Charleston Mayor William Cogswell has been in office for a year now, so it’s probably a good time to check in with how he’s doing.
If you believe a Jan. 7 email from the city (“Top Ten Highlights of 2024”), everything is going swimmingly. But if you look behind the rhetoric and examine the actual record, you’ll probably draw a different conclusion. Consider these points:
- Flood mitigation. Cogswell glows about creation of the city’s Active Flood Mitigation Plan as a top success. But wasn’t most of this stuff already in the works by former Mayor John Tecklenburg? Cogswell gets credit for no-wake zones during flooding, but not really for flood pumps, lowering lakes, road closures and storm drain maintenance. Furthermore, he gets a big Thumbs Down for pushing out Dale Morris, the really smart guy who steered the city’s flood strategy by incorporating principles learned during the Dutch Dialogues.
- Restructured city government. If you want to give Cogswell credit for hiring a chief of staff to act as a city manager and take virtually all direct contact with the mayor away from department heads, you could count this as a win. We don’t. We classify it as the mayor implementing a way to do less work and still get paid $225,000 a year.
- Union Pier. Cogswell gets credit for pushing through a Tax Increment Financing District to fund infrastructure and other development in Union Pier. But it’s still worrisome about how much revenue the county school district will lose as pier district properties become taxable.
- New communications efforts. While the mayor and his team say they’re promoting engagement and transparency with residents by pushing the newsletter and putting his campaign’s social media company on the city payroll to make feel-good videos, he gets a huge Thumbs Down for accountability. He continues to refuse to talk with the Charleston City Paper (no interviews still since his election), and his communication team routinely erects communications roadblocks. Other media outlets also notice his reticence. And just look at the city’s fiasco of redoing its historic seal. Some council members didn’t even know about the thousands of dollars spent by Cogswell and company on what turned out to be a juvenile-looking, embarrassing new brand.
The city also touts successes of a King Street safety initiative (another rebranded Tecklenburg item), Angel Oak rezoning and cost-savings on an operations facility. But Cogwell conveniently leaves out the collapse of his plan to build more housing for the homeless, interference that threatened a long-sought pedestrian-bike bridge over the Ashley River and a lack of details or specifics on how the city will build — and fund — hundreds of units of promised affordable housing.
A one-year score for Cogswell as mayor: Meh.
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