Charlotte and Mecklenburg County’s largess with your money gets special notice this week from the North Carolina Institute for Constitutional Law’s Corporate Welfare Weekly newsletter. The Queen City and the state took top honors in partnering to hand out about $80 million in promised incentives – read government-speak for bribes – to lure Siemens Energy […]
Let the sun shine in? It’s a nice thought; but with our local government cloudy with a chance of rain is more likely, making the uptown paper of record’s headline that Commissioners Chairperson Jennifer Roberts endorses an open system of transparency all the more painfully ironic. This from the chairperson of a board that thumps its […]
The Charlotte City Council earlier this week approved nabbing $7.4 million from the city’s capital reserve account to help balance its current-year general fund budget, which city staff estimates is light about $8.5 million. Declining revenues – what policy wonks euphemistically call “economic deterioration” – are being blamed for the budget shortfall. City staff assured […]
Hey, it works in Amsterdam to turn some decent coin, why not Charlotte? Intriguing piece here from “Financial Armageddon” on how cash-strapped municipalities are ramping up collection of enforcement taxes to help fill empty coffers: For example, a federally funded ticketing blitz in the state of Virginia resulted in a total of 6996 traffic tickets […]
Let me get this straight: Police Chief Rodney Monroe has steadfastly refused to release the personnel files of a rogue cop accused of committing numerous sexual assaults while on duty, but the chief is more than ready and willing to bare the inner workings of his department’s homicide division on national TV? That’s the story […]
The city council earlier this week approved renewing a contract with PetData Company to handle animal registration and pet licensing for the city. That might not seem like a big deal, but there’s plenty of bite behind the contract’s bark. PetData is paid a fee for each license sold, receiving $3.50 of the $10 charged […]
With half-cent sales tax revenue to run shiny choo-choos all over town plunging like a wounded duck, and likely triggering cuts to bus service and/or higher bus fares, now comes news that ridership for the $521-million Lynx Blue Line is on a steady decline. Transportation and transit guru David Hartgen has the data and Jeff […]
A long-range transportation plan that received approval from the city council Monday night assumes that Charlotte will have two more rail-transit corridors up and running by 2025, which coupled with some long-delayed road-building projects will help the Charlotte region attain air-quality levels mandated by the federal government. One glaring problem with the plan, of course, […]
All it apparently takes to shave more than $250,000 off a government project is for a few dozen people to show up at some city council meetings and a few dozen more sending angry e-mails to elected officials and the media. At least that seems to be the case for a controversial sidewalk project that the […]
It’s difficult enough trying to hold members of the Charlotte City Council accountable when a majority of them occupy seats sprung from grossly gerrymandered districts that virtually guarantee their re-election every two years. The task would become all the more insurmountable with a move to four-year terms, a switch some councilmembers have advocated. Fortunately, that […]
