Streetcar Primes Pump For Porkulus Redux
It’s only appropriate that a streetcar plan hatched with the explicit goal of buying votes to help defeat repeal of Charlotte’s half-cent sales tax for transit would, years later, still find itself being used as a handy campaign tool designed to push a purely political agenda.
That was the case on Monday, when U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood rolled into town to officially award Charlotte a $25-million federal grant to help build the first leg of the city’s vaunted streetcar project, slated to run all of 1.5 miles from Time Warner Cable Arena to Presbyterian Hospital. The federal largess is being matched by $12 million pulled from city coffers – money that could have instead been used to pay for other pressing infrastructure needs like roads, sidewalks and neighborhood development.
LaHood’s formal announcement of the federal grant was convenient window dressing for a larger purpose. The grant, after all, was originally awarded and accepted by the city last summer. With that already in the bag, LaHood used Monday’s presser as an opportunity to stump for passage of Porkulus Redux, a.k.a. President Barack Obama’s American Jobs Act, touting the starter streetcar project as “an economic engine” that would help create hundreds of jobs.
City officials have pegged that job-creation number at 385. With the streetcar’s capital cost of $37 million that rounds out to nearly $100,000 per job per temporary job, paid for straight with tax dollars. And LaHood assured that with passage of Obama’s American Jobs Act, there would be scores of other similar transit-oriented, taxpayer-funded jobs created down the tracks and across the country.
Mayor Anthony Foxx, a Democrat and one of the streetcar’s biggest cheerleaders, echoed the job-creation theme with claims that the project would “stimulate growth” in parts of the city that have struggled with economic development. That would be the city’s Westside corridor, where the streetcar route will ultimately stretch 10 miles, and cost upward of $500 million to build, chugging down Beatties Ford Road and out Central Avenue.
The city doesn’t have a plan in place to fund the whole streetcar route; ditto for operating costs projected to top $1.5 million a year, just for the first leg, to be siphoned from the either the city’s budget or some other taxing scheme yet to be developed. All of which runs counter to long-standing assurances from city officials and councilmembers that only half-cent sales tax revenue would be used to pay for rail transit projects.
Those promises became impossible to keep, though, when coupled with other assurances. Specifically, in 2007 city leaders had tacitly vowed to expedite construction of the streetcar – bumping it to 2013 from 2018 – to gain support from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Black Political Caucus and black community leaders to defeat the transit-tax repeal.
The city took over funding responsibility for the streetcar when officials conceded there wasn’t enough money from the half-cent sales tax to build it, at least not on its fast-track schedule, effectively breaking one promise while keeping another.
And now, apparently, there are more promises on the line – promises of more jobs and massive economic development, both for the city’s Westside corridor and also the country as a whole, with more job-creating capital projects like the streetcar coming down the tracks across the nation.
The chances of those promises being kept ring as hollow today as the empty ones politicians have made in past. But like they did nearly a decade ago, they still provide fodder for snappy but wholly disingenuous campaign speeches.
Just ask LaHood and Foxx.
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