10-12-03

By Edward Cone
News & Record

It's morning in Greensboro. Time to go to work.

The city has changed since last week. At long last we have a plan. The job at hand is to make the plan succeed, whether you supported it or not before Tuesday's election. This is a moment for optimism and cooperation, a time for magnanimous winners and inclusive next steps.

The vote in favor of the downtown baseball stadium was decisive enough to put the stadium issue to rest for good. The margin of victory was significant, and the turnout, while woeful in absolute terms, was more than three-and-a-half times that for the previous primary.

Meanwhile, incumbent and stadium-supporter Keith Holliday won the mayoral primary so handily that the general election seems a foregone conclusion. Maybe his opponent, Bruce Ashley, has just been keeping his powder dry, but from here it looks like he doesn't have any powder. Pro-stadium City Council incumbents also had a very good day at the polls.

So we know what's next on the agenda, and we know who's likely to be holding the gavel. Now it's all about execution. Holliday's legacy will rest in large part on how he navigates his next and presumably final term as mayor. If all we get out of this is a cool new place to watch ballgames -- enjoyable as that will be in itself -- it will count as a wasted opportunity.

Now the public-private partnership that got the stadium situated needs to share its success with the rest of the city. Our civic ideal should be that old Looney Tunes cartoon where the sheepdog and the wolf punch the clock and shake hands after fighting all day. Holliday is a good man to lead that effort, as long as he leavens his nice-guy personality with some grit where it's needed.

That means getting the city to work with the Aycock neighborhood on its multi-point area plan, and standing by promises to maintain and use War Memorial Stadium. The private foundations behind Action Greensboro could find enough money in their couch cushions to make a difference for the neighborhood that lost its baseball team, and Fisher Park is also due for some love. Holliday needs to shake those couch cushions. Healing the relationships with these neighborhoods is in large part his responsibility.

Baseball alone is not going to fix downtown Greensboro, and I've never met anyone who pretends that it can. A stadium won't support restaurants and nightspots all by itself, but it doesn't have to. Businesses often succeed or fail at the margins, and baseball traffic might deliver the incremental volume that lets area businesses turn a profit. The city needs to make sure its traffic patterns, parking rules, taxes and regulations don't strangle businesses before the stadium can help them.

The stadium project will have ripple effects at the other end of downtown, too. A direct consequence of the baseball process is the imminent cleanup of the brownfield site at South Elm and Lee streets. The city finally noticed the wasteland at the southern end of downtown only after the ballpark boys said they had considered building there. More than a year ago, former mayoral candidate Roch Smith Jr. suggested via this column and to anyone else who would listen that Greensboro pursue federal grants and loans to reclaim the polluted lots. Now Rep. Mel Watt and Sen. Liddy Dole have proved Smith right by delivering $5 million of federal money. That gives Greensboro a chance to fix a festering problem.

Think what a grocery store at that location would do for downtown's emerging residential scene and for south Greensboro in general. Holliday and his private partners can't ignore South Elm Street and leave its development to chance; they have to help make good things happen. That's the way to leverage the stadium triumph.

None of this is going to save the textile industry, or lead directly to job recruitment, or offer any other magic solutions to our economic problems. But a vibrant downtown will make the city more attractive for current residents and new ones, and that's a big step in the right direction.

It's a new day in Greensboro. Not a cloudless day, but a hopeful one, a fresh chance for this city to pull together.

Edward Cone (www.edcone.com, efcone@mindspring.com) writes a column for the News & Record most Sundays.