City Council Vacation Ends, Spending Spree Starts
President Obama is taking a lot of flack over jet-setting off for posh Martha’s Vineyards, as the country’s economy crumbles and families and businesses struggle to make ends meet. Personally, I wish a long and leisurely vacation for The One. The busier he stays duffing around the links, the less time he has to tee up more mulligans from the Oval Office.
There’s a parallel here with our own vaunted Charlotte City Council, which has been on its summer meeting schedule these last several weeks; hence the paucity of headlines about councilmembers blowing through a million dollars here and a million more there. That ends Monday night when the council finds itself back behind the dais, with the money machine revved up and ready to roll.
Take, for example, the council’s slated vote to authorize a pair of grant applications seeking tens of millions of dollars in federal money from the U.S. Department of Transportation. PunditHouse previously reported on one of the grants, which has the Charlotte Area Transit System scratching for $15 million to $27 million to upgrade the Lynx Blue Line light rail.
The other grant application up for a vote Monday night? That would be the one to help fund implementation of Charlotte’s bicycle and pedestrian network and its project price tag of $16 million. The federal grant would cover up to 80 percent of the cost, so peg the local match at around $3 million. And what exactly does a $16 million bicycle and pedestrian network buy these days? From the council’s agenda:
– This project would construct a series of road conversions, minor intersection modifications, greenways, and bicycle/pedestrian connections to more fully develop the bicycle network in Charlotte.
– Road conversions would convert one or more through lanes into bicycle lanes, wider sidewalks, and/or parking, such as what has occurred on Seneca Place, 36th Street, Selwyn Avenue, and Rozzelle’s Ferry Roads.
– Portions of the Mallard and Campbell Creek Greenways are identified projects. Both of these greenways are part of the Carolina Thread Trail. Mecklenburg County and/or the Carolina Thread Trail organization could be funding partners on this grant.
– Greenway components could include water-quality features.
The spending doesn’t stop there, though, not when councilmembers have been on a skimpy summer meeting schedule lo these many weeks and have to make up for lost time. City department chiefs have requested that a few “time sensitive items” not be deferred for a vote Monday night, including a whopper in preparation for the DNC 2012 rolling into town.
Councilmembers will be asked to approve a $594,000 contract for an upfit of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department’s Command Center, which “will allow Police to share and receive critical information related to the safety and security of the City, various Democratic National Convention (DNC) venues and events,” according to the council’s agenda. “The project is included in the estimated $50 Million DNC Security Grant Fund. Police will file for reimbursement through the grant process outlined by the Bureau of Justice Administration for DNC-related security expenses.”
The council will also be staying busy spending millions of dollars as part of the city’s continued efforts to assist with the redevelopment of Boulevard Homes. This time around, the council is being asked to authorize $12 million in reimbursement agreements with the Charlotte Housing Authority, which two years ago landed a $21 million HOPE VI grant to revitalize the aged public housing project on the city’s Westside corridor.
Drawn from affordable housing bonds that voters approved last year, $5 million will be used to fund 332 rental housing units as part of the Boulevard Homes project. The new units will serve households with income levels at 60 percent or less of the area median income, which officials peg at $40,500.
Another $7 million, from neighborhood improvement bonds that voters approved last year, will be used to fund infrastructure and streetscape improvements as recommended in the Boulevard Homes HOPE VI redevelopment plan, which “creates an educational village and includes both senior residential and multi-family communities in addition to a Child Development Center, Community Center and new K-8 school,” according to the council’s agenda item.
The Housing Authority’s overall HOPE VI program for Boulevard Homes includes the construction or rehabilitation of 957 housing units, to include 110 units for seniors, 222 units for families on site and 162 units for seniors and 463 units for families in various offsite locations.
Moving from affordable housing to picking winners and losers in the private sector while gambling with the taxpayers’ money, also up for consideration at Monday night’s council meeting is a pair of so-called business incentive grants.
Time Warner Cable has its hand out for $696,000, part and parcel of a total city/county grant of $2 million to be doled out over five years. That’s on top of the $3-million business investment grant the city and county forked over in 2003 and the $3-million grant it awarded Time Warner Cable in 2008.
For anyone keeping track at home, that stacks up for a nice pile of $8 million. Somebody, please, remind me again why my cable bill keeps going up.
In return for the largess, city officials say Time Warner Cable has added 950 jobs and invested more than $100 million for business expansion, with the cable titan expected to add another 225 new jobs by 2012.
Councilmembers are also expected to approve an amendment to the city’s share of a business investment grant to SPX. It seems the original grant of $1.7 million wasn’t enough, so that’s been jacked to $2 million, paid over five years, for a combined city/county grant that rolls in at $5.8 million, up from an original $4.8 million. That, of course, is on top of the $4.9-million job development grant that the state has already awarded SPX, along with the state’s One North Carolina grant that squeezed out another $350,000.
SPX has its corporate headquarters in Ballantyne and officials say the company expects to add 180 new jobs within the next five years. Last November, the company announced that it would build a new 230,000 square-foot office building in Ballantyne, after initially considering sites in Lancaster County, South Carolina, which presumably couldn’t afford to come off the hip for nearly $6 million to lure the company south of the border.
This all might sound like an oversized boatload of money to burn through in one night, and it’s only a portion of what’s on the council’s full agenda. But, hey, it’s been a long summer break for our elected officials, who are obviously ready, willing, and more than able to jump right back into the swing of spending other people’s money.
Maybe if some boosters pitched in to rent them a condo at Martha’s Vineyard, we could get a few more weeks respite. Just a thought.
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