Yeah, I know — big surprise. But The Charlotte Business Journal is reporting in a story not yet online that the cost of actually running the rail line to and through the convention center and the adjacent Westin hotel, pretty much the sine qua non of the entire $430 million project, could cost $4 to $8 million more than expected.
At the upper-end of the estimate, a $22 million price tag would leave the project some $13 million short. The bottom-line is that the right-of-way for the ridiculous $40 million uptown trolley is proving to be much more expensive to retro-fit for light rail use than Charlotte officialdom expected, at least publicly.
Of course, the Locke foundation told you that the trolley was a classic stalking horse/camel’s nose kind of thing for a half-billion dollar light rail boondoggle, so no news there.
