Voters on growth: 'Whoa, Nellie!'

It might have made for an interesting exit survey. Buttonhole folks after they finished voting in Raleigh and Cary last week and ask them:

1) Do you have to drive to work on roads where the traffic often comes to a standstill and intersections are so busy that it takes multiple stoplight cycles to get through?

2) If you have kids, are they crammed into schools surrounded by trailers, where they've got to start serving lunch in mid-morning to feed everybody or where they have to let teenagers drive to off-campus burger joints because the cafeteria can't handle them all?

3) Are you bothered by the prospect of running out of drinking water because our reservoirs can't keep up with demand in the midst of a drought?

Anyone who answered "yup" to a question on that list would have been a good bet to have voted for a local candidate who didn't look like someone with a ring through the nose that developers could use to pull him or her along. Pull where? In the direction of giving this community more of what has helped it prosper, but at the same time risks suffocating it if growth runs wild.

The development lobby -- builders, real estate agents, all kinds of folks who feed off the area's growth in jobs and population -- saw what was at stake and pushed thousands of dollars into the pot to help friendly candidates.

This time, they'd have been smart to save their money for the kids' college fund for all the good it did them when the votes were counted.

Only one of four successful contenders for the Raleigh City Council -- Mary-Ann Baldwin -- had taken a significant chunk of developer money for her campaign, and she probably would have done well without it. In Cary, the slow-growthers roared to a sweep, with Harold Weinbrecht, the mayor-elect, able to boast that he hadn't taken a developer's dime.

Not so Ernie McAlister, the incumbent. A final breakdown of his campaign funding sources will have to wait. But it's safe to predict that the lion's share of his contributions came from people more worried about a growth slowdown than a speed-up.

That also happens to be a pretty big lion. An N&O article four days before the election pegged McAlister's campaign receipts at almost $160,000. Weinbrecht was having to make do with $32,000. You'd think he would have been stomped flat. But it might be that the mayor, in trying to make Weinbrecht look bad, sowed the seeds of his own downfall.

My Cary mailbox was stuffed with a righteous plenty of those glossy fliers from candidates for mayor and two Town Council seats -- 32 fliers in all, including nine from McAlister. Three of his were nicely positive in tone. Three were a blend of positive (talking up his own credentials and priorities) and negative (criticizing Weinbrecht). In the remaining trio, the challenger came in for a ripping, along the lines of taxpayers, hold onto your wallets and don't believe a word he says.

Was Weinbrecht really that scary, voters might have wondered, or did the growth-promoting mayor protest too much?

If there was a boomerang effect of that sort, it must have been strengthened by the bumptious full-page anti-Weinbrecht ads in The N&O paid for by Cary political activist Tom Joyner. Could someone who just wanted to ease off on the growth throttle -- someone who also happened to be a perfectly reasonable-sounding software guy over at SAS -- possibly be as bad as Joyner portrayed him? Old Tom couldn't have done McAlister any favors. (By the way, I collected four Weinbrecht fliers, mainly arguing the need for change and aiming a few shots in McAlister's direction.)

Over in Raleigh the big contributors also must have come away feeling burned.

Consider what happened in the north Raleigh district where conservative Tommy Craven was trying to retain his seat. As The N&O reported, Craven had raised just a little bit shy of $60,000 for the year as of Sept. 24, and close to two-thirds of that had come from people with real estate and development industry ties. That support must have become more curse than blessing as he was crushed by slower-growth advocate Nancy McFarlane, who campaigned on a shoestring. A similar fate befell incumbent Jessie Taliaferro in her losing effort against Rodger Koopman.

If anybody expects the new crop of elected leaders to close off the growth spigot and leave Wake County's two cities in a state of suspended animation, guess again. It can't, won't, shouldn't happen.

But it's fair to look to our city halls for some clearer perspective on the costs and consequences of the growth that is changing this region into a metropolis -- and then to do a better job of managing it. People don't want to sacrifice their quality of life so the developers, so desperate for influence, can stay fat and happy. At least, not most of the people who just voted.