Faced with a budget crunch that is cutting into operations across the board, the Mecklenburg County Department of Social Services is scuttling its years-long practice of using taxicabs to provide transportation for senior citizens and Medicaid-eligible clients. Beginning next month, a majority of those DSS clients will be required to use Charlotte Area Transit System […]
Charlotte’s Solid Waste Services Division enters a brave, new world this week, with the advent of its vaunted Recycle It! program that features a veritable army of very large and very green 96-gallon rollout recycling bins, part and parcel of a new single-stream collection system that proponents claim will make recycling easier and more efficient […]
After leaving upwards of $11 million in potential advertising revenue on the table over the last decade, when former Transit Czar Ron Tober and the erstwhile braintrust of the Metropolitan Transit Commission perpetuated the charade that exterior ads on city buses was visual clutter that would ugly up Center City, it appears that commercialism might […]
Mecklenburg commissioners approved a $1.35-billion budget that calls for about $75 million in cuts to programs and services and includes pink slips for nearly 300 county employees. That was Tuesday night. By Wednesday morning, many of those same commissioners were jet-setting to Boston for a three-day junket of fine dining, site seeing, and luxuriating in […]
On the heels of city officials recently voting to fork over $1.4 million to bail out libraries and prevent the wholesale shuttering of branch locations, the Charlotte City Council on Monday night extended another dose of largess when it approved an agreement that will save a handful of county jobs. The council authorized City Manager […]
Faced with an $800-million shortfall in its operating budget and a state unemployment rate that tops 10 percent, the N.C. Senate on Monday night voted 46-0 to approve $542 million in construction bonds for a variety of projects scattered throughout the UNC system. Some of the big-ticket items up for grabs: a $45-million football complex […]
Charlotte’s contentious rules on where to locate so-called affordable housing would see subtle but significant changes under a new policy that the city council’s Housing and Neighborhood Development (HAND) committee unanimously approved Tuesday afternoon. The proposed policy would scuttle existing criteria that define areas where the location of subsidized, multi-family housing developments is prohibited, permitted, […]
When it wasn’t staying busy Tuesday night driving the final nails into the reduction-in-force coffins of nearly 540 teachers and upwards of 1,000 total personnel, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education took time to yap and nip at its own heels. Several board members voiced skepticism and concern over a wide-ranging review of the district that’s […]
A Democrat majority of the Mecklenburg Board of County Commissioners on Thursday night conjured millions of dollars from thin air to bolster funding for county programs and services without having to hike property taxes in an election year. Flush with a sack full of phantom money, the board then proceeded to embark on a dizzying […]
With Mecklenburg County drowning in debt and struggling to plug an $81-million budget gap, the City of Charlotte’s spending plan has managed to fly under the radar virtually unnoticed, despite being chock full of questionable expenditures that could stand a spotlight. Take, for example, the $602,000 that the city manager’s recommended budget allocates for so-called […]
