Casey Jones Council Grabs Streetcar Grant
“The fact that you’re considering moving forward with such a project, at a time when our country and our city is in a recession, demonstrates to me that you know no boundaries with regard to spending,” said Marcus Philemon, executive director of Char-Meck Court Watch, a group whose members, he said, had logged over 3,100 hours in volunteer service last year to address the criminal justice system’s repeat offenders issue.
“You don’t have enough money to fund the district attorney’s office,” Philemon scolded councilmembers, “but you can find the money to fund a streetcar system.”
Monday’s vote also brought out a contingent of streetcar supporters, who said that the project was a critical investment in the city’s future.
State Senator Malcolm Graham, a Democrat, said he was speaking in his capacity as special assistant to the president of Johnson C. Smith University, which stands to directly benefit from the streetcar, when he urged the council to accept the federal grant.
“Charlotte has a history,” he said, “of investing in itself and planning for its growth and development.”
Ron Carter, president of Johnson C. Smith and chairman of the city’s streetcar advisory committee, echoed that sentiment. So did Mattie Marshall, a member of the same advisory committee and president of Historic Washington Heights – a community that also will directly benefit from the streetcar.
“I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired of waiting and living on empty promises,” she said, referencing promises made to the black community that the streetcar would be given priority, if the 2007 transit-tax repeal referendum was defeated.
Cooksey also referenced the failed repeal referendum, but in a decidedly different context.
“The strongest arguments made by opponents of the transit tax – that we all said, ‘no, no, don’t listen to them, vote against repeal; we promise we have a plan that can stay within the half-cent tax’ – by this vote [to accept the streetcar grant], we break that promise and we abandon that plan,” Cooksey said.
If one thing became glaringly apparent Monday night, in fact, it was that the city’s 2030 transit plan is all but officially dead for lack of funding. Howard even used that as justification for the city assuming funding responsibility for the streetcar.
“Although the Lynx Blue line and Lynx Red line remain the top priority, the economic recession has significantly reduced the revenue anticipated for the implementation of the plan,” Howard said, quoting from language council had previously used in approving other initiatives.
“The result of this is that the 2030 corridor system plan adopted in 2006 is no longer financially achievable under the current schedule,” he continued, “and that new funding schedules and options must be explored by the MTC (Metropolitan Transit Commission) and the CATS staff.”
Having the city foot the bill for the streetcar apparently being one of the new funding schedules and options.
Cooksey didn’t buy that rationale. The plan, he said, called for accelerating the 2030 corridor system as conditions allow.
“I do not believe economic conditions allow us to take the streetcar project out of that plan,” Cooksey said, “and do it ourselves.”
Or as Peacock put it: “How can we build something that we know we can’t pay for?”
Taxpayers are about to find out.
“The truth of the matter,” said Mayor Anthony Foxx, a Democrat and one of the streetcar’s biggest boosters, “is that for this community to build out a transit system we’re going to have to deploy large amounts of money to build infrastructure, on the belief that that infrastructure is going to translate into investment.”
In other words: hope and change, along with a few broken promises thrown in for good measure.
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