Hey, why don’t we build a billion-dollar college campus shuttle?
This morning, the Charlotte Observer unofficially launched the campaign for a second half-cent sales tax for mass transit with this article.
I’ll translate the article. Sure, we’ll have federal and state dollars for the billion dollar train line in place by late 2012 because the feds and state are eager to hand us $802 million dollars, the Observer claims, as if it will be easy to get that kind of payola with governments as broke as they are. (I doubt that, but play along.) Now the only thing holding up the line, the Observer hints, is that stingy taxpayers need to fork over more cash.
This article will be followed up tomorrow or in the next few days with one suggesting, either directly or indirectly, that we get a move-on cranking up the local campaign to increase the tax. The Observer won’t question how sure a thing this supposed cash infusion from the feds and the states actually is.
Here is the reality. We are no where near having commitments for federal and state money to start arriving by then end of next year for the rail line. You can tell this by reading the article because the Observer didn’t even bother to source that claim.
The truth is that to credibly ask the feds or the state for money, we’d need to pass another half-cent sales tax FIRST. Even then, getting funding from both is a long shot. But the Observer won’t tell the public the truth about that until after the tax passes in 2012. What is important now is that they create the impression that $802 million in free federal and state cash could be ours if we’d just agree to raise the transit tax.
And the reason for all of this is that the shiny shoes know tumbleweeds will be blowing through uptown by the end of the decade as bank jobs disappear. Their plan to avoid a deadening urban core, the kiss of death in their world for a city like Charlotte, is to keep the life in uptown by making it a huge college campus over time. Uptown will start as a satellite to UNCC with the current UNCC campus eventually becoming a satellite for the uptown one. That has always been a long-term plan of theirs. Now, it is the only plan they know of to save uptown from decline.
If you think about it, the foundation is there. Charlotte now has a law school uptown and a medical school is planned. It’s also got Johnson & Wales. Now it just needs some kind of anchor to tie it all together.
Will it work? I don’t know about the saving uptown part, but I wouldn’t bet against these people on the transit tax. They have a documented history of getting what they want.
Bonus Observation: This rail line was originally supposed to end at I-485. Now it will end at UNCC. That utterly changes its purpose. These lines were sold to the public in 1998 as an alternative for drivers stuck in traffic. But if you know anything about the geography of where UNCC is located, you can see that dead-ending it there will make the line largely inaccessable or at best highly inconvenient for those interstate drivers stuck in traffic. That means that what they are actually building is a billion-dollar college campus shuttle.
And another thing: Several of you have reminded me that I should have linked to this article today about UNC Charlotte’s new $50.4 million, 12 -story center city building, which just officially opened in First Ward, “giving the university its most visible presence off the main campus.”
The $50.4 million high-rise – looking like a twisted Rubik’s Cube – was designed to better engage the university with Charlotte and bridge the once-vast divide between the city and the sprawling campus just 11 miles north.
In other words, its main purpose isn’t to boost education, but to boost uptown. This is SimCity on a large, and very expensive scale.
