Charlotte’s second African-American mayor – the first Democrat in two decades – shows up at the Capitol Hilton with a plastic folder full of agendas, notes and a Blackberry fixed to his rapidly scrolling thumbs. He’s a minor-leaguer in many respects compared with his seasoned counterparts and powerful political figures attending the 78th Annual U.S. Mayors’ Conference.

Yet Foxx, 38, the youngest mayor ever elected in Charlotte, after two terms on the City Council, works the room as though he’s never left the district. He networks his way into meetings with the U.S. secretaries of Transportation and Housing and Urban Development and schedules back-to-back meetings with congressional delegates throughout the week.

On this trip, Foxx opens doors for Charlotte and a big one to the next chapter of his young political career. His connection to politics goes back to his boyhood and the influences of his grandparents, who helped raise him.

Foxx’s grandfather, James, was a high school principal in Charlotte and a heavy hitter in the Democratic Party. His grandmother taught junior high French. Together they taught Foxx the importance of community.

“Their mentality was: Do whatever it takes to help a kid to learn,” he recalls. “It was not unusual for students of theirs to come by the house and get an extra lesson or for my grandparents to visit the homes of students they had and talk to their parents.”

Foxx says that the examples set by his grandparents greatly dictated how he viewed and still views himself today.

“You know, I could be a minister, a teacher … I could be a doctor, I could be just about anything, but whatever I would have become, somehow it would have connected back to the community,” he says.
And he was destined to drift into politics under the wing of his granddaddy, who was a guru of all things political. Foxx says he got lassoed into many conversations by virtue of being a kid hanging around the house after his single mother moved away to further her education and work. He also was an extra pair of hands during election time and a cute half-pint-tag-a-long at the polls.

Foxx remembers putting out signs in support of Harvey Gantt, Charlotte’s first African-American mayor and close family friend.

“At the time I didn’t really know all about who Harvey Gantt was; I just knew my grandfather was supporting him so he pulled me in the car and we went out and I was doing what he was doing,” Foxx says.  “I learned about that later.”

One of his most vivid memories of that time was when his grandfather – using a staple gun to fix campaign signs to wooden posts – stapled his thumb by accident.

“It looked like the most painful thing you could ever imagine, but he just stopped, pulled out the staple and kept going,” Foxx says. “I thought to myself right then that he was made out of something different than I would ever be made of … it just showed me how committed he was to what he was doing.”

Foxx graduated from West Charlotte High School and then Davidson College, where he was the school’s first black student body president. He later earned his law degree from New York University and returned briefly to Charlotte before going to clerk at the U.S. Court of Appeals in Cincinnati.  Foxx then went on to work in the voting section of the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Department and was counsel for the House Judiciary Committee.

He returned to Charlotte in 2001 and worked as a litigator for Hunton & Williams for years until recently becoming general counsel at Design Line.

Foxx dropped jaws when he ran for an at-large City Council seat with no experience in 2005. That was seen as a far-reaching goal because, historically, the best launching pad for serving on the City Council has been district representation.

“You know, one of my basic philosophies of life is not to complicate the simple,” he says. “I had a desire to represent the entire city in the same way in which I saw it represented when I was a kid, which was leadership that understood all of the push-pull in the community, that took it all into account but dug down deep to make decisions and to communicate those decisions to the public in a way in which everyone felt fairly treated.”

With all of Charlotte’s rapid growth, some people in the community feel like our politics have gotten lost, Foxx says.
“I felt a deep obligation to try to do what I could to restore it,” the Charlotte mayor says.

Foxx was re-elected in 2007 and says he can’t really pinpoint when he decided to run for mayor.

“Did you ever think to yourself, ‘I want to be mayor one day’?” I ask.

“No,” he says.

I try to dig into his thought process a little more. He doesn’t indulge.

“I guess something misfired,” he says, laughing.

But the ball seemed be rolling long before 2009.

Chatter whirled as early as 2007 while former Mayor Pat McCrory was making headlines for wielding his powers while assigning council members to committees. Democrats – including Foxx – billed the assignments as politically motivated, questioning the qualifications of some of McCrory’s choices. The Republicans, including John Lassiter, who ran against Foxx for mayor, criticized Foxx and other Democrats behind the scenes – chiding them for stirring unnecessary debate.

Gallis’ passion for exploring history, his ability to see beyond boundaries and identify spacial relationships has made him an expert in his field. He has helped shape the vision for U.S. transportation in the 21st century. His uptown Charlotte firm paved the way for how people commute from New York to Orlando, Fla., to Detroit and Memphis, Tenn., which also has a new economic development strategy thanks to him.

But he is also a writer, working on a book about friends who went to Vietnam and returned very different people. He is a historian, able to quote Bible verses and war battles.  And he is passionate about the environment and the impact of global warming.

“It’s apparent to all of us we have a daunting challenge ahead of us,” he says.

Gallis, 66, was born in San Francisco to a Chinese-born Russian father who operated a general goods and timber company that expanded to Oregon.  When the company collapsed during the Great Depression, Gallis’ father moved to the United States and enrolled in the University of Oregon. His mother was Swedish. Her family operated timber companies as well. The two had met at International House at the University of California at Berkley and married a short time later.

Gallis, who crewed on a rowing team when he was young, also developed an appreciation for history and art, courtesy of his parents who had their own Chinese art collection. He bought his first piece – a pair of African figurines – from an L.A. art dealer he discovered while buying supplies for a freshman architecture project at a lumberyard next door.

“The importance of collecting art from different parts of the world to me is that it was created as a result of different kinds of ideas,” Gallis says.

Today his first floor office in the Boxer Building uptown resembles a gallery, with hundreds of pieces of Tribal and African art displayed on shelves and whitewashed walls. Feathered masks with shells, carved wooden shapes and masks with cutout eyes fill the library.  But the collection doesn’t stop there. Metal statues tucked between floor plants fill the hallways and decorate desks along with a chair hand carved from a single tree. One of Gallis’ favorite pieces of art is a colorful painting of Chinese letters that hangs in the conference room.

“If you only stick to your own culture, you never expand your mind,” he says. “By collecting different art you get a better understanding of your own history and a deeper appreciation for your perceptions and values.”

Gallis studied art history and earned his architecture degree from the University of California at Berkley and a master’s in architecture and planning from the University of Pennsylvania. He went on to teach at the University of Miami and came here in the early 1970s when a college friend asked him to teach at the newly formed college of architecture at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

He was an associate professor there for 20 years before starting his own company, which he called Noah Studios – a name he chose after reading the Bible and recalling Jesus’ first prophet, Noah.

“That little company was our arc,” he recalls. “Noah put trust in God to guide the arc and we left it up to God to get our little company off the ground.”
Decades later, Gallis has been recognized nationally for motivating governments to integrate regional, national and global strategies. His firm’s latest study – the first of its kind – provides insight into coping with nature’s evolution and how man-made systems can evolve efficiently so the two can co-exist.

The framework for his most recent study and those before it stem from lessons learned while watching Charlotte transform from a tiny city into the country’s 21st largest.
Gallis began studying Charlotte in depth in the mid-1980s.  It was transforming quickly from a city to a metropolitan area and people were confused over how to deal with planning as political coalitions emerged and development patterns changed.

“When I arrived here, Charlotte was just a small city with a lot of country roads around it,” Gallis says. “In the course of the next three decades it transformed into a major metro area – it was a great urban learning laboratory.”

His staff crafted a development plan for Rock Hill, S.C. And it was during that research when growth patterns began to emerge.

Using a pen on old hand drawings, Gallis circles little yellow blobs on a map that represents Gastonia, Concord and others. They were getting bigger. And a grid of highways and superhighways was beginning to develop, he says.

The cities were not just growing but they were merging as one big unit or urban network, and the future of any city is related to where it sits inside the network.
This would require new theories and approaches, Gallis says.

A decade later city leaders formed committees to study growth in the region. Rather than build more highways, the Gallis research suggested Charlotte choose building a transportation system along its centers and corridors, which became the transit lines the city has today.

“The key to the future was understanding how these urban networks grew and changed and then how we could affect their future through different policies, regulations and investments,” Gallis says.

He retired from teaching in 1997 to work full time at the newly formed Michael Gallis & Associates, which suddenly began getting nationwide attention for its innovative and efficient strategies.

The firm began studying connections between Connecticut, New York and Boston and discovered relationships between politics, urban economics and geography.  Soon, Gallis and his staff were traveling the country compiling research on numerous regions.

Through this work the firm developed what Gallis calls a systems approach to networks such as transportation, tourism and the environment. The concept is similar to the systems within the human body, each with a purpose and function.

It was through this lens that Gallis and his people determined that the environment was so unique that it should be treated separately.

“We discovered that we knew less about the environment than we did about any other system,” Gallis says. “And it occurred to me that we needed to study the interaction of (the environment and manmade systems), which had never been done before.”

What had been done before simply was man’s impact on the environment such as air pollution and water runoff. But no one had studied how people were building urban ecosystems, Gallis says.

Wearing a crisp white button-down and gray paisley tie, Gallis pops up out of his chair to fetch a book to illustrate his point. He glances pensively through his collection of topics from painting to ocean liners and railroads.  At 6-foot-4, he towers over some of the highest shelves, which include the 1929 plans for New York City, a collection of 19th century atlases and the book that created the Federal Aviation Administration.

In the mash of books, Gallis can’t find what he’s after, but it’s hardly needed. He recalls most of the details he’d hoped and explains how his firm began researching the way cities were growing compared to the patterns of nature. First his staff looked at the Southeast, from Birmingham, Ala., to southern Virginia as well as Atlanta, Columbia, S.C., Charlotte, Raleigh and the Tennessee Valley. On a global scale, Gallis & Associates took the research to another level looking at the relationship between natural and human systems.
“You could see where – as we built human networks such as roads and buildings – we never built either to fit the natural system. We took the environment for granted,” Gallis says. “It is only now we are able to fully appreciate our relationship with nature.”

Currently nature and man-made systems are in conflict with each other, he says.

“We have to move toward co-evolving.”

By identifying effects of growth on the environment such as erosion, depletion, extinction and pollution, Gallis & Associates has identified strategies for action to include new policies, incentives and regulatory procedures up to the federal level.

“The bottom line is we have to rethink the way we manage the growth of our cities,” Gallis says. “We have two systems in conflict and we are facing problems people haven’t grasped.”
Based on its global research and findings, Gallis & Associates is one of several organizations working with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to study the physical, socioeconomic and ecosystem impact of significant changes in sea levels along the Eastern seaboard.

“We are looking at some of the potentials of dramatic changes that people think will happen in small increments but could be of significant size,” Gallis says. “If we don’t try to understand them we won’t be prepared for them.”

~ Victoria Cherrie