The full-court propaganda press by the Uptown crowd against the transit tax repeal continues. The latest is CATS boss Ron Tober telling News14 Carolina that people signing the petition have no idea what they are doing.
“Frankly a lot of people signing the petition didn’t fully understand what they were signing,” Tober declared. People are just being told to sign here to reduce their taxes, he complained.
“We’re very concerned about what’s going on with the petition drive. … We see it as being driven by political ideology and emotion, rather than hard cold facts and logic,” he continues.
Why yes, the wacky ideology is freedom and fairness; the emotion is anger at being lied to for so very long; facts and logic — when has CATS ever paid attention to either? Keep swinging, Ron.
“Without the sales tax we’d end up having to pare back the bus system to probably less than what we had in 1997,” Tober says.
Yes, yes the sales tax — as much as 70 percent of it — goes to pay for buses. Wonderful.
Why not cancel the management aggrement with McDonald Transit Associates, get rid of the expensive Teamster bus drivers who had you worried the other day, Ron, and see where that puts you? That was the pre-transit tax situation. Just another option that CATS will never consider so long as $65 million or so in transit tax money keeps flowing each year.
Of course, never mentioned is exactly how CATS will afford to pay for all of its future plans, the ones that will generate roughly $350 million in annual expenses. Tober and gang keep trying to pretend they have all the answers, but we never get one on that rather important question.
The more the defenders of the status quo talk, the more obvious the need for change becomes.
