Stone Rolls Out Jobs Plan
GOP mayoral candidate Scott Stone says Charlotte can add 35,000 private-sector jobs to its work force by cutting taxes by $72 million, reducing the cost and scope of government while improving its efficiency, and sidetracking a streetcar to nowhere – along with implementing an assortment of other key initiatives that he unveiled this week with the release of his Charlotte Jobs Now plan.
Part of the strategy for putting Charlotte back to work, Stone said, is to make the city more competitive by putting more money back into the pockets of taxpayers, while removing government-created barriers and uncertainties that hinder small business investment.
“Charlotte’s current leadership has adopted a wait-and-see approach to Charlotte’s double-digit unemployment,” Stone said. “I am running for mayor because I do have a plan to turn our economy around.”
The majority of Stone’s plan hits the right notes, but it manages to skip a few beats with talk of creating a brand image for the Queen City and championing a massive expansion of the airport and a long-planned multi-modal station. At its turnaround heart, though, Stone’s plan acknowledges some of the ugly fiscal realities facing Charlotte and proposes some commonsense solutions for addressing them.
Take, for example, the novel idea of actually shrinking the cost and size of government as a way to fire up private-sector growth. From his pitch to cut taxes by upward of $70 million:
There is a direct correlation between tax burden and employment. In North Carolina, many of the cities with the highest combined city/county taxes have the highest unemployment rates.
We need to ensure that Charlotte is among the lowest taxed areas to encourage companies to choose us. Individual taxpayers – not government – are the best and most efficient stimulators of the economy. The more money they have in their pockets, the more spending in the private sector, which translates into jobs.
Tag teaming with tax cuts is Stone’s call for spending cuts to reduce the cost and size of local GovCo. Part of his plan’s remedy includes derailing the city’s insanely expensive streetcar project; reducing or eliminating pricey public art required as part of city capital projects; privatizing city services like utilities maintanence, printing, and solid waste collection; and retiring city debt with the sale of city assets that have historically proved money-losing propositions (think Ovens Auditorium and Bojangles Coliseum).
Stone’s plan also calls for eliminating government mandates and red tape that, he said, can often stymie private-sector job creation, with Stone citing the construction and development industry as prime examples. Part of his plan’s remedy:
* Make standard rezoning the norm and make conditional rezonings the exception. Modify existing zoning ordinances – to tighten as necessary – to remove the staffs’ and politicians’ perceived “need” for conditional rezoning.
* Modify current policies and ordinances which impact Charlotte’s competitiveness. The Post-Construction Stormwater Ordinance, for example, adds construction requirements which far exceed the state’s requirements. Furthermore, the Urban Street Design Guidelines, Tree Ordinance, and Post-Construction Stormwater Ordinance all have compounding impacts to project viability and often conflict with each other.
Stone’s plan even has the audacity to ensure that people who are hired through work with the city are actually, get a load of this, legal residents of this country, with a proposal to employ the E-Verify system for all city contracts.
The whole plan is worth a read. It’ll be interesting to see what kind of public support, or on the flipside blowback, he gets from the Chamber-connected uptown lunch bunch, including some GOP members of the city council, both past and present.
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