Stealing a page from the county manager’s playbook, the city manager and police chief have apparently taken to treating the city council and the public like mushrooms: keep them in the dark and feed them crap. In this case, it takes the form of City Manager Curt Walton coming before council last month and explicitly […]
A contingent of Charlotte councilmembers and city staff is living large in the nation’s capital this week, soaking up lessons on how to grow government and spin the public at the annual National League of Cities Congressional City Conference. Charlotte taxpayers will likely shell out in excess of $15,000 for the five-day event, to include […]
Like night follows day, Charlotte is tops again in the total tax burden local government places on its citizens. This from the John Locke Foundation’s annual “By The Numbers” report on tax burdens in North Carolina: Charlotte’s local taxes and fees totaled $2,360 per resident for the 2009 budget year. That total helps the state’s […]
If a racing museum crumbles in a center city and nobody’s around to hear it fail, does it really make a sound? Apparently not, as the uptown lunch bunch continues to make excuses for the fiscal wreck that the France Family Museum has become and paint a happy face on its future. This from TCO: […]
No real surprises here: operating costs for the vaunted light-rail Lynx Blue Line are expected to soar, with projections pointing toward a whopping 55 percent increase over four years. Charlotte Area Transit System officials blame required maintenance for the spike. “Hopefully the costs will begin to stabilize,” CATS administration manager Dee Pereira tells the uptown […]
That would be Scott Stone, probably unfamiliar to many, who announced today that he’s tossed his hat into the ring as a GOP mayoral candidate. Stone, an executive vice president with Merrick & Company, launches with a bang, hitting incumbent Democrat Anthony Foxx square on the jobs front and promising not to accept any chatter […]
When politicians tell you it’s not about the money, you can usually bank on one certainty: it’s about the money. Take, for example, speed cameras. When they were rammed through the Queen City in 2005, politicians swore up one side and down the other that it wasn’t about money. It was about safety, we were […]
For the taxpayers, that is, which could be lurking right around the corner from the sounds of recent developments. Eastland Mall’s new owner, Boxer Property, originally threw down a Christmas 2011 marker for reopening the shuttered retail goliath as a Hispanic-themed marketplace, but is already backing off the date. Boxer bought the Eastland property for […]
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Utilities Department could save everyone a whole lot of time and just concede that rates will increase every year for the foreseeable future, just like they have every year in the past. Drought? Doesn’t matter, rates will go up. Floods and typhoons? Rates will go up. Picture perfect weather? Guess what, your rates are […]
At Charlotte-Douglas International Airport, that is, where a string of disturbing incidents has attracted scant attention or appropriate oversight from local officials, elected or otherwise. First we have 16-year-old Delvonte Tisdale apparently breaching airport security, stowing away inside the wheel well of a US Airways jet and falling to his death from the sky over […]
