Will MUMPO Listen Now?
What do you do when someone doesn’t want to listen to you?
When it comes to the folks who decide on the HOT lane plan, it’s not a hypothetical question. HOT lanes on I-77 are the most far-reaching transportation project since the interstate was built in the 1970’s. The current plan calls for the lanes to be managed by a private company for 50 years, which is longer than that stretch of road has been in existence.
The organization that makes the HOT lane plan official is a group that meets down in Charlotte called the Charlotte Regional Transportation Metropolitan Planning Organization (CRTMPO). Previously they were known by the equally unlovely acronym MUMPO.
According to federal law, before they decide to put anything in their official plan (called the LRTP), they must provide the public and any interested parties a “reasonable opportunity to comment on the transportation plan.” They want to amend the LRTP to include HOT lanes at their May 22nd meeting so they opened an official public comment period on March 23rd.
And closed it April 22nd.
In the interim they held a pair of public comment meetings on consecutive days. One was in Charlotte, the other at the CPCC campus in south Huntersville (held at the inconvenient time of 5-7pm, by the way). Did you miss them? Quit blinking.
They also held a regular meeting on April 17, during which they managed to find an hour to listen to a consultant discuss the results of a year-old survey on ‘managed lanes’. Widen I77 was limited to ten minutes.
And that’s it for public input. A couple of meetings and ten minutes for a 50 year contract worth over half a billion dollars that’s also set to be the first HOT lane in Mecklenburg and the first privately operated road in state history. Think of it as the bureaucratic equivalent going through the motions by lifting a pinkie. Clearly the provincial, moneyed interests at CRTMPO have little concern for what their constituents have to say.
So what do you do when someone doesn’t want to listen to you?
Add a thousand voices. That’s what we did today when we delivered an anti-toll petition with over 1,200 signatures. The number is all the more impressive when you consider those signatures were collected in a mere three weeks. If I do my arithmetic right, that’s gathering over 50 signatures a day.
Hopefully they’ll listen. But remember, they let a consultant talk about a year-old survey for an hour and cut us off after ten minutes.
~Wideni77.org
PS want to do more than read blog posts? Download a copy of the petition and have people sign it. Email us (wideni77@hotmail.com) and we’ll make arrangements to pick it up.
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Short URL: https://pundithouse.com/?p=13680
