‘Member the other day when I pointed out that we may be entering an era of shrinking Charlotte? CMS Super Pete Gorman concurs.
An an amazingly overlooked interview with WCNC, Gorman says that CMS will have to start closing schools unless the county revenue situation reverses itself soon. Specifically:
In 2011, federal stimulus money will go away, requiring even more cuts. Gorman told us he will ask the school board to close schools.
“Double-digits,” Gorman said, referring to the number of schools that would likely close. “I don’t have an exact number for you, but if I had to guess, I would guess double digit school closures.”
Think about what that means. Absent boom times, the county and CMS cannot support the physical plant now in operation. I can think of no more searing indictment of local fiscal management (sic) than that.
It means that for years CMS and the county threw money around in irresponsible and unsustainable ways. Cue Patricia Rodgers and her gold-plated, $500K concession stands in Cornelius, gleefully purchased by CMS with fist-fulls of county debt.
Gorman has seriously gone off-script with this startling admission. Unless Gorman — who applauded the county library board for its “close the libraries” gambit at the same moment county Manager Harry Jones was damning them, another criminally neglected little side-bar to the county’s fiscal woes — is somehow trying to deploy the Washington Monument approach in advance of 2011, everything we thought we knew about baseline costs is out the window.
In fact, the wholesale closing of public schools would be the clearest indication yet that Charlotte is indeed becoming Detroit-on-the-Catawba.
