Month: May 2007

Charlotte pols lack guts?

It’s obvious Charlotte-Mecklenburg isn’t the only place slammed by growth that’s outpacing its ability — or at least its willingness to raise property taxes enough — to pay for building the schools needed for all the newcomers.

A total of 46 — FORTY SIX — bills in the General Assembly would give local governments across the state new authority to levy taxes beyond property taxes. Other places want permission to enact land transfer taxes, which adds a fee to real estate transactions. Or they want permission to levy impact fees on new residential construction. Or they want permission to raise sales taxes to help pay for building schools.

WakeUp Wake County, a group that advocates more limits on growth, recently hired a well-known lobbyist to push a fee of up to 1 percent on real estate transfers. At least three Wake County legislators have sponsored bills to let Wake enact some new taxes, if voters approve.

What’s Mecklenburg County asking for? Nada. Zip. Zilcheroonie. (OK, to be fair, I think they passed a resolution supporting an N.C. Association of County Commissioners’ attempt to get broad permission for all counties. But that bill’s going nowhere, and other counties have been far more assertive about asking the Leg for what they need.)

What’s Charlotte asking for? Nada. (Nope, the city doesn’t pay for schools. It does pay for road and street improvements made necessary by new development. Why not ask for an impact fee for street improvements?)

Here’s a roundup story from the Raleigh News & Observer. It mentions the massive campaign being sponsored by the N.C. Association of Realtors, to “Stop the N.C. Home Tax.”

How disingenuous. Let’s see. Right now, school construction is paid for mostly through bonds or other debt, which is repaid with, hmmmm, let me get this right — property taxes. So a real estate transfer tax — which would apply to every transaction, not just homes — is a “Home Tax.” And the tax you pay because you own your home is NOT a “Home Tax”?

The thing is, when you ask representatives of the N.C. Association of Realtors, “Well, how do you propose that counties find money to build schools? Shall we infer that this means you support raising property taxes?” they just hem and haw.

Or, they say, governments should trim their budgets. Oh, for pity’s sakes. That’s like saying Americans should exercise more and watch less TV and parents should teach their kids better manners. In other words, yes they should, but they haven’t done it yet and are most unlikely to do it in the future, because there’s no way to make them.

Furthermore, I don’t think county governments can cut enough to find the billions needed to build the schools they need. What are they going to do, stop paying for social services that they’re legally required to provide? Stop running public health departments? People who say “just cut the budget” either don’t know much about local government budgets or are among the tiny minority who believe that virtually no government services are really needed. And the majority of voters don’t agree with them. Which is why it’s hard for elected officials to cut services enough to find the money to build schools.

Why are Mecklenburg’s local officials so much more passive about proposing impact fees or land transfer taxes than those in Wake? Any ideas?

East side speaks out

What do east Charlotte residents like about where they live? What would they improve?

Those topics generated some deeply felt remarks by a small group of East-siders at a Monday night discussion sponsored by AIA Charlotte (the American Institute of Architects’ Charlotte Chapter. The impetus for this is a project by AIA Charlotte that aims to study the Central Avenue corridor and come up with a vision for improving it, looking at issues of (their words) “safety, connectivity, transportation alternatives, walkability, open space, image and economic vitality.”

So they’ve been talking with residents. Monday night’s session was one stab at that. About two dozen residents attended, although it looked to me as if hardly any were from the Latino community (you can’t always tell from a glance, obviously) or the immigrant community (which takes in Asian, Middle Eastern and Eastern European as well as Latino).

Some of the comments:

— Residents like the diversity of the area and think that newcomers who move to the area do, too.

— They feel as though they get an unjustified bad reputation, especially about crime. “I have such good neighbors,” said one woman, a widow who’s lived in the neighborhood for 52 years.

— Roberta Farman, who lives in Medford Acres and who just resigned from the city-county planning commission, talked with affection about the great old trees and rural look of her neighborhood. “You’re 4 miles from downtown and could almost be in the country,” she said.

— “Someone needs to mention food,” said Tom Tate, school board member who lives in Plaza-Midwood. “Anything you want, you can find it.”

— Schools are an issue, although Tate said some schools in the area are like East Charlotte overall, in that they’re better than the perception. But people who move in with young kids will either move away or put their kids in private or magnet schools because of the reputations of Eastway Middle School and Garinger High School.

— Gentrification, as in rising property values and more upscale development, is generally welcomed. It’s coming out Central Avenue, they predicted.

— That said, Louise Barden whispered to me about two houses for sale, both on half-acre lots, on Progress Lane — a street lined with huge, Myers Park-worthy old oak trees. They’d be eye-popping steals in other neighborhoods. One with four bedrooms and 1,700 square feet and a tax value of $104,000 is to be auctioned this weekend. Another, with a pool and 1,900 square feet, but only two bedrooms, is listed at $195,000.

— There’s much concern about big boxes, dilapidated buildings and generally shoddy development left over from a few decades ago. ” ’60s strip centers,” one man said. “Their life cycle was 20- 30 years at most.” Residents want better guidelines for new development, so they’re not left with 2007’s version of those flimsy ’60s strip centers.

Life, as they say, is complicated. It’s precisely because those dilapidated old buildings are available, cheap, that they’ve attracted the rich mix of ethnic restaurants from all over the world. Start-up businesses tend to need cheap, old buildings.

On the other hand, as some of the residents noted, the grungy look of some of those falling-down 60s strip centers is likely to be a turn-off to the more upscale residents that gentrification is expected to produce.

The Naked City solution — I’ve written this before and I expect I’ll write it again — is for the city to revamp the standards for its older zoning categories, such as B-1. The old standards allow and in some cases even require suburbia — buffers, large setbacks, too much parking. Changing those standards for B-1 would mean when new places are built on old zoning they’d have a more urban look. Examples of new buildings on old zoning: Eckerds in Myers Park and Dilworth, the Bojangles at Third and Indy Blvd, and Burger King on Fourth Street in Midtown. Compare the Bo and the BK to the much nicer-looking buildings along Third street just off Indy.

Like the good planner he is, Kent Main of the planning department attended the East Charlotte meeting. I asked him if there were any plans afoot to change the old zoning standards. It’s on their long-term list, he said, but they’re deluged with other things (rezonings, TODs, etc.) so it’s back-burnered.

Myth-busting: CATS compares well with other cities

(The full report is now available online from the UNCC Center for Transportation Policy Studies. Folks at the center reported some problems with it, however, so if you can’t open it, try again later. This links to the center’s home page, where there’s a link to the report.)

Are Charlotte’s bus system costs way out of line for similar cities?

Does the cost for building the South Corridor light rail line make it among the most expensive in the country?

Have the South Corridor construction costs gone up so much that it stands out among public projects as bloated and wasteful?

If you only read the John Locke Foundation’s data, or listen only to AM talk radio, or believe everything someone tells you in the grocery store line — or in the comments section of this blog — you’re going to answer YES, YES and YES.

And you’ll be wrong. So says a new research report from Edd Hauser. Hauser is founding director of UNC Charlotte’s Center for Transportation Policy Studies, and he has a lengthy and impressive pedigree in transportation engineering and planning, including master’s and Ph.D. degrees from N.C. State in transportation engineering and a master’s in regional planning from UNC. He helped found the Institute of Transportation Research and Education (ITRE) at UNC, was an assistant state highway administrator at the N.C. Department of Transportation and worked in the private sector for almost a decade, with Kimley-Horn and Associates.

He happened to see a March 26 City Council meeting at which Charlotte Area Transit System chief Ron Tober and City Manager Pam Syfert gave their version of the effect on city taxes and CATS if a proposal to eliminate the county’s half cent sales tax for transit succeeds.

“Emotions are running amok in this. I wanted to start looking at the data,” Hauser told me today. He and colleagues at the CRPS started looking at the numbers. “Our objective was to layout relevant data. I had no idea what it would look like when I started.”

His report isn’t available online yet, but here’s a link to an executive summary. (Hauser points out a typo. In the bulleted paragraph “Construction Cost Estimating,” the phrase “the original project cost” should read “the original project cost estimate.”)

He found CATS’ bus operations are comparable to, and in some cases are more economical than those in comparable cities, including four others in North Carolina, using three widely accepted measures of cost. He found CATS per-mile costs for light rail construction are in the middle of other cities with recent LRT projects.

He looked at metro areas from 300,000 to 1 million population, but only three of those had light rail transit operations so he also looked at metro areas roughly Charlotte’s size with more than a million population. He looked at operating expenses per passenger mile, operating expenses per vehicle revenue mile and cost per passenger trip.

For areas of more than a million, CATS’ bus operations ranked No. 1 (i.e. least cost) in operating expenses per vehicle revenue mile (VRM); No. 4 in operating expenses per passenger mile; No. 8 in cost per passenger trip.

For areas of 300,000 to a million, CATS’ bus operations ranked No. 2 out of 10 in operating expenses per passenger mile; No. 3 in cost per passenger trip; No. 4 in operating expenses per VRM.

He also compared CATS with bus systems in Raleigh, Greensboro, Durham and Winston-Salem, “with all four systems in total having fewer operational buses than the Charlotte system,” the full report notes. CATS ranked No. 3 in operating expenses per VRM, No. 4 in operating expenses per passenger mile, and last in cost per passenger trip.

He looked at Charlotte’s capital costs for its light rail construction, compared with 9 other new transit projects, and converted all costs to 2007 dollars. In cost per mile, CATS ranked 6, with $48 million per mile. More expensive per mile were St. Louis ($56 million), Dallas, ($60 million), Phoenix ($65 million), and Seattle ($179 million).

Finally, he looked at other regional transportation construction projects, to see how much they cost above their original estimate. The current estimate for the U.S. 29-601 Connector is 305% ABOVE the original estimate. That for the northwest segment of I-485 is 584% ABOVE the original estimate. The current estimate for the U.S. 29-N.C. 49 Connector is 327% ABOVE the estimate. The third runway at Charlotte-Douglas International Airport is 180% above the original estimate.

The CATS South Corridor line is 109% above the estimate.

(Note: “original estimate” is what you get from the engineers after thorough study. The estimates given before the 1998 sales tax referendum were projections, not specific estimates for specific routes, with a specified number of stations, etc., from engineers. Why would anyone who knows anything about public projects and how they’re funded think they’d be precise engineering studies, when there was no funding at that point for study or design? In other words, of course they were flabby. Get over it. And all the brouhaha because the costs weren’t given in inflation adjusted dollars? Maybe that SHOULD be standard practice but it isn’t. Hauser says typically construction project estimates aren’t adjusted for expected inflation.)

I hope he’ll be able to put the whole report online. Hauser is a researcher who looks at the data and then draws his conclusion, rather than drawing a conclusion and then seeking data to support it. “A lot of information is put into the media based on an incomplete look at relevant data,” he said.

What should you conclude? If you think any spending on light rail transit, or on a public bus system, or both is a waste of money, none of that information will change your mind. But if you’re under the impression CATS is a lot more inefficient than other transit systems, then consider whether you’ve been getting only part of the story, from whoever you’re getting your information from.

Myth-busting: CATS compares well with other cities

(The full report is now available online from the UNCC Center for Transportation Policy Studies. Folks at the center reported some problems with it, however, so if you can’t open it, try again later. This links to the center’s home page, where there’s a link to the report.)

Are Charlotte’s bus system costs way out of line for similar cities?

Does the cost for building the South Corridor light rail line make it among the most expensive in the country?

Have the South Corridor construction costs gone up so much that it stands out among public projects as bloated and wasteful?

If you only read the John Locke Foundation’s data, or listen only to AM talk radio, or believe everything someone tells you in the grocery store line — or in the comments section of this blog — you’re going to answer YES, YES and YES.

And you’ll be wrong. So says a new research report from Edd Hauser. Hauser is founding director of UNC Charlotte’s Center for Transportation Policy Studies, and he has a lengthy and impressive pedigree in transportation engineering and planning, including master’s and Ph.D. degrees from N.C. State in transportation engineering and a master’s in regional planning from UNC. He helped found the Institute of Transportation Research and Education (ITRE) at UNC, was an assistant state highway administrator at the N.C. Department of Transportation and worked in the private sector for almost a decade, with Kimley-Horn and Associates.

He happened to see a March 26 City Council meeting at which Charlotte Area Transit System chief Ron Tober and City Manager Pam Syfert gave their version of the effect on city taxes and CATS if a proposal to eliminate the county’s half cent sales tax for transit succeeds.

“Emotions are running amok in this. I wanted to start looking at the data,” Hauser told me today. He and colleagues at the CRPS started looking at the numbers. “Our objective was to layout relevant data. I had no idea what it would look like when I started.”

His report isn’t available online yet, but here’s a link to an executive summary. (Hauser points out a typo. In the bulleted paragraph “Construction Cost Estimating,” the phrase “the original project cost” should read “the original project cost estimate.”)

He found CATS’ bus operations are comparable to, and in some cases are more economical than those in comparable cities, including four others in North Carolina, using three widely accepted measures of cost. He found CATS per-mile costs for light rail construction are in the middle of other cities with recent LRT projects.

He looked at metro areas from 300,000 to 1 million population, but only three of those had light rail transit operations so he also looked at metro areas roughly Charlotte’s size with more than a million population. He looked at operating expenses per passenger mile, operating expenses per vehicle revenue mile and cost per passenger trip.

For areas of more than a million, CATS’ bus operations ranked No. 1 (i.e. least cost) in operating expenses per vehicle revenue mile (VRM); No. 4 in operating expenses per passenger mile; No. 8 in cost per passenger trip.

For areas of 300,000 to a million, CATS’ bus operations ranked No. 2 out of 10 in operating expenses per passenger mile; No. 3 in cost per passenger trip; No. 4 in operating expenses per VRM.

He also compared CATS with bus systems in Raleigh, Greensboro, Durham and Winston-Salem, “with all four systems in total having fewer operational buses than the Charlotte system,” the full report notes. CATS ranked No. 3 in operating expenses per VRM, No. 4 in operating expenses per passenger mile, and last in cost per passenger trip.

He looked at Charlotte’s capital costs for its light rail construction, compared with 9 other new transit projects, and converted all costs to 2007 dollars. In cost per mile, CATS ranked 6, with $48 million per mile. More expensive per mile were St. Louis ($56 million), Dallas, ($60 million), Phoenix ($65 million), and Seattle ($179 million).

Finally, he looked at other regional transportation construction projects, to see how much they cost above their original estimate. The current estimate for the U.S. 29-601 Connector is 305% ABOVE the original estimate. That for the northwest segment of I-485 is 584% ABOVE the original estimate. The current estimate for the U.S. 29-N.C. 49 Connector is 327% ABOVE the estimate. The third runway at Charlotte-Douglas International Airport is 180% above the original estimate.

The CATS South Corridor line is 109% above the estimate.

(Note: “original estimate” is what you get from the engineers after thorough study. The estimates given before the 1998 sales tax referendum were projections, not specific estimates for specific routes, with a specified number of stations, etc., from engineers. Why would anyone who knows anything about public projects and how they’re funded think they’d be precise engineering studies, when there was no funding at that point for study or design? In other words, of course they were flabby. Get over it. And all the brouhaha because the costs weren’t given in inflation adjusted dollars? Maybe that SHOULD be standard practice but it isn’t. Hauser says typically construction project estimates aren’t adjusted for expected inflation.)

I hope he’ll be able to put the whole report online. Hauser is a researcher who looks at the data and then draws his conclusion, rather than drawing a conclusion and then seeking data to support it. “A lot of information is put into the media based on an incomplete look at relevant data,” he said.

What should you conclude? If you think any spending on light rail transit, or on a public bus system, or both is a waste of money, none of that information will change your mind. But if you’re under the impression CATS is a lot more inefficient than other transit systems, then consider whether you’ve been getting only part of the story, from whoever you’re getting your information from.

What’s up with the Cup?

I caught up this week with Gardine Wilson, one of the co-proprietors of the Coffee Cup, the venerable soul food restaurant threatened with demolition. Beazer, the developer that owns the property, plans a mixed-use project there. Things don’t look good, though Wilson says he’s trying to stay optimistic.

City Council in March designated the 60-year-old building a historic landmark, but even that doesn’t prevent demolition. It just delays it by up to a year. So for now, the Cup sits forlornly amid several blocks that have been cleared of all buildings and vegetation. It looks like a mesa rising from the desert.

Wilson says they’re still negotiating with Beazer. The company doesn’t really want to try to build around the old restaurant building, he said. One possibility is selling some property to Wilson and co-proprietor Anthony McCarver, with Beazer moving the old building, or maybe moving into a new building. Which, as we all know, just wouldn’t be the same.

Wilson said Beazer is having experts look at whether the building can be moved, the same ones, he said, who moved the Ratcliffe Florist building on South Tryon Street.

I asked if he was optimistic. “I think Beazer is pretty well set on what they’re doing,” he said. “They’ve said they’d pretty much wait that year out (for demolition) and take it from there. Unfortunately, they do own the building.”

Among Wilson’s worries is that the business can’t survive if it’s forced to close for months of construction.

Another worry is that land nearby is now incredibly valuable. If your business is on expensive land (whether you’ve bought it or someone else has), it’s hard to make a profit if you’re a modest, 38-seat diner that traditionally offered good food at modest prices. You’d have to jack up prices, or add a lot more seats. Or both.

“We want to maintain the essence of what the Coffee Cup is – the warm feelings, the Southern hospitality,” Wilson said. “People come from all over the world. We had some folks in here from New Zealand last week. … They had us on the Travel Channel last week, on a show called ‘Taste of America.’ I got calls from Denver, Texas, Mississippi and California.”

Beazer, I’ll point out, hasn’t had much good publicity recently. Observer investigations have found rampant foreclosures in some of Beazer’s starter-home developments, and some loan applications with, ahem, problems. Last week the Observer reported that a Beazer executive in 2001 offered homebuyers $100 to rate the company highly on customer satisfaction surveys.
The Securities and Exchange Commission is looking into whether anyone related to the homebuilder violated securities laws.

Seems to me Beazer needs a lot of good press.

Seems to me that working out an arrangement to let the Coffee Cup survive in place, business intact, would bring in a lot of community kudos.

What’s up with the Cup?

I caught up this week with Gardine Wilson, one of the co-proprietors of the Coffee Cup, the venerable soul food restaurant threatened with demolition. Beazer, the developer that owns the property, plans a mixed-use project there. Things don’t look good, though Wilson says he’s trying to stay optimistic.

City Council in March designated the 60-year-old building a historic landmark, but even that doesn’t prevent demolition. It just delays it by up to a year. So for now, the Cup sits forlornly amid several blocks that have been cleared of all buildings and vegetation. It looks like a mesa rising from the desert.

Wilson says they’re still negotiating with Beazer. The company doesn’t really want to try to build around the old restaurant building, he said. One possibility is selling some property to Wilson and co-proprietor Anthony McCarver, with Beazer moving the old building, or maybe moving into a new building. Which, as we all know, just wouldn’t be the same.

Wilson said Beazer is having experts look at whether the building can be moved, the same ones, he said, who moved the Ratcliffe Florist building on South Tryon Street.

I asked if he was optimistic. “I think Beazer is pretty well set on what they’re doing,” he said. “They’ve said they’d pretty much wait that year out (for demolition) and take it from there. Unfortunately, they do own the building.”

Among Wilson’s worries is that the business can’t survive if it’s forced to close for months of construction.

Another worry is that land nearby is now incredibly valuable. If your business is on expensive land (whether you’ve bought it or someone else has), it’s hard to make a profit if you’re a modest, 38-seat diner that traditionally offered good food at modest prices. You’d have to jack up prices, or add a lot more seats. Or both.

“We want to maintain the essence of what the Coffee Cup is – the warm feelings, the Southern hospitality,” Wilson said. “People come from all over the world. We had some folks in here from New Zealand last week. … They had us on the Travel Channel last week, on a show called ‘Taste of America.’ I got calls from Denver, Texas, Mississippi and California.”

Beazer, I’ll point out, hasn’t had much good publicity recently. Observer investigations have found rampant foreclosures in some of Beazer’s starter-home developments, and some loan applications with, ahem, problems. Last week the Observer reported that a Beazer executive in 2001 offered homebuyers $100 to rate the company highly on customer satisfaction surveys.
The Securities and Exchange Commission is looking into whether anyone related to the homebuilder violated securities laws.

Seems to me Beazer needs a lot of good press.

Seems to me that working out an arrangement to let the Coffee Cup survive in place, business intact, would bring in a lot of community kudos.

What does ‘professional’ theater really mean?

Here are some facts about professional, Equity and union theater, courtesy of Observer theater writer Julie York Coppens. This is to clarify some of the comments on my previous post, which make some factually murky statements. And it’s all relating to the now-shriveling efforts by Steven Beauchem to try to find community support for a regional, professional theater to replace the defunct Charlotte Rep.

There are several pro theaters in the Carolinas — all more successful than Trustus, which one commenter mentioned: The most obvious are Flat Rock Playhouse, Playmakers Rep in Chapel Hill, Blowing Rock Stage Co. and Triad Stage in Greensboro.

The union/non-union question is worth addressing, Coppens says. When people say “professional regional theater,” they mean (among other things) a company affiliated with Actor’s Equity, i.e., most of the talent and crew are union and so earn what might be called living wages.

The pro companies listed above live at various points of a sliding scale Equity has devised to allow smaller and emerging professional theaters, which have lower potential box-office income, to hire fewer union members and to pay those at a lower rate than the larger, more established houses do. Thus, all are professional/union, but only Flat Rock (as far as Coppens knows) is fully so — though even Flat Rock relies on a lesser paid army of “apprentice” laborers and chorus members who are working toward Equity status.

Charlotte’s two remaining professional theaters (Actor’s Theatre and Children’s Theatre) provide occasional work for Equity members under Guest Artist contracts, but not at a pay level or of a consistency for someone to live and work here long-term. That’s why so many of our best artists have left town. Steven Beauchem was trying to establish an Equity-affiliated company, which you really can’t do for less than a quarter-million. Presumably most of the talent, especially at first, would be jobbed in from NY or Chicago.

Charlotte’s fringe theaters (like BareBones) call themselves professional. Is it professional if the actors are making $100 for four weeks of work? But “professional” also refers to a company’s orientation, its artistic ambitions, its emphasis on product over participation. Says Coppens, “I know some amateur/community theaters that show more professionalism, in the way they work and in the product they put on stage, than a lot of fringe theaters do. The old lines are blurring.”

The Observer plans more coverage of the Rep-replacement issue in coming days.