Business As Usual
In this case, it consists of the Charlotte Regional Visitors Authority spreading around thousands of dollars in gifts and perks to Charlotte’s uptown lunch bunch crowd and their enablers and benefactors to further the agenda and interests of the same, at the expense of the rest of us mere mortals, the unwashed masses.
This comes as absolutely no surprise, and don’t bother looking to the city council or board of commissioners for answers, fixes, or anything but faux outrage. Councilmembers continue to annually receive the same type of high-dollar, elitist perks from the CRVA, in the form of skybox tickets to the CIAA basketball tourney, that are being dished out to every other player whose job it is to protect and further Uptown’s interests. County commissioners were guilty of receiving the same CIAA beanies until finally, after much gnashing of teeth, squashing the practice this year
There’s a reason for all the turning of heads, the washing of the hands, the move-along-nothing-to-see-here attitudes. Namely, it’s the same crowd spending thousands of taxpayer dollars for perks, gifts, and come-ons to sell, promote and justify the tens of millions of taxpayer dollars they spent building flashy trinkets and baubles for Uptown – think arenas, light rail, rafting parks, art museums, racing museums, stadiums, greenways – at the expense of core government services and responsibilities.
When CRVA chieftain Tim Newman says he’s spending money to make money, what he’s really saying is that taxpayer money is being looted in plain sight, passed between groups like the CRVA and Charlotte Center Partners, their respective boards of directors, the city council and the board of commissioners, doled out in many cases to the very folks charged with the oversight of those groups and to their favored friends and co-conspirators.
It doesn’t make it right, but it does make it fully acceptable, the benchmark of Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s status quo.
Folks like councilmembers Michael Barnes and Andy Dulin and Mayor Anthony Foxx can puff up their chests and bleat all they want about how change is necessary and accountability required. It’s all so much fluff and feigned fury, as long as they’re content to keep pocketing their own free tickets and perks, allowing groups like the CRVA to investigate themselves instead of demanding legitimate independent audits with potentials for fraud and corruption charges the end result.
Until then, it is and remains business as usual. And that, perhaps more than anything, is the real crime.
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