Don’t know where to start on the news that CATS has been forced to delay and scale back its nine-mile South Blvd. line yet again.
First, pushing back the ribbon-cutting to August 2007 puts the $427 million line a full year behind schedule. Plus, reworking the Trade Street station is another indication that the system cannot, in fact, be funded by the .5 cent sales tax voters approved for transit in 1998. For that reason, the city is now officially exploring using property tax revenue to pay for a pedestrian bridge at the station.
This gets out in the open what has already gone on along South Blvd., with infrastructure improvements being funded by bond money. But in that case the city could reasonably argue that the work needed to be done with or without a light rail line. Not so a bridge for a light rail station.
These developments also mean that talk of the project being “on budget” is meaningless. The delay simply patches a cash-flow problem and does nothing to impact the higher-than-budgeted costs CATS is encountering. In fact, the delay is almost certain to push up costs elsewhere for the project. And once property tax money is clearly and explicitly used to pay for the system, Charlotte will have crossed into open-season on taxpayers.
Escalating costs — actually real-world costs vs. fantasy-land projections — will leave Charlotte with a choice of leaving out increasingly vital parts of the system — like, say, a tunnel underneath 485 in Matthews? — or building something utterly useless.
Great choices, huh?
