Streetcaropolis
It’s the place where pipedreams bloom and lollipops and money grow on trees, which is a good thing as nobody has a clue where dollar-one is going to be found to pay this $1.5-million tab.
That’s the annual operating cost to run the initial leg of Charlotte’s vaunted streetcar, all 1.5 miles of it, chugging from the uptown transit center near TWC Arena to Presbyterian Hospital. Charlotte officials learned this week that they landed a $25-million federal grant to help pay for the streetcar, which will cost $37 million to build. Assuming, of course, there aren’t any cost overruns. And everybody knows how that goes with rail transit in Charlotte.
So, no worries there, right. Good thing, because there isn’t any money to cover any cost overruns. As it is, the city council had to dip into a variety of slush funds to find the $12 million local match to cover construction costs, including general fund revenues that could have been used to pay for basic needs like sidewalks, roads, bike paths, and neighborhood improvements.
Those were city dollars, not half-cent sales tax for transit money, in direct contradiction to the long-held assurance that officials would never let their crazed lust for all things rail transit outpace a dedicated revenue stream that could support it.
But reality has no place in Streetcaropolis. When it became obvious that the Charlotte Area Transit System didn’t have the revenue to support an expedited timeline for building the streetcar, the city simply picked up responsibility for funding its tab – without a clue where the money would be found to do so.
There still aren’t any clues, which leaves a whopping $1.5-million annual operating cost hanging out there, just waiting for some lunatic taxing scheme to come chugging down the track – all 1.5 miles of it.
At least to start; the city’s ultimate goal is to expand the first leg and have a 10-mile streetcar route, to be built in segments, from Beatties Ford Road to the currently defunct site of Eastland Mall. Total price: $500 million.
Nobody has a clue how to pay for that, either.
As an added bonus, the first 1.5-mile leg, at a price of $37 million, is projected to have the lowest cost to build and the highest ridership of the whole streetcar line. The projected ridership, based on the numbers that use the existing bus route, is 950 trips per day. That’s trips, not passengers.
For the record, the city councilmembers who voted to pony up the $12-million local match to pursue the $25-million federal grant to build the $37-million streetcar that less than 500 people per day are projected to ride and will cost $1.5 million a year to operate with money that has yet to be found, the city councilmembers who voted for that would be Democrats Michael Barnes, Patrick Cannon, Nancy Carter, Patsy Kinsey, David Howard, James Mitchell, and former councilmember Susan Burgess. Mayor Anthony Foxx, a Democrat, didn’t cast a vote, but has been one of the project’s biggest cheerleaders.
Republican councilmembers Warren Cooksey, Andy Dulin and Edwin Peacock, along with Democrat Warren Turner, voted against pursuing the grant.
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