On the ballot: Mayoral race -- Chuck Allen
By From staff reports
Published in News on November 2, 2015 1:46 PM
Chuck Allen
Q: What do you feel is the biggest issue facing our community?
A: I think the biggest issue facing our city is our crime, our poverty and our schools. I think that they all are related. That's the three issues I think are the biggest.
Q: Describe, with specific examples, what you would do to expand and improve Goldsboro's economy.
A: I think the city council's job is to create an environment and infrastructure to create jobs, or to allow the private sector to create jobs. So I think what we need to do is create that environment, have a work-ready workforce and do whatever we need to do to have that. We need to work on blight and have the city as clean as possible and looking as good as we can make it look, and we need to work with our schools and the county to try to better prepare our workforce, and of course we need to have the infrastructure to support it all.
Q: What do you think should be done about Goldsboro's panhandling problem?
A: Well I'll tell you, personally, and anybody that knows me knows that when I'm downtown, whenever I see one I tell them to go on. So the first thing I would want to do is encourage people not to give them money. I know it's disheartening not to do that, but I think people have to understand it's a business to them. It's just a way of life. As long as we keep giving to them, we're going to keep enabling them. We're trying to figure out what we can do legally to address it.
Q: The council has designated four major issues it intends to tackle in the coming years. Where do you stand on these issues?
* Greenways and pathways around the city, both maintenance of existing systems and bringing new ones to Goldsboro.
I think it's no secret that I'm a huge advocate of greenways. I've done everything I can to move us forward with greenways. We have several pieces of greenways now, but we've got to get connectivity. So the next thing is how do we connect the greenways.
* Continue to invest in downtown
My opinion is the city has done its share of investing in downtown for right now. I think what we have to do is be sure we maintain what we've done and be sure we keep it looking good. I think now it's time for the private investors to come into downtown and let's see what we do there. I think we started the thing, but the city can't continue to put that kind of money in downtown without some private investment.
* Develop the city's parks and recreation department
I'm really excited about the events center. I think that will be a really good combination of the meeting space that a lot of our citizens need, to golf and having a nice place for them to work out of, and tennis, they're going to have really nice tennis courts, so I'm really excited about that. I'm really excited about W.A. Foster, I think that really gives a lot of kids in that neighborhood access to what they've needed. I'm really equally excited about the partnership we're going to sign with the schools, because I think that opens up a lot of gyms. And then I think we're really close to signing the lease with the base for the multi-sports complex, and I think that'll be another huge venue, not only for our kids, but for travel and tourism and the revenue it'll bring in there to the hotels and restaurants.
* Combat blight throughout the city
You can't sell blight. You've got to do something with it, whatever it is. You've got to clean it up, you've got to renovate it, you've got to tear it down -- you know, I understand, especially around the downtown area, there's historical value to these properties, so you have to figure out what's the most important, how are you going to save them, how are you going to clean them, but all through the city we have to make our city look good. Every year we budget money for blight or demolition, and the other thing I'd like to see -- and I don't know the answer to how we do it -- is to see property owners be held responsible for their own property.
Q: If elected mayor, what do you think you can do to lower Goldsboro's crime rate and stop the shootings in our city?
A: I don't ever want to give anybody the misconception that I believe we're going to stop the shootings. My hope is that we can slow it down and move it to other areas of the county, or another county even. That's the hope. And I think what you'll see is we're already taking some steps to try to improve the morale of the police department, we're trying to get it to where we can hire more officers, get more officers on the street, and we're looking seriously at the ShotSpotter. I think in the next year you'll see it being funded, and I think that will give us a lot of information. That will cover a lot of our problem areas. I think the other side of that is we start doing more civil suits against the bad operations, the people that are causing all the problems. From the administrative side, we're going to be a lot more aggressive with that. The biggest thing is that we've got to get more community involvement. First off, parents have got to be responsible for their kids. It's not just a Goldsboro problem, it's a statewide problem and a national problem. But the question for Goldsboro is, are we going to accept it as being a problem or are we going to work on it? And all of it relates -- poverty, education, all of that stuff relates. Low performing schools relates to poverty. All of it relates to kids having parents who don't care. So how do you get to the root of the problem, that is the question.
Q: The new 70 bypass will be completed and opened during the new mayor's first year in office. If elected, what do you think you can do to lessen the potentially negative impact a bypass could have on our community?
A: You've got to remember that I've been the head of the MPO (Metropolitan Planning Organization) for many years now and I 100 percent believe in the new bypass. I believe what you'll find is there may be some restaurants, some folks that are adversely impacted by it. But I think you'll see, if you look at what happened in Clayton, if you look at what happened in most other communities, you'll see -- and the DOT predicts this -- within five years the local traffic will pick up enough that you're back to where your daily volume was. As the city and county come together and put infrastructure at these new intersections, I think that will more than accommodate the new growth and what you may lose. I personally don't see any real negative tax effect to it. So I really think the long term effect is not going to be bad. I think it's actually going to be very good.