Month: May 2007

Several people recently have posted comments akin to this one (look deep into the lengthy comments thread):

Yes Mary…please get with Ms. Burgess immediately and ask about the $50 MM that city council funded to LTR [light rail transit] to the detriment of public safety (ie: police officers).Oh, and ask about that bald face lie they told to the general public that the 2006 increase was necessary to FUND additional police officers. They would have plenty if not for the $50 MM funded to LTR, so really it was an LTR tax.

I asked Susan Burgess. I asked Deputy City Manager Curt Walton. I asked Budget Director Ruffin Hall. They all said the same. The city budget doesn’t allocate any money to the transit system — not for operations, not for building the rails or stations. It never has. All the LRT money comes completely from within CATS’ separate budget. (See technical note below.)

Best we can figure — I mean Hall, Burgess, Walton and I — people who are talking about the $50 million are referring to a $50 million street and sidewalk infrastructure package known at City Hall as SCIP, the South Corridor Infrastructure Program. That project is building much- needed sidewalks and improving intersections, as well as solving decades-old drainage and sewage problems, along South Boulevard near the light rail line.

The city decided to speed up some of that work so that people would have sidewalks on which to walk to transit stops and so streets and intersections on the South Boulevard corridor would function more smoothly once the light rail operations start. Those needs have lingered for years, decades even and many of them predate any notion of light rail. The city decided it would be more efficient and effective to do the work all at once, rather than tear up the street for an intersection improvement, then tear it up a few years later for storm drainage, and then later still to add sidewalks and bike trails.

SCIP is being paid for through bond issues that voters passed — let me repeat that, VOTERS PASSED — in 2002 and 2004. The City Council’s decision to raise property taxes came in 2006. In other words, those decisions were not linked, and the voters approved the SCIP projects. Whatever Susan Burgess may have said on the radio (she told me she couldn’t remember saying anything like that) she was either misunderstood or bumbled what she was trying to say.

People who are spreading this alleged fact are either:
A. Confused and/or misinformed.
B. Getting their “facts” from news sources that are confused, misinformed or don’t understand the city budget.
C. Deliberately spreading misinformation.

I’m going to assume most people are A. City finances are tricky and boring to understand. Most people whose jobs don’t require them to attend City Council meetings or interview city officials don’t have the time or interest to fathom things such as the difference between capital budgets and operating budgets.

But here’s a quick lesson. The $50 million capital improvement project SCIP comes from the capital budget — i.e. one-time expenditures, such as when you get a new roof for your house. Debt service on city bonds also comes from the capital budget.

Police officers’ pay comes from the operating budget — i.e. continuing expenses, such as paying the light bills. In other words, you can’t just take money allocated to repay bonds and convert it easily into police officer positions. (See the other technical note below.)

(Technical note: For bond-issuing reasons, the CATS budget is housed within the
city’s budget, because there’s no official government entity that runs CATS, as there would be if the Metropolitan Transit Commission were an authority. But the CATS budget and the city’s budget remain separate.)

(Other technical note: Yes, city officials have to balance how much revenue to put into their capital budget and how much into their operating budget. So yes, there is a relationship between those budgets. But the city has been issuing street and sidewalk improvement bonds for years and years, long predating CATS and the light rail plans. Most council members see those improvement projects as basic, continuing city services.)

Asheville tries to hire an architect who’ll do a green roof for its new civic center; can’t find a taker. Any green-roof experts willing to contact Asheville? Here’s the Citizen-Times’ version.

The idea, of course, is that a roof with stuff growing on it is better insulated and helps save energy costs for the building in the long run, as well as absorbing stormwater (i.e. fewer taxpayer dollars going to storm drain projects) and keeping down the urban heat island effect. Which means lower A/C needs for everyone.

Some of my architect sources tell me green roofs still have some kinks to be worked out. Like trying to keep birds’ nests from being sucked into air ducts. Or, finding plants that will grow in the hot (HOT!) and occasionally very dry environment. A planted roof I visited in Providence, R.I. — you know, New England where it isn’t all that hot — was planted in desert cacti and other dry-heat loving plants. My suggestion? Bermuda grass or crabgrass. Or both. Heat and drought just encourage them.

Read to the end of this, as I’ve tucked in a news item.

Is it true only 2 percent of the public in Charlotte rides public transportation?

You’ll hear that stat a lot. It counts everyone driving through the region on I-85 or I-77, commercial delivery trucks, tractor-trailers, etc. — trips transit would never compete for. Nearly 10 percent of the workforce in uptown Charlotte takes public transportation every weekday.

Light rail will never reduce congestion.

In a growing metro region, building mass transit doesn’t result in fewer cars on the road than before. However, mass transit will keep congestion from being as bad as it would be without mass transit.

In large and very large urban areas with rail, traffic congestion grows at a 42 percent lower rate than in similarly sized urban areas without rail. That’s from a study in 2000 by Mobility Planning Associates of Austin, Texas.

The well-respected Texas Transportation Institute, in its 2005 Urban Mobility Report and Texas Transportation Index, found that in the Charlotte region, people who ride public transportation versus driving alone reduce congestion delays by 6 percent to 12 percent, or more than 2 million hours of congestion delay per year.

Public transportation provides 3.25 times more congestion relief than operations treatments such as signalization, intersection improvements, incident management, etc., according to the TTI study.

In coming months you’ll hear a lot of people offering up statistics purported to show that light rail transit is a bad, bad, evil and/or spendthrift idea. Plenty of anti-tax folks just don’t like more taxes. Other, libertarian types don’t like public governments spending money on big public works projects. Others just like to make political hay.

Be smart. Statistics are like cakes. How they turn out depends on what ingredients you start with. For just about every stat purporting to show CATS is wasting money and poorly run and light rail is “failing” all over the country, you can find other stats — many of them from groups such as TTI that are neither transit bashers nor transit zealots — that will show the opposite, or will show a more complex, nuanced reality.

Now news, of a sort:
Transit and city officials are looking at whether part of the South Corridor light rail line — which they call the Lynx Blue Line — could open earlier than planned. Target date, CATS chief Ron Tober told me, is Oct. 27. The section that would open, he said, would be from uptown to as far south as they determined they could do it safely.

City Manager Pam Syfert says the City Council will be asked to look at the pros and cons of an early opening.

Betcha they’re looking at that Nov. 6 election, when the kill-the-transit-tax measure is likely to be on the ballot. Generating a lot of positive community enthusiasm right before the election surely couldn’t hurt. But any glitches, and they’re toast.

I’ve been in Charlotte long enough to know that you should never, ever count Crosland out of any city deal until the final buzzer. For decades developer John Crosland Jr. was the city’s preeminent master of getting what he wanted out of elected officials. He’s retired now, and others run the company he and his father, John Sr., built. The company is still doing suburban subdivisions but has done more urban-oriented and mixed-use projects (Birkdale Village, Alpha Mills renovation). Now it’s going for transit-oriented development.

Fast-forward to Monday’s City Council committee meeting, where the Economic Development and Planning Committee (hereafter ED&P) was briefed on the three development teams seeking to build a transit-oriented development (hereafter called T.O.D.) at the Scaleybark station. (Note to you who don’t read all the fine print inside the Observer: Yes, all three original development proposals withered. But all three development teams submitted new proposals.)

David Furman of Boulevard Centro retooled what was formerly known as the Bank of America proposal.

Crosland, which had dropped its St. Louis-based affiliate McCormack Baron & Salazar, offered a retooled proposal.

So did Scaleybark Partners, a coalition that includes Pappas Properties (Phillips Place, the Midtown development, etc.), GreenHawk Partners of Raleigh, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Housing Partnership, Shook Kelley design and something called Citiventure Associates of Denver, which is run by Marilee Utter who’s been to Charlotte several times to give talks on transit-oriented development.

The committee unanimously recommended —- Scaleybark Partners.

The staff had recommended against Boulevard Centro — the only team to guarantee a parking deck — because it sought a loan from the city. There’s no money now for a loan, said Tom Flynn of the city’s Economic Development office.

Both the Crosland and Scaleybark Partners proposals include affordable housing — 90 units from Crosland (with a commitment to start 30-50 of them in 2008 regardless of whether they have in hand some tax credits to build them) and 80 units for Scaleybark Partners.

Both guarantee parking for the light rail station. Neither guarantees a parking deck (preferable for T.O.D. but more expensive). Both said they’ll build one if market conditions are right, i.e. if they can get enough money from developing land that would otherwise be under a surface parking lot to make it worth the extra expense.

Neither offered a site design. Scaleybark said it would build open space — i.e. a park — before this November and do some landscaping and streetscape improvements by the end of 2008.

Neither offers a guarantee for a new library, though both say they’d like to try to build one.

The city would net a few hundred thousand dollars more from the Crosland proposal. But the council members on ED&P (John Lassiter, Nancy Carter, Andy Dulin, Don Lochman and James Mitchell) seemed to prefer several things about Scaleybark Partners:

–The development team has remained the same.

–Citiventure has T.O.D. experience. (Crosland said its planners would also have experience, but its development team isn’t fully formed yet.)

–They liked Scaleybark’s willingness to build the open space first, so the station area looks more inviting.

–They’re familiar with the Housing Partnership, a local nonprofit with a strong record of building affordable housing.

–And a key point, mentioned by Carter: Crosland owns a big chunk of land across South Boulevard and intends to redevelop it. There’s value in having different developers doing projects near each other, so you don’t have a big chunk of your city looking exactly alike. She’s right, though it’s a point of design likely to be lost on a lot of people.

Here’s a link to a Powerpoint presentation made to council on May 14 that has some of the key information. Here’s a link to Monday’s presentation. (Be forewarned that our online guru notes many of you may not have a viewer that can see it.)

The full council still has to make its recommendation, probably May 29. The memorandum of understanding would go to council July 11, and a development agreement would come in July or August.

I’ve been in Charlotte long enough to know that you should never, ever count Crosland out of any city deal until the final buzzer. For decades developer John Crosland Jr. was the city’s preeminent master of getting what he wanted out of elected officials. He’s retired now, and others run the company he and his father, John Sr., built. The company is still doing suburban subdivisions but has done more urban-oriented and mixed-use projects (Birkdale Village, Alpha Mills renovation). Now it’s going for transit-oriented development.

Fast-forward to Monday’s City Council committee meeting, where the Economic Development and Planning Committee (hereafter ED&P) was briefed on the three development teams seeking to build a transit-oriented development (hereafter called T.O.D.) at the Scaleybark station. (Note to you who don’t read all the fine print inside the Observer: Yes, all three original development proposals withered. But all three development teams submitted new proposals.)

David Furman of Boulevard Centro retooled what was formerly known as the Bank of America proposal.

Crosland, which had dropped its St. Louis-based affiliate McCormack Baron & Salazar, offered a retooled proposal.

So did Scaleybark Partners, a coalition that includes Pappas Properties (Phillips Place, the Midtown development, etc.), GreenHawk Partners of Raleigh, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Housing Partnership, Shook Kelley design and something called Citiventure Associates of Denver, which is run by Marilee Utter who’s been to Charlotte several times to give talks on transit-oriented development.

The committee unanimously recommended —- Scaleybark Partners.

The staff had recommended against Boulevard Centro — the only team to guarantee a parking deck — because it sought a loan from the city. There’s no money now for a loan, said Tom Flynn of the city’s Economic Development office.

Both the Crosland and Scaleybark Partners proposals include affordable housing — 90 units from Crosland (with a commitment to start 30-50 of them in 2008 regardless of whether they have in hand some tax credits to build them) and 80 units for Scaleybark Partners.

Both guarantee parking for the light rail station. Neither guarantees a parking deck (preferable for T.O.D. but more expensive). Both said they’ll build one if market conditions are right, i.e. if they can get enough money from developing land that would otherwise be under a surface parking lot to make it worth the extra expense.

Neither offered a site design. Scaleybark said it would build open space — i.e. a park — before this November and do some landscaping and streetscape improvements by the end of 2008.

Neither offers a guarantee for a new library, though both say they’d like to try to build one.

The city would net a few hundred thousand dollars more from the Crosland proposal. But the council members on ED&P (John Lassiter, Nancy Carter, Andy Dulin, Don Lochman and James Mitchell) seemed to prefer several things about Scaleybark Partners:

–The development team has remained the same.

–Citiventure has T.O.D. experience. (Crosland said its planners would also have experience, but its development team isn’t fully formed yet.)

–They liked Scaleybark’s willingness to build the open space first, so the station area looks more inviting.

–They’re familiar with the Housing Partnership, a local nonprofit with a strong record of building affordable housing.

–And a key point, mentioned by Carter: Crosland owns a big chunk of land across South Boulevard and intends to redevelop it. There’s value in having different developers doing projects near each other, so you don’t have a big chunk of your city looking exactly alike. She’s right, though it’s a point of design likely to be lost on a lot of people.

Here’s a link to a Powerpoint presentation made to council on May 14 that has some of the key information. Here’s a link to Monday’s presentation. (Be forewarned that our online guru notes many of you may not have a viewer that can see it.)

The full council still has to make its recommendation, probably May 29. The memorandum of understanding would go to council July 11, and a development agreement would come in July or August.

How’s business?

The Charlotte Regional Partnership and UNC Charlotte’s Urban Institute, trying to answer that question, have devised the Charlotte Regional Business Barometer.

It’s a regional snapshot, combining data from the region’s North and South Carolina counties. Some notable “down” arrows: unemployment and business investment.

The partnership’s CEO, Ronnie Bryant, says in an e-mail newsletter:

“Our activity over this economic period has remained strong, although we can see some leading indicators that suggest some of the economic sectors and particularly U.S.-based small businesses are proceeding very cautiously with their capital spending programs.”

Still mad that the pedestrian bridge over I-277 that was to have paralleled the light rail/trolley tracks got scrapped? Then attend an open house Tuesday, 5-7 p.m., to hear about other connections being talked of between South End and uptown. More info here.

Staff from the city and a consultant are looking at several ideas, including a pedestrian and bike path to be built on the I-277-Caldwell Street Bridge, as well as capping the freeway. The idea to cap the freeway has been around since the Center City 2010 Plan, as a way to create land for a park to connect uptown with South End and Dilworth.

Don’t laugh, several cities have put roofs atop freeways and created parks. The meeting’s in Room 267 at the Gov Center uptown.

Could too much growth hobble Wake County? See what the Raleigh N&O has to say.

Also in the Capital City, Raleigh City Council on Tuesday will consider adopting permanent year-round water restrictions beginning this summer. Other N.C. municipalities with similar year-round restrictions include Cary, Greensboro and Fayetteville.

The Washington Daily News in Eastern North Carolina’s Washington County (county seat Plymouth) reports on efforts there to pass a land-transfer tax, and the N.C. Association of County Commissioners’ response to the state Realtors’ contention such a tax would slow growth.

And finally, here’s an idea that’s long overdue for Charlotte: Help increase the number of affordable places to live by relaxing the out-dated zoning rules against garage apartments, granny flats and other so-called accessory units. Here’s architect Roger K. Lewis from the Washington Post on the same, courtesy of Planetizen.com.