Let it die a natural death. This means you city flunkies and councilwoman Nancy Carter.
I’ve got a sick sense that Charlotte city officials are still itching lob millions in taxpayer dollars toward Eastland in order to be able to control what comes next on the sprawling site. I doubt these yobs have the slightest understanding that their meddling — constantly floating the prospect of a city bailout, drawing pie-in-the-sky re-development plans with the serial flim-flam artists at the Urban Land Institute — helped to short-circuit the normal market processes. We might be well on our way to something other than a dead mall without all the public-sector — bipartisan — posturing of the past few years.
At least the economic and political reality is making some impact now, to wit:
Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx said it would be politically difficult to take even partial ownership in Eastland while Mecklenburg County makes deep cuts to schools and libraries.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Where is the local smart-ass brigade to sing-song but the city doesn’t pay for schools and libraries, the county does. Or didn’t you know that?
Mayor Foxx is making the broad, common-sense point that the local public sector is the local public sector — all funded out of the same local private sector wallet. The neat little bureaucratic trick of walling off this fund for that purpose does not matter.
When basic services cannot be funded, the dreams of planners and developers for subsidized spaces should not be on the table for discussion.
