Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory is calling for a new level of partnership between his city and Salisbury.

Speaking at the Salisbury Rotary Club on Tuesday, McCrory announced two steps toward that stronger alliance:

• Salisbury Mayor Susan Kluttz has been invited to join the N.C. Metropolitan Coalition to lobby the General Assembly on behalf of the state’s cities. Rural interests still tend to dominate the legislature, McCrory said.
• Salisbury will be included in a new environmental group that will formulate a joint plan concerning air, water, land-use planning and transportation issues in a region stretching from here to Rock Hill, S.C. The Environmental Protection Agency has given a $100,000 grant toward the regional effort, which is supposed to plan 30, 40 and 50 years out.

“Many of us, including me, won’t be here 50 years from now,” McCrory said. “But we have a responsibility to start planning for that right now.”

McCrory, who graduated from Catawba College here, said Salisbury and Charlotte have a lot in common.

“The fact of the matter is we are now next door neighbors,” he said, and added that in 20 to 50 years the fact will be even more evident. As partners, he said, each area would continue to have a unique identity, but they would tackle their mutual problems together.

Residents from Charlotte, Concord and Salisbury gripe when they’re stuck in traffic, and they are unhappy if they’re breathing dirty air, McCrory said. They don’t care which city addresses the problem, as long as someone does.

“They want something done about it, and they’ll expect us to do it as a team.” The political boundaries that have separated the different cities and counties like the Great Wall of China will no longer matter, he said.

McCrory outlined three areas in which the two cities need to work together — transportation, land use and the environment.

Salisbury and Charlotte may be in different metropolitan planning organizations, he said, but they still have a big impact on each other when it comes to transportation. Workers go back and forth between the two cities, and the entire region relies on Charlotte Douglas Airport, which he described as one of the leading airports in the world.

But people from Rock Hill to Hickory and Salisbury need to work together, he said, to make the right decisions for the future. “We have to determine how we want this region to grow and what we want it to look like.”

Area planners are “making mistakes as we speak” by not planning 50 years out on such projects as the widening of Interstate 85, he said. More planning should be going into creating different types of interchanges — so that they don’t all become magnets for convenience stores and gas stations — and the highway should include lanes designated for commuters’ high occupancy vehicles, he said.

It would be better to build these things right the first time, McCrory said, to save the construction, land and labor costs of redoing them in a few years.

Salisbury is in Charlotte’s transportation improvement plan map, McCrory said, because it’s a major economic base. Having a well-developed transportation corridor linking the two — a well as Concord, UNC Charlotte and other areas — would be good for business headquarters here, he said.

Without proper land-use planning, though, the region might as well not build new roads because they’d be obsolete by the time they were built, he said.

McCrory urged local governments to determine now where higher-density corridors should go, where they want open spaces, what kind of zoning and curb cuts and developments they want to allow. Atlanta made the mistake of building big, new interchanges without proper land-use planning in place for the areas around them. As a result, commercial growth mushroomed, creating the need for three to four stoplights at each interchange, he said.

“I’m a big road advocate,” McCrory said. But if local zoning allows unlimited curb cuts in new roads, money spent on the roads is wasted because they will immediately become congested.

Environmental issues also have a strong influence on the region’s future, McCrory said. The Environmental Protection Agency has good intentions, but its implementation often encourages sprawl, he said. For example, Charlotte is in a “non-attainment” area when it comes to pollution standards. The government will not let the city build new roads within that area because of the environmental impact. But by drawing a circle around th city and slowing road construction there, the EPA in effect forces growth farther into green spaces, which takes up valuable space and forces people to drive farther.