Turned out, not so much:
While it’s correct that suburban voters overwhelmingly rejected the bonds, voters in heavily African-American precincts voted overwhelmingly for them.
A Creative Loafing analysis of the 23 county precincts with 70 percent or higher African-American voter registration showed that school bonds passed in all but two precincts, most of the time by larger margins than they passed elsewhere.
So the black community bought the bargain that Parks Helms designed: A massive bond package with a little under $200 million for close-in school renovation and a little over $200 million for new schools. Plus, overall around 20 to 25 percent of the total package was to be spent in South Charlotte-Meck, an enticement that CMS, the Chamber, and Helms must’ve thought would cinch the deal. But voters in that area, and in truth across the county, rejected the deal anyway, delivering a body-blow to CMS’ 10-year, $2 billion plans.
The confusion over where the black community stood on the bond issue stemmed from some upset that the burbs were getting more of the package overall. But that view clearly did not carry the day at the polls. There was no large black anti-bond vote for county leaders to fret over and to try to decipher, contrary to posturing of the past week. Moving forward then, the question for anyone looking to get a bond passed must answer is how do they get voters in the other 220-odd precincts to vote yes.
We’ve already seen the nuclear option deployed by Norman Mitchell: Tell voters if they do not vote “yes” their kids will be bused to where there are seats, i.e., inner-city neighborhoods. But that really is not the message that the corporate Uptown types want to get out.
It seems self-evident then that CMS is going to have prove to voters that it has its priorities straight and will heed the call for a change in the way it conducts business. A good start would be moving to bring the cost of CMS’ building plans in line with that of other communities by deleting all the bells-and-whistles from school designs and designate the $188 million it still has in previous bond money for building new schools.