Can you say damage control?
UNCC has opted to reassign Center for Transportation Policy Studies executive-in-residence Dennis Rash to the Office of the Vice Chancellor of Business Affairs, where Rash will help bootstrap the $45 million Jim Black-provided Uptown building for UNCC.
Chancellor Philip Dubois also provides some mumbo-jumbo about the new slot allowing Rash to “privately advocate his position on this important community vote while separating his advocacy from the university.” Got that? Me neither.
Let’s be clear about this. The sole reason UNCC has a $45 million Uptown building is to provide a SimCity pod which will “require” linkage to the UNCC main campus via the $750 million Northeast light rail line. Dubois must really think we are all idiots to believe that attaching Rash to the Uptown campus somehow makes him less interested in CATS continuing to build choo-choo trains.
In fact, I’d argue that Rash is now more interested in seeing the half-cent repeal fail as the without the Northeast line, the entire rationale for the Uptown campus — such as it is — goes poof.
Then there is the matter of Rash’s wife.
Maybe the University spells this out somewhere — who knows as only favored media outlets received the Dubois statement — but Rash should have been put on duty far, far removed from the transit issue the minute his wife, former city councilwoman Betty Chafin Rash, was appointed to the Pat McCrory/Charlotte Chamber “grassroots” task force to help save the half-cent. That happened two months ago, just as Chambergate was coming to light.
As it stands right now, the Rashes are in a perfect position to continue their joint advocacy on behalf of continued train building.
All this move does is attempt to demonstrate to probers from the UNC System that Dubois recognizes that Rash’s involvement in the UNCC transit “study” — and the subsequent attempts to mask said involvement — were improper. Consider it the equivalent of a quick institutional “my bad.”
And that is but more arrogance and spin from an office and institution that still thinks itself above reproach.
Not so.
Update: Yep, Phil Dubois thinks you are an idiot. Check out this quote: “This is obviously directly tied to the controversy about the transit study. I don’t want anyone to feel we are using state resources to underwrite his advocacy.”
