It is official. A half-billion dollars worth of streetcars is more important to elected and hired city officials than police or roads or anything else. A half-billion dollars worth of streetcars that no one in city government knows how they are going to afford. A half-billion dollars that will not come out of the existing half-cent transit tax.
Worse, the $8m. council elected to spend on a streetcar study is but a portion of the $41m. required in preliminary engineering. Who wants to bet that we won’t end up spending all of that number on streetcars? After all, the line will go, to do otherwise would be to throw away $8m. we’ve already spent….
In other words, as Charlotte city government ties itself in knots trying to find two, three, $4m. for more police officers and any money at all for required road fixes, over ten times that amount has just been rubber-stamped by a council utterly captive to special interests and whatever city staff wants. This irresponsible act has opened a vein in the local body politic. It is only a matter of time now before Charlotte bleeds out.
Fee and tax hikes will start this year, pick up speed in 2010. By 2015 Charlotte once vibrant quality-of-life will be gasping beneath a staggering tax burden. Lumbering, solipsistic local government will double-down: More subsidies for insiders and projects favored by government staff. By 2020, the deed will be done. Another dead city. Murder most foul.
Bonus Observation: Neat trick by councilman John Lassiter to suddenly realize that there is no way to pay for the streetcar, hence it is prudent to oppose spending the $8m. on the study. There has never been a way to pay for the streetcar, John. Just fanciful rosy projections. Anthony Foxx, who attended the same West Charlotte meeting as I did in 2007 to watch former CATS honcho Ron Tober promise a streetcar for Beatties Ford in exchange for voting against the transit tax repeal, is all aboard the streetcar train with no turning back.
It remains to be seen if this is the start of a more conservative fiscal campaign by Lassiter, or if he simply intends to tell West side and East Charlotte voters that to get their half-billion dollar streetcar, they’ll have to support a sales tax hike. That would just make him the Ron Tober of 2009.
