State & Local

With Procurement Strategy, Charlotte, N.C., Seeks to Address Past Racial Bias

Governing: Charlotte, N.C., is a study in contradictions. It’s a booming success story of the New South, a corporate and financial center with gleaming high-rises, museums, green spaces and an expanding light rail system. At the same time, the city still struggles to escape its history of racial segregation. Schools and neighborhoods still break along racial lines, and a 2014 Harvard-UC Berkeley study ranked Charlotte last in economic mobility among the nation’s 50 largest cities. Some in the city’s African-American community have likened Charlotte’s glassy office towers and sports arenas to a “glimmering, fake Oz.”

City officials want to change that disparity. They’re trying to do that in multiple ways, including a city-county Opportunity Task Force that was created in response to the Harvard-UC Berkeley study. The group released its first report in March of this year, laying out 21 strategies, 91 recommendations and 100 tactics, including calls to stabilize families, foster greater access to education and to create “social capital.” “This report marks the beginning of our work; a blueprint for us to work together,” Mayor Jennifer Roberts said at the report’s release in March. “We are not going back to business as usual.” (The speed of implementing that blueprint has frustrated some; the Charlotte Observer reported that six months after the initial report, “little has happened.” No executive director or other staff had been hired; no funding had been dedicated, and there was no agreement on what indicators would be used to measure success, according to the paper.)

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