Sunday, February 14, 1999
Planner untangling Tristate boundaries
Gallis puts emphasis on regionalism
BY JOHN J. BYCZKOWSKI
The Cincinnati Enquirer
“I don't know any place quite as complicated, where you have one county and 50 planning agencies. Fifty! How do you coordinate that?” says Michael Gallis.
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CHARLOTTE — In his three decades as an urban planner and architect, Michael Gallis has never seen anything quite like this.
On the table before him is a large map of the Greater Cincinnati region, 13 counties in three states with the Ohio River curving through the middle.
Political jurisdictions are outlined with colored pencil. Cities are brown, villages tan, townships light green. Counties are lime, states are thick green. School districts are red, legislative districts blue.
The map is a Technicolor tangle of boundaries, as if someone had unwound thread from spools and dropped it on the paper.
“I don't know any place quite as complicated, where you have one county and 50 planning agencies. Fifty! How do you coordinate that?” he said, throwing his palms open.
A planner with a national reputation, Mr. Gallis is an evangelist for regionalism: the notion that America's important metropolitan areas, facing global shifts in trade and technology that can either embrace or abandon them, need to end the infighting that stymies their progress.
“We're going to have to recognize we need to find more effective ways to work cooperatively together. You just can't fight it on your own,” he said.
On Monday and Tuesday, Mr. Gallis will be in Cincinnati to unveil his progress in creating what he calls “a new conceptual framework,” a way of visualizing what makes the region tick, where the assets are, where the challenges are, where the opportunities are, irrespective of state and county borders.
The meetings are public, and — based on the presentations he gave around Cincinnati in October — will be great theater.
IF YOU GO
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Michael Gallis and the Metropolitan Growth Alliance will offer presentations on the development of a framework for understanding the region's structure. The meetings are free and open to the public:
• Monday, 5 p.m., Albert B. Sabin Convention Center, downtown, South meeting room.
• Tuesday, 5 p.m., RSVP Banquet Center in Miami Township, Wards Corner Road and I-275.
• March 24, 5 p.m., Lakota West High School, I-75 and Union Center Boulevard.
• March 25, 5 p.m., Mason High School Commons, Mason-Montgomery and Tylersville roads.
• Final presentations of the Gallis report are being scheduled for late June.
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Tall and thin with a mop of salt-and-pepper hair parted down the middle, Mr. Gallis, a former college professor, cuts a matchstick figure standing before a wall of some 50 maps. He takes the audience on a journey through the silk trade routes and over the centuries, following the flow of goods and information around the globe, into the Midwest and right into Evendale, Lawrenceburg and Florence.
The Metropolitan Growth Alliance, which is paying Michael Gallis & Associates $250,000 for his work, hopes this is more than great theater.
“We are a community with a number of very strong attributes and strengths, but at the same time we are a community that is not always pulling together,” said David O'Maley, CEO of Ohio National Financial Services and a member of the alliance's planning committee. “And we're getting outpaced by some of our neighbors.”
GALLIS FILE
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• Urban planner and architect; Principal, Michael Gallis & Associates, Charlotte.
• Age: 56.
• Retired professor, College of Architecture, University of North Carolina-Charlotte.
• Master's degrees in architecture and city planning, University of Pennsylvania, 1969.
• Quote: “The world says metropolitan units are the key economic units of the global age. So you are one of those in Cincinnati. You can be a hub, or you can be a satellite. The lessons of history seem to be clear: Hubs succeed, and satellites, cul-de-sacs dry up.”
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Based on his advocacy of regionalism and a reputation based on his work in the Carolinas and on the speaking circuit, Mr. Gallis was hired by the alliance to do two things. One is to construct a framework — based on data and community input — for visualizing Cincinnati as an economic unit where people and commerce flow across borders as if they're not even there.
The other is to walk the region's leadership through a kind of group therapy. Mr. Gallis draws the framework in colored pencil, but community leaders determine its meaning.
“We're not trying to come up with a plan to fix this,” he said of the web of color on the map. “We're trying to come up with a framework to understand it.”
Will it change anything? It worked in Charlotte, say his employers at the alliance. “He just gets a lot of credit for being the stimulus in Charlotte,” said William Burleigh, chief executive of E.W. Scripps Co. and co-chairman of the alliance.
Charlotte sees influence
On the eighth floor of the Charlotte-Mecklenberg Government Center downtown, next to the planning commission office, is a meeting room called the Innovation Station. On this day the room is being used for the Zoning Forum. Developers planning housing or retail projects are required to show up a month before their zoning hearings, post their maps and diagrams, and take questions.
A dozen are here, and three of them are using Gallis & Associates maps to illustrate the demand for their projects.
Raymond Jones' investment group builds infill housing, finding vacant tracts within the city. For the last year he's been using Gallis maps, which depict patterns of job growth, transportation, utilities, school capacity, and existing housing.
“He maps it out, overlays them, and you look for the white spaces,” Mr. Jones said. “You look for the niches in town where there's all of the infrastructure and nobody's developing.” On one of the white spaces on Charlotte's north side, Mr. Jones is proposing 300 rental units and 120 condos.
Walter G. Fields is also planning to build on one of those white spaces, proposing a complex of housing for the elderly. Formerly a Charlotte-Mecklenberg County planning officer for 20 years, Mr. Fields said it's hard to assess Mr. Gallis' impact.
“What Michael does is educate people,” he said. In 1998, for instance, voters approved a half-cent sales tax to generate $50 million a year to fund a regional transportation plan.
“For years and years, those of us in the professional planning business had been pushing for that,” but without success, Mr. Fields said.
Early last year, Gallis & Associates helped the planning commission publish Centers & Corridors Sourcebook, a 16-page color book of maps laying out the Charlotte region's structure — the urban centers and the corridors that connect them, along which development occurs.
The book “set the framework for a regional transportation system.” Mr. Fields said he can't say the Gallis maps led to passage of the sales tax, “but somewhere along the way people began to think on a larger scale. Some of those documents began framing those situations.”
One of those connected urban centers is Rock Hill, S.C., 20 miles south of downtown Charlotte on Interstate 77. In the early 1980s, Rock Hill watched 13 textile mills close and unemployment climb over 17 percent. Former city manager Joe Lanford said the state wouldn't even direct new business prospects Rock Hill's way for fear of losing them to North Carolina. Rock Hill, he said, was in danger of getting everything Charlotte didn't want: “junk yards and billboards.”
The city engaged Mr. Gallis in 1987 to help it compete in the Charlotte region for new business. “Michael was the one who started talking about regionalism,” said former mayor Betty Jo Rhea. “We didn't need to push Charlotte away, we needed to embrace Charlotte.”
Today, visitors to Rock Hill are greeted by Civitas, a sculpture garden that includes a piece of Charlotte — two columns from a famous Masonic temple demolished in downtown Charlotte — to symbolize the connection. Civitas' four winged angels serve as a gateway to Tech Park, a 200-acre industrial and office park.
More than just pretty art, the sculpture made a statement about the quality Rock Hill could support. The city paid around $5,500 per acre for the Tech Park land, and sold it for $60,000 an acre; it's nearly sold out. Rock Hill recently opened its fourth industrial park — with a Hale Irwin-designed golf course — and is looking for room for a fifth.
More than 60 businesses have moved to Rock Hill in the past decade, and the market value tax base has grown from $908 million in 1989 to $1.7 billion in 1998. Incomes went up, property values went up, tax rates went down.
“Michael changed the way we marketed ourselves,” said Mr. Lanford, who — after 16 years as city manager — started his own consultancy. “Having some perspective on the market you're in is a big part of that.”
In support of the framework he devised for Charlotte, Mr. Gallis gave dozens of talks on his views. “He engages you visually and verbally,” said Mark Erwin, a Charlotte developer. “He's got a professorial look about him, wild-haired and a bit of a dreamer.”
Mr. Gallis didn't make Charlotte the nation's second-largest financial center, or the sixth-largest wholesale distribution center.
“Probably the most direct benefit we've gained from Michael's unique perspective was that he showed us we're part of a much larger picture. ... People generally leave his sessions knowing a good deal more than they knew when they got here,” Mr. Erwin said.
“My guess is Michael's going to teach you something about your city that you don't know.”
Looking at Cincinnati
With his experience in the Carolinas, Mr. Gallis is attempting to clone the process and take it on the road. Gallis & Associates has six full-time employees, including former students of his from the University of North Carolina-Charlotte. Along with Cincinnati, his firm is in the midst of a study of Rhode Island, and has just signed to do similar work for Memphis and the state of Connecticut.
The process is this: First, build the framework, the maps and diagrams that depict how a region works and what assets it has. Second, build understanding within the community. The framework “allows us to sit at a table and talk about how we interact,” he said. “Doing this project, the process is half the value.”
The project here has spawned meetings of many people who never have sat in a room together. Greater Cincinnati's university presidents, for instance, met together for the first time several weeks ago.
With those pieces in place, Mr. Gallis said, the community can begin “to work toward a common future.”
Gallis & Associates is 11 months into the 15-month process of constructing a framework. The final product will be delivered in June. An early assessment: There's much to build on.
“What impresses me about Cincinnati is the antiquity of its history, the greatness of the city, the size of it,” he said. “I love going to Cincinnati. The beauty of the city, the riverfront, the small towns in Kentucky.
“Ever eat at the Meet & Eat in Ludlow? Ever eat goetta?” he said, earnestly. “To me the diversity of Cincinnati is just fabulous.”
But while the region's hills and river valleys give it beauty, “they've also defeated the issue that it's one place. And it becomes a collection of small places without developing a single-place mentality. That has defeated the ability to come together in terms of strategy and build critical mass.
“That doesn't say erase the lines,” he said. “We're not erasing any lines in Charlotte, but we have a framework that allows the political bodies to talk to each other within a new conceptual framework, within which they can talk about the relationship between the parts.”
Metro areas need strategies to remain vital, he said: “You've got to rededicate yourself to being the city of the future.”
Movers behind the maps
Back at the Metropolitan Club atop RiverCenter on Covington's riverfront on a recent Friday morning, a closed-door meeting of the Metropolitan Growth Alliance planning committee has just broken up. Out of the board room stride Merwyn Grayson of Huntington Bank, the Cincinnati Business Committee's Laura Long, Jim Wuenker of the Greater Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce, Corporex CEO and alliance co-chair Bill Butler, Joe Wind of Northern Kentucky University, retired Enquirer publisher William Keating, Ohio National CEO David O'Maley and others.
The subject was the Gallis study, and what to do with it. “We're trying to mold the report and develop it,” Mr. Keating said. “It's a work in process. ... We regard this as the first leg on the stool. There's more to come after this.”
People are expecting magic, Mr. Butler said — “between you and me, there's too much expectation” — but Mr. Gallis isn't a magician. One planner who worked with Mr. Gallis in Charlotte agrees. Martin Cramton, who's been Charlotte/Mecklenberg's planning director for nearly 20 years, said Mr. Gallis “will only be as good as the intellectual horsepower you can pull from the community. ... The power of the ideas has got to come out of the community.”
The hope is that the clarity of the Gallis framework sells itself. “We only have one goal: to get a million eight hundred thousand people acting as one,” Mr. Butler said. “Nothin' lofty about that.”
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