Mecklenburg County Commissioner Chair Jennifer Roberts recently struck a distressingly mendacious chord by attempting to explain the county’s fiscal troubles with reference to Mecklenburg’s growth in the past decade. Roberts implied the reason MeckCo was short cash for schools, libraries, parks — pretty much the functions of county government — was because Meck’s population was up 25 percent since 2000.
The first thing I flashed to was fact that county spending and revenue is up much more than that. Tara Servatius this week pegged county spending up almost 75 percent since 2000. So right off, in common-sense, hard dollar terms, Roberts is spouting nonsense.
But what really troubled me was and is the notion that the added population is somehow just a burden on the county and local government in general. As if those folks who moved in are only consuming government services, and not paying taxes to government. Clearly and obviously that is not true. The additional workers are an asset not Robertsian liability. Productive, law-abiding humans are always an asset.
Yet when you think about it a little while, from a top-down, social engineering point of view, these folks who came to Charlotte in the past decade were more trouble than they are worth. Afterall, they spurred the building of hated new suburban subdivisions — which forced the county to spend money on suburban schools even as building permit cash and property tax revenue soared thanks to the newcomers. Functioning burbs — that is not what Roberts and assorted social engineers wanted to do.
The newcomers also demanded roads and police protection — again, not what local government staff and the Uptown crowd wanted to spend their growing revenue stream on. The insiders wanted arenas, Whitewater centers, arts campuses, trains, and transit oriented development. Ideally, new high density developments would be populated with childless “creative classers” who did not demand a lot in government services — but did spend a ton on restaurants and filled government-owned and subsidized venues to party. Call it the EpiCentre Economy.
There was a brief, speculative Uptown condo boom funded by local banker Ponzi scheme lending, but these newcomers did not flock to live and work inside 277 by the tens of thousands as the planners intended. And it turns out that productive small businessmen and women are perfectly willing to bug out to Union County or Ft. Mill should the cost of doing business grow too high in Charlotte.
Local officials like Roberts cannot handle this reality and instead try to deny it with increasingly inventive cognitive gymnastics. It is time for this skit to end. It has just become silly at this point.
