And why was he meeting with Mecklenburg County DSS officials at the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce back in July?
Let’s start with what we know. Wulkan is a former senior vice president for Parsons Brinckerhoff, the transit and transportation firm that helped CATS get its transit plan off the ground and project costs and ridership for the corridors. Tara Servatius detailed the sorry history of Parsons Brinckerhoff and transportation projects here.
Wulkan now runs a consulting firm he founded, Infraconsult, which describes itself as expert in infrastructure development — including community outreach for transit projects. For a number of years going back to his days with Parsons, Wulkan has written on and discussed aspects of mounting successful transit tax election campaigns. It is fair to say Wulkan is considered something of an expert on the topic.
According to emails from Mecklenburg County officials, Wulkan and his firm were hired by an unknown private entity to work on the Save The Tax campaign in Mecklenburg. Wulkan has not yet responded to an email asking if that entity was the anti-repeal campaign group chaired by Pat Mumford.
Nonetheless, Wulkan, along with Brian Rasmussen of R&R Partners, the Las Vegas ad agency which we know was hired by Mumford’s group, met with county DSS officials at the Chamber on July 30 at 3:30 in the afternoon. According to an email from DSS official Mark Bevilacqua, the consultants were interested in information that might help them defeat the repeal effort.
“They explained they were trying to garner the elderly vote to help defeat the referendum. The also wanted to know what elderly organizations there were in the community they could contact. We gave them several they could contact,” the email concludes.
Now keep in mind that the end of $70 million a year in transit tax revenue would cut at most $1 million in support for DSS general purpose elderly transportation. The county could flip the couch cushions and come up with $1 million. In short, there is absolutely no universe in which the county’s transportation program for the elderly who are dependent on it would go unfunded post-repeal. None.
And I dare Alan Wulkan or anyone else to say otherwise.
But that is evidently not the message that Wulkan and company want to send.
You see, Wulkan is on record as saying transit elections should be made to turn on “What’s In It for Me?” and extremely short-term in outlook — what do I get or lose?
Here’s Wulkan at a transit conference in San Jose in 2001 on how to sell transit to an elderly population:
People want to know what they’re paying for and what they’re getting and the proposition should be focused on short-term and immediate time frames.
In Miami, we used to say, “We don’t go try to sell the people in Northeast Dade County on something that requires them to buy more than green bananas.” These people don’t buy green bananas. They don’t, people are short-term focused. They want to see what I’m going to get today. You try to tell them it’s going to ripen in the future, and 10 years from now you’re going to get a great rail system, they think they’re going to be dead by then, okay? They’re not, it was funny, the opening of MetroRail after we won our election, I had some of the same people that said, “Why would I support you? I’m going to be dead by the time we open.”
Then sure enough, I reminded them that they’re still here. That’s fun, if you have a chance to do that, but they don’t trust you up front. So be careful with that.
Don’t try to sell the long-term vision, unless again, in some communities, long-term vision is paired with the short-term benefits.
In the case of Charlotte, Wulkan and the pro-tax camp have merely moved to the supposed short-term loss of repeal — namely, that the elderly will lose their rides to medical care — if the tax is repealed.
What an utterly shameless performance. The Uptown crowd continue to set ever-lower lows in their quest to save the tax. Hiring big dollar consultants help to scare old folks. Pathetic.
Update: Just hit me that we just decided to spend $2.8 million to kill tree worms in the city — and we honestly might not have $1 million for elderly transit? Don’t even try it — I’ll smack you with a damn tree branch.
Update II: Pat Mumford confirms that the Vote Repeal campaign hired Wulkan.
