The Uptown paper of record has lurched into the UNCC transit study story with a belated bang, digging up new emails that reveal an even closer relationship between the University and the Chamber of Commerce in producing the pro-CATS propaganda document.

Incredibly, UNCC resources were used to help the Chamber shape the questions used in the Chamber’s local telephone poll conducted in April.

“We need some of the research data in order to craft the attitude survey and then to begin the 2 1/2 (to) 3 weeks of telephoning for the surveys ASAP. We need this attitude survey to mount an effective PR campaign,” Transportation Center advisor and long-time Uptown fixture Dennis Rash told Chancellor Phil Dubois in a March 26 email.

Rash in a later email: “Edd’s research has given MarketWise the opportunity to present facts after the initial survey questions. With the attitude data, we will be able to see what are the ‘hot buttons,’ where the areas of support and opposition are, and the demographics that correlate to those. Then we can plan what the key messages need to be, when and where to send those messages.”

An effective PR campaign. Why is a taxpayer supported university helping a well-funded corporate lobby like the Chamber with its PR and campaign efforts? Why — exactly — didn’t the Chamber pay the University for all its manifest help?

This is the crux of the matter now.

The Chamber, according to Edd Hauser, paid for previous Center reports, like the one on Charlotte-Douglas Airport. (see Update) But not the transit study. Why not?

The obvious answer is that it would’ve been bad PR. The scheme evidently involved hiding Chamber — and CATS — involvement in the study and presenting the study as an unbiased, “academic” look at a politically charged issue. Anyone listening to the first WFAE interview with Hauser or reading the initial Observer embrace of the study certainly got a face full of that bogus spin.

Now Dubois is trying to act like nothing is wrong. That of course the University helped the Chamber. Move along. Nothing to see here. Then why all the secrecy several weeks ago?

Money.

The University essentially did research for the Chamber for free. This appears to violate University policy with regard to outside research. State resources and state employees did the work of a private group without disclosing that relationship to the public paying for those state assets.

That is fraud on a basic, fundamental level. If the Chamber had gone out and hired Edd Hauser to do a study on CATS, fine. Great. No problem. Everybody would know the score. The report could’ve made the best possible case for CATS and for keeping the half-cent tax. That then gets thrown into the mix. May have swayed some local opinion that way.

But that was too risky for the Uptown crowd, unfamiliar with actually having to argue on the merits of an idea with an informed opponent. Instead they opted to try to game the system. Their advocacy would be cloaked in the shell of a public university. More effective PR that way.

Not so much anymore.

Update: In response to a public records request, UNCC now reports that there are no emails other than that of Chamber president Bob Morgan that it received in early to mid-March which asked the University to conduct a study on CATS.

How this squares with Vice Chancellor for University Relations David Dunn’s assertion that there were “multiple prompts” for the study is left to the imagination.

In addition, the University now clarifies Edd Hauser’s remarks to WFAE on July 2 which seemed to indicate that the Chamber had paid for a previous study on Charlotte-Douglas Airport. The University now says that the Chamber has never funded the Center, at all.

This now makes Hauser’s comments on WFAE a complete non sequitur. In response to the observation that the Center had previously cited Chamber involvement in Center research, Hauser seems to say around the 18 minute mark that the difference is that they had previously played a sponsoring role, accounting for the citation. That is evidently not so.

We are back to square one, then. The Chamber’s role in a previous study — funded by the airport authority — was disclosed. The Chamber’s role in the transit study — funded by the university itself — was not.

Why was that?

Effective PR.