Casey Jones Council Grabs Streetcar Grant
The Charlotte City Council on Monday night delivered the first installment of a pricey political payoff, when it voted to accept a $25-million federal grant to help build the city’s coveted streetcar project.
The total price tag for the route’s first leg, which will stretch all of 1.5 miles, from Time Warner Cable Arena to Presbyterian Hospital, tops out at $37 million. As a match for the federal grant, the city is kicking in $12 million of general fund revenues that could have been used, instead, to pay for other pressing needs – little things like roads, sidewalks and neighborhood development.
The city took over funding responsibility for the streetcar when officials conceded there wasn’t enough money from the half-cent sales tax for transit to build it, breaking one promise while keeping another.
Councilmembers have consistently made assurances that only half-cent sales tax revenue would be used to pay for transit projects. But during an effort in 2007 to repeal that tax, city leaders had tacitly vowed to expedite construction of the streetcar, to gain support from the black community to defeat the transit-tax repeal effort.
The streetcar route will ultimately stretch 10 miles, and cost upwards of $500 million to build, chugging down Beatties Ford Road and out Central Avenue, through largely minority communities on the city’s west and east sides.
On Monday night, the promise that was made to leap frog the streetcar over other transit projects came due – and so did its bill. The council voted 6-3 to accept the federal grant to kick start construction.
Democrats James Mitchell, Patrick Cannon, Nancy Carter, David Howard, Patsy Kinsey and Jason Burgess voted to accept the grant. Republicans Warren Cooksey, Andy Dulin and Edwin Peacock, along with Democrats Warren Turner and Michael Barnes, voted in dissent.
“This council has now said we are in the transit business,” Peacock said. “Why did we come up with a half-cent sales tax, why did we say we wanted to take a regional approach? Why we did that is because [the city] wanted to get out of the transit business.
“Now we’re back in it,” he said. “It’s debt paid by debt and it’s going to be debt on you as a property owner.”
Indeed, in addition to the $12 million the city is paying to build the streetcar, it will also need to deliver about $1.5 million for annual operating costs. Charlotte Area Transit System officials have said they can’t pay that tab. And city officials don’t know how they will, only that the money will likely have to be pulled, in one form or another, from the city’s general fund.
That struck a sour note with dozens of residents who showed up Monday night to protest the city spending $37 million on a 1.5-mile stretch of streetcar, at the expense of more pressing needs.
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