Up and Coming Weekly is a weekly publication in Fayetteville, NC and Fort Bragg, NC area offering local news, views, arts, entertainment and community event and business information.
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4 UCW MAY 19-25, 2021 WWW.UPANDCOMINGWEEKLY.COM STAFF PUBLISHER Bill Bowman Bill@upandcomingweekly.com OPERATIONS DIRECTOR Paulette Naylor accounting@upandcomingweekly.com EDITOR April Olsen editor@upandcomingweekly.com GRAPHIC DESIGNER Dylan Hooker art@upandcomingweekly.com EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Keyuri Parab REPORTER Jeff Thompson news@upandcomingweekly.com MARKETING ASSOCIATE Linda McAlister Brown linda@upandcomingweekly.com DISTRIBUTION MANAGER/SALES ADMINISTRATOR Laurel Handforth laurel@upandcomingweekly.com CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Margaret Dickson, Pitt Dickey, D.G. Martin, John Hood, Jim Jones, Shanessa Fenner, Crissy Neville COVER Cover photos by K. Kassens, U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School. –––––––––––- Up & Coming Weekly www.upandcomingweekly.com 208 Rowan St. P.O. Box 53461 Fayetteville, NC 28305 PHONE: 910-484-6200- FAX: 910-484-9218 Up & Coming Weekly is a "Quality of Life" publication with local features, news and information on what's happening in and around the Fayetteville/Cumberland County community. Up & Coming Weekly is published weekly on Wednesdays. Up & Coming Weekly welcomes manuscripts, photographs and artwork for publication consideration, but assumes no responsibility for them. We cannot accept responsibility for the return of unsolicited manuscripts or material. Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. The publisher reserves the right to edit or reject copy submitted for publication. Up & Coming Weekly is free of charge and distributed at indoor and outdoor locations throughout Fayetteville, Fort Bragg, Pope Air Force Base, Hope Mills and Spring Lake. Readers are limited to one copy per person. © 2020 by F&B Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction or use of editorial or advertisements without permission is strictly prohibited. Various ads with art graphics designed with elements from: vecteezy.com and freepik.com. PUBLISHER'S PEN Is Fayetteville finished? by JAMES BAKER 82 64 82 83 79 82 63 64 83 66 64 65 THU MAY 20 FRI MAY 21 SAT MAY 22 SUN MAY 23 MON MAY 24 TUE MAY 25 84 61 84 61 84 62 86 64 84 64 84 64 Partly Cloudy Partly Cloudy Partly Cloudy Partly Cloudy Showers AM Showers Association of Community Publishers Note from Publisher Bill Bowman: ere are many urgent needs in the Fayetteville community. I am yielding my space this week to James Baker, a retired Army officer and Fayetteville resident advo- cating for a local government initiative that would better serve residents by giving them a much greater voice in their leadership and future. Recently I attended a conference in the Asheville area. Making conversation, another attendee asked me, "Where are you from?" "Cumberland County," I answered. "Fayetteville." e man smirked. He caught himself and tried to make it look like a smile, but it was still a smirk. "Fayette-Nam, you mean?" he said. "Still, lots of crime, right?" I changed the subject, and the man was nice enough to let me get away with it. But this brief exchange rankled. I recalled the downtown of three decades ago: strip joints and stabbings, hookers on Hay Street, gunshots, and sirens al- most every night. ings in Fayetteville are a lot better now than they were back then, I thought. e following week I was back at work here in Fayetteville. Just on a hunch, I went to my laptop and Googled "crime rate Fayetteville NC." I was astounded at the re- sults. e first entry read: "With a crime rate of 44 per one thousand residents, Fayetteville has one of the highest crime rates in America compared to all communities of all sizes." e next entry was even more depress- ing. It informed readers that, on a scale of 1 to 100, "Fayetteville violent crime is 39.1. e U.S. average is 22.7. Fayetteville property crime is 69.4. e U.S. average is 35.4." Internet search results don't guarantee sci- entific accuracy, I realize. But I kept on read- ing, entry after entry. ey all said essentially the same thing: Fayetteville is bad news. No wonder the smirking man at the conference trotted out the old nickname: "Fayette-Nam!" I began to look more closely at my local surroundings. I started taking a different route to work every day, just to re-visit parts of the city I don't always see. Downtown I saw the remaining scars of the 2020 unrest. In an- other part of town, I saw what looked like the start of a "homeless camp." It wasn't uncom- mon for me to see at least two panhandlers — and sometimes more — during my drive. About this time, I read a newspaper report stating that, before the end of April, our city already had its fifteenth homicide this year. ese observations bothered me. But what I found even more unsettling was a conversa- tion I partially overheard in a grocery check- out line. Shoppers were bitterly agreeing with each other that "the politicians at City Hall don't care about our problems." Clearly, street crime isn't the only issue that Fayetteville struggles with — it's only part of a larger problem. And the solution is not automatically a law enforcement issue. Much of the current frustration in Fayetteville seems to spring from a feeling that City Coun- cil isn't very responsive to citizen concerns. And that perception may very well be right. Instead of criticizing specific politicians or personalities, perhaps we should look instead at the structure of the Fayetteville City Council. We have 10 people on our City Council, but only one of them — one! — is expected to look out for the city as a whole. at's the mayor. e mayor is elected on a citywide basis. But the other nine people on the Council are elected from their own local districts. ey look out for their home district, not for the city at large. And you know what? at's not wrong, and it's not abnormal — it's just human nature. But we need a few more Council members who don't put their district first, and the city second. We need men and women on the Council who don't look the other way, when they see homeless camps, or street crime, or other problems, in somebody else's district. We need more elected officials who won't say, "at's in your district, so it's your prob- lem!" We need more people on the Council who will look out for the whole city. e way to get more people like that on the Council is to elect more of them on a citywide basis — in other words, to elect more of them as "at large" Council members. We could do this with a simple structural change to the Council. Keeping the Council at ten mem- bers, we could strike a balance by electing five of them from districts, and five of them as citywide representatives — instead of nine district representatives and only one citywide representative, the lopsided way it is now. e balanced method seems to work well elsewhere in North Carolina. Both Raleigh and Charlotte, for example, have a balanced City Council, with roughly equal numbers of district representatives and "at large" mem- bers on their City Council. Balance is the key, and both cities clearly understand that. Fayetteville needs that kind of balance, also. To get it, the first step is to petition for this issue — updating the structure of our City Council — to be added to the ballot at our next municipal election. Let the voters decide! Citizens should be able to vote on this important issue. If you agree, go to www.voteyesfayetteville.com and sign and mail back the petition. Fayetteville is a pretty town. Fayetteville has character. And Fayetteville is not finished. Our best days as a city are still ahead of us! JAMES BAKER, Contributor. COMMENTS? Editor@upand- comingweekly.com 910-484- 6200.