This week I had the opportunity to join City of Greenville Mayor Knox White on stage for the Greenville Chamber’s annual State of Greenville event at the Hyatt Regency downtown.
The Chamber built the morning around a pretty important question:
Where is Greenville headed from here?
And judging by the room, there are a lot of people interested in the answer.
I want to start by thanking the Carlos Phillips and the Greenville Chamber for putting the event together and for continuing to create spaces where government, business and community leaders can sit in the same room and have serious conversations about what is happening around us.
The morning began with breakfast and networking before moving into an economic outlook from Tom Barkin, President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, followed by a panel discussion with Mayor White and me.
It was great looking out from the stage and seeing a room full of people who had gotten up early to be there. Business owners, employers, community leaders and people who have a very real stake in what Greenville looks like five, ten and twenty years from now.
Government can pass ordinances, approve infrastructure projects and adopt budgets, but the people actually creating jobs, signing paychecks, taking risks, building businesses and investing in this community see another side of the economy that those of us in government need to hear.
There Are Two Greenvilles….Until There Aren’t
One thing I think gets lost sometimes is that when people say “Greenville,” they usually aren’t thinking about jurisdictional lines.
They don’t necessarily care whether the road they’re sitting on belongs to the City, County or State.
They just know they’re sitting in traffic in Greenville.
Government doesn’t work quite that simply.
The City of Greenville and Greenville County are two completely separate governments. We have different elected bodies, different budgets, different responsibilities and very different geographic footprints.
But there are also a whole lot of problems that don’t particularly care where one jurisdiction ends and another begins.
Growth certainly doesn’t.
Transportation doesn’t.
Economic development doesn’t.
And neither does the strain that comes with being a place where an awful lot of people want to live.
That was really the part of the conversation I enjoyed most.
Greenville has spent decades becoming a place that gets noticed nationally.
People visit here and want to come back.
Businesses want to be here.
Families want to move here.
Companies want to invest here.
And downtown Greenville has become something other communities around the country point toward when talking about what thoughtful redevelopment can accomplish.
That’s something Greenville should be proud of.
But there’s another side to success that doesn’t fit quite as nicely into a tourism brochure.
We’ve got to keep up with it.
More people mean more cars.
More homes mean greater demands on roads, sewer, stormwater, public safety and the rest of the infrastructure that allows a community to function.
And development that makes perfect sense when you’re looking at a map in an office can look very different to the person who has lived next door to that property for 25 years.
Those are the conversations I’m much more interested in having.
I’m not interested in pretending we’re going to put a gate around Greenville and stop growth.
That’s not going to happen……don’t shoot the messenger……
But I also reject the idea that our only two choices are grow as fast as humanly possible or stop growing altogether.
There is a whole lot of room between those two extremes.
The real question is whether we’re willing to be intentional about what happens in that space.
Are the roads ready?
Is the infrastructure there?
Does a project actually fit where somebody wants to put it?
What will it mean for the people who already live there?
Are taxpayers getting something worthwhile for the money we’re spending?
What problem are we actually solving?
And maybe most importantly:
Are we protecting the things that made people want to live here in the first place?
Those aren’t anti-growth questions.
They’re responsible-growth questions.
Greater Together
I think it’s healthy for our municipalities and County government to sit beside each other every once in a while and answer the same questions.
We aren’t going to agree on everything.
We shouldn’t.
The City of Greenville has its priorities. The County has ours. Travelers Rest, Greer, Mauldin, Simpsonville, Fountain Inn and our other communities all have their own needs and identities as well.
But when you really start looking at the problems we are trying to solve, there are a lot of places where drawing a line on a map and saying, “That’s somebody else’s problem,” doesn’t accomplish very much.
Transportation may be the easiest example.
You can leave your house on a County-maintained road, travel onto an SCDOT road, pass through a municipality, turn onto another road maintained by somebody else and never have the slightest idea that you’ve moved through three different governmental systems.
Nor should you have to.
The person sitting in traffic doesn’t care whose logo belongs on the road.
They just want us to figure it out.
That means some of our bigger transportation and infrastructure challenges are inevitably going to require cooperation among County government, municipalities, the State and, in some cases, the federal government.
That doesn’t mean every government has to agree on everything.
It means knowing when working together produces a better result than working separately.
A Word About Mayor Knox White
That’s also one of the reasons I’ve genuinely appreciated my relationship with Mayor Knox White.
Knox has always been willing to sit down with me, pick up the phone, talk through an issue and look for places where the City and County can work together.
Sometimes the conversation is about transportation.
Sometimes it’s economic development.
Sometimes it’s about music and culture.
Sometimes it’s simply comparing notes about what we’re seeing happening across Greenville.
But the underlying question is usually pretty simple:
How do we make both Greenvilles better?
And I don’t take his willingness to have those conversations for granted.
Knox has served as Mayor of Greenville since December 1995. More than 30 years, making him the longest-serving mayor in Greenville’s history. His service to the City goes back even further. He was first elected to Greenville City Council in 1983.
Think about how much Greenville has changed during that period.
An extraordinary amount of what people now associate with modern Greenville, particularly the transformation of downtown and the City’s emphasis on public spaces and redevelopment, happened during his tenure.
You don’t serve a community for that long without accumulating a tremendous amount of institutional knowledge, and I’ve appreciated that Knox has always been willing to share some of it with me.
I also want to thank him for something much more personal.
Knox has been incredibly generous in the way he has spoken about my leadership on County Council, and he did that again from the stage at State of Greenville.
I wasn’t expecting it.
And sitting beside someone who has spent more than three decades leading this community and hearing him publicly recognize the work I’ve tried to do as Chairman was genuinely humbling.
I was honored by it.
Public office can be a strange business.
We spend a lot of time talking about the disagreements. Probably because disagreements make better headlines.
But there are also moments where people representing different governments, different constituencies and sometimes different perspectives simply develop respect for one another and try to get things accomplished.
Those moments probably deserve a little more attention than they get.
So I want to say publicly what I probably didn’t say well enough from the stage:
Thank you, Mayor White.
Thank you for your leadership.
Thank you for more than three decades of service as Mayor.
Thank you for always being willing to sit down with me and have the conversation.
And thank you for the kindness and encouragement you’ve shown me personally and for the confidence you’ve expressed in my leadership on County Council.
It means a great deal to me.
A Well-Deserved Recognition
The morning also included a fitting recognition of Mayor White’s service when the Greenville Chamber presented him with the Butch Kirven Excellence in Public Service Award.
The award recognizes outstanding public service and leadership in Greenville and bears the name of longtime Greenville County Councilman, and my former colleague Butch Kirven. Knox became the second recipient of the award.
There was something especially appropriate about seeing Knox receive an award bearing Butch’s name.
Both have given decades of their lives to this community, albeit from different seats at the table, and both have had the opportunity to watch Greenville become something dramatically different from what it was when they first entered public service.
That kind of service deserves recognition.
Where Do We Go From Here?
By the time our panel wrapped up, I probably could have stayed on stage another hour talking about roads, infrastructure, development and growth.
I’m guessing everyone who had already been sitting through a breakfast and an economics lesson was perfectly happy that we didn’t.
But I walked away encouraged.
Not because Greenville has everything figured out.
We don’t.
In fact, I think some of the hardest decisions are still ahead of us.
I was encouraged because the room was full of people who understand that our future isn’t something that just happens to us.
We have choices to make.
The Chamber’s State of Greenville brought together the people building businesses, creating jobs and investing in our community, one of the country’s leading regional economic voices, and representatives of the two largest local governments serving Greenville. The program was specifically designed around the economic trends and initiatives shaping the community.
That’s a pretty good group of people to have talking to one another.
