first of all I’ve got to run for office. And it gets really sticky and messy and ugly. And takes a lot of time and a lot of money in this community. Way too much money in this community. And then you get on there and you don’t get paid anything for doing the job. And you just catch heat all the time. And it’s a lot of work. So, where are the people who have the burning desire to make a difference in their community? We have a ton of volunteers in this community. There are a lot of volunteers who are fighting the good fight every day. But we really need leaders. We need people that are willing to step up and not just create havoc. There are people that run for office that just want to create havoc, and that’s not good either.

CCV: Is there an adequate feeling of civic responsibility, out there, among the public?

DELAIR: No. Of course not. Nobody’s voting. You’d have to say there’s not because people won’t even take the few minutes on election day to go out and vote. Or to keep track of just a little bit about what’s going on.

CCV: So where does that come from... that sense of civic responsibility?

DELAIR: I can only offer it from the other side, which is to say people are discouraged with what’s going on because of the way the federal government’s been run for years. And the state government’s being run. And actually from my perspective this is the only place you can make change. Everything else has to do with money, budgets. Most of the time that they spend in state and federal government is budget stuff. They’re writing laws and things, but here you can actually make change. You can make people sit down across the table from one another and work something out...

CCV: How do you think the developers see the problem of city government?

DELAIR: Zoning is probably obviously to them a nightmare. Things take a long time to get through. And I know that from a libertarian perspective. Libertarians probably agree with them that there’s just too many rules, too many regulations and everything. But as a Democratic leaning libertarian, I’d say in a Utopian society, yeah that works, where everybody behaves properly and watches out for the other person and doesn’t trample their rights. But in the society we have you have to have those rules in place, because people are only in it for the money, and they do not give a flip about their neighbor most of the time. They want to just make as much money as they possibly can. Obviously, there’s no workforce affordable housing being built in this community when we’re screaming out for it. Our firefighters, our police officers, our teachers need housing... Workforce affordable housing, which is different from our federal housing, government funded for the poor people. Because people are working very hard every day to make a living and raise families and they can’t afford it, it’s getting harder and harder to live in this community. And that shouldn’t happen. It just shouldn’t happen. With all the development that’s going on right now.

CCV: Why are we not developing the kind of housing that teachers and police officers and nurses can afford?

DELAIR: Because it’s being driven by market forces, and right now market forces are dictating high-end retirement condominiums and houses. Because those are the people that are coming down here and those are the houses that people want to make money building. There is a developer over in Leland or Brunswick County I’ve heard on the radio, and I think he is actually building houses under $100 thousand, and that’s what we need. A $150 thousand house in Wilmington is a reasonably priced house but it’s not affordable—when you’re making $30 grand a year. That’s not affordable. You can argue, yeah, compared to the $400 thousand houses that are being built here it’s affordable. But we need really affordable housing...

CCV: Why do think prices are going up so high? Is it all about money and exploitation?

DELAIR: Yeah, land prices are going up. Because we’re limited. It’s supply and demand. We don’t have a lot of supply. The demand is very high. So you get what you can for it.

CCV: Is this one of the downsides of being a rapidly growing area?

DELAIR: Yes. This is a rapidly growing community with a beach, and a river, great weather, and still has that small town feel to it. Taxes are still fairly low here, when you look at other parts of the country. A lot nicer than Florida.

CCV: So, taxes and government services. Do we have an understanding that we need to make taxes sufficient to provide the right kind of government services? Or is it, let’s do away with all the services and let the people suffer?

DELAIR: I think that politicians are really afraid of taxes, and the whole issue of taxes. And I have to agree that we need to look at how we are spending our money, before we keep looking at how we’re are going to, where we are going to tack on more percentages of things to raise more money. We really need to look at the spending side of it more than the revenue side of it.

CCV: Do you think that the city services are there? That we are providing the services that should be provide for the people of this area?

DELAIR: I don’t know if we are a catastrophe waiting to happen or if we are doing a good job. It’s kind of like, or if we’re being really lucky. Our fire fighters, the trucks are undermanned. You know, and I know people don’t like putting money towards fire fighters cause they sometimes don’t consider them being a necessary evil, or full time thing. But, we need ‘em when we need ‘em. And if you don’t have enough manpower on your truck to allow them to fight the way they’ve been trained to fight the fire or whatever...something tragic could happen. So, and they are very well trained individuals... So that’s one thing. Public safety... they fall into that category. Yes generally speaking things are going okay. But obviously when you say your sewer system is completely shot. You’ve got a downtown that’s a hundred years old, that’s just a spill waiting to happen. You’ve got a major problem with your main sewer line. Both your sewage treatment plants are over capacity. That’s not leadership.

CCV: So you think city council is not doing enough to address the sewage problem?

DELAIR: No. We are still allowing the flows, we are still allowing development, we are still allowing a lot of new people to hook up. We have not addressed the commercial development properly. We just basically rolled over. We are not addressing subdivision hookups properly enough. We’ve got PPD going to hook up soon. I’ve been told they are going directly to the Northside plant. That is at capacity or near capacity. We have infiltration that we don’t know where it is coming from. So that means if we have a series of major storms the capacity is gone.

CCV: So if Hurricane Katrina rolls into Wilmington, there’s going to be a problem with the sewage situation?

DELAIR: The sewage situation compounded with our storm water problem that we have that we are still working on. We could have a major problem here. And I know that we are addressing it in terms of getting repairs. Getting the engineering done. And we are working towards getting these repairs done, getting things replaced, getting things moved, getting things to happen. But we just don’t want to give up on that one little piece that logical would say to you, we do not need any more sewage running into our pipes right now until we get some of these repairs done. And as a matter of fact luckily the state did step in a few days after that meeting and said, you’re over capacity at the Southside plant. We’re going to have to cut you back a little bit more on this.

CCV: I’d like to go back to the beginnings of your career and relate that to the downtown situation. Because a lot of people see a funny pattern of growth in this area. You were a downtown merchant. How do you see the downtown situation? Were you treated the right way as a merchant? How would you approach the problem?

DELAIR: Well, I’ll tell you one of the things that drove me to want to be on the city council was... while I’m going through a very public, which I made pubic, eminent domain battle with Cape Fear Community College. Ah, Spence Broadhurst was the mayor at the time. Was in the paper saying, hey, we’ve got this thing going with PPD, it’s going to be great, we’ve got the convention center. Northside of downtown, which was where my business was, Northside is going to be booming. We need small business owners to support the Northside of downtown. And here I am a small business owner on the Northside of downtown and I’m not getting any assistance or even anyone calling me saying, look, we support you. But we can’t get involved politically, because of this thing between the city and the community college. We even had the mayor in advertisements, Mayor Broadhurst in advertisements on behalf of the Community College’s bond in the referendum. While a small business owner is getting screwed over. And I just thought to myself—there is something wrong with this picture. I guess I wasn’t the right small business owner.

CCV: So you were a small business owner, but they weren’t paying any attention to you. They were talking about the small business owner, but who they were really paying attention to were the big developers, CFCC, and the corporations they wanted to bring in here?

DELAIR: Yes. The money. And that’s fine, but you’ve got to, and the same way you’ve got to-- with the housing developments happening on the Northside. North Fourth Street is booming right now. It’s going great. That’s great. We needed that. But we do not need to disintegrate the Northside neighborhoods. And every time, next thing you know, I see another sign up for Plantation. They’re buying up another piece of property and putting up a duplex. That’s a very dangerous trend. It goes back to the building of wealth in the community. Having African Americans being allowed to develop wealth in the community. That means having land, and being able to stay on your land. And not be forced off because you can’t afford to make repairs to your property. Not be forced out because your taxes are going up too high. You have to be very careful because of how this trend is going on the Northside. Supposedly the housing authority is going to put up a huge condominium project to help support, fund their other developments. Great idea? I don’t know. Is that a good location to do it? On the Taylor Homes site? I don’t know, we just have to be very conscious of all the things we’re doing in the community. And money should not be the driver behind all of this.

CCV: Is the African American community over there in the Taylor Homes area... did they get screwed?

DELAIR: I think they have been getting screwed for over a hundred and some odd years, since the beginning of time here. I think that has been happening. And I think that it’s an institutional screwing. And I think it’s probably going to continue until... I don’t know when it’s going to stop. Until you get a different thinking in this community. We need more people on city council perhaps that are from different places. That can lend a different view to things. But I know that’s not wanted...

CCV: Those people who were living in that housing project over on North Fourth... in Taylor Homes. Were they just summarily ordered out of their homes?

DELAIR: Yes. That was a terrible thing to happen. You know what, that goes to the Katrina thing. And there’s a thinking, people get so removed from real life, what people are really doing. And I believe it was Barbara Bush who said, these people should be very grateful for what happened to them because, the horrible way that they were living is gone. And now they are going to be able to move to other cities and live better. But what she doesn’t get is the neighborhood. When you become rich, neighbors and neighborhood are not as important to you. It isn’t. Because you associate with people you work with. You go play golf. It’s a whole different mentality. When you are in a middle income or poor community, that’s what you do. You associate with your neighbors on Friday night.

CCV: Did they have a place to go?

DELAIR: They dispersed them throughout the city. And there were old people. And that to me was the tragedy of that situation. Was to take older people who have only known that community. And they don’t have vehicles, ways to get around. And to just push them out throughout the community, with strangers basically. They lost complete... they were just so. It was just so...And for the housing authority who were supposed to be knowing how to do these things they should know and understand the psychology and the sociology of their neighborhoods that they are working with. And they don’t seem to get that. The same thing with Solomon Towers. Yeah, it’s not the best place in the world. But those people have some sense of community in there. And they will probably end up doing the same thing with those people. They will probably just push them out into the community. And you can’t do that. You have to be able to keep that cohesiveness.

CCV: So people in leadership are not listening. They are not tuning in to the human needs of people in these situations?

DELAIR: Anywhere in this community. Even the people over in Hewlett’s Creek, that have money. They are not listening to their needs...

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Carolina Civic Voice

                             Spring 2007  Vol.  7, No 1