Month: July 2007

If you are under the belief that the recent study by UNCC’s Center for Transportation Studies was paid for by the Charlotte Chamber, or somehow was connected with the Chamber: What are you smoking?

It was paid for by UNCC and done by a nonpartisan UNCC transportation study center whose director has a lengthy background in transportation studies.

Here’s what happened: Chamber President Bob Morgan suggested to UNCC Chancellor Phil Dubois that the topic would be a good one to study. That’s sort of like mentioning to Bob Johnson, “Say, you might want to get your players to practice shooting.” I mean, Duh! You’ve got a center of transportation studies. Studying transportation is what it does.

Some people are offering up UNCC Professor Emeritus David Hartgen’s studies as being more objective. Yet several of his most recent studies were paid for by interest groups with a specific position to advance: The Reason Foundation and the John Locke Foundation, two Libertarian think tanks that have funded a variety of studies opposing rail transit and Smart Growth. Those nonprofits have a point of view, and they use their money to advance it, hiring researchers who share those points of view. How is that somehow purer than a short report from UNCC’s Center for Transportation Policy Studies, beholden to no one?

If you bother to read the UNCC study — in contrast to most advocacy group studies such as those from Reason or the JLF — you’ll read no conclusions and no recommendations. Indeed, some of the information it offers will probably be of more use to people opposing light rail transit, such as the comparison of highway and transit spending since 1998.

“Our research has revealed a need for a comprehensive study of the economic, societal, environmental, land use and business impacts of LRT,” it says. Gee, that’s clearly a biased, tainted and suspect statement if I ever heard one.

I suppose some people are going to see dark conspiracies in such statements. Remember, there are more than a few people out there who think Commies in pink robes are hiding under the bed, or they put on tinfoil caps to keep the alien transmissions out of their brains. But the rest of you? Get a grip.

Some people who don’t like mass transit are deliberately trying to plant the idea that light rail mass transit is a creature of the Charlotte Chamber. Though it’s misleading, it’s also a clever political stunt, because a lot of people here are suspicious of the Chamber. But if you think I blindly follow everything the Chamber proposes, well, you haven’t been reading what I’ve been writing for more than a decade.

If you’re thinking mass transit is a creature birthed and nurtured by Charlotte’s business oligarchy then you are uninformed about Charlotte. For about, oh, the past century or so it was the conservative business oligarchy here that fought the concept of any government-funded public transit. They kept a pitiful bus system running on fumes and pennies — and extremely high fares — because business leaders didn’t want their taxes raised just to make life easier for low-income mill workers and black people. It’s still the ultra-right-wing descendants of those anti-tax businessmen who are fighting the transit tax now.

One last thought. Rick, I appreciate your devoted readership and your civility, but it’s blindingly naive to say we can just get another transit tax in 2010, if we decide we want one again. State legislators from outside Mecklenburg just cackle if you mention that possibility.

What Mecklenburg voters do or don’t want doesn’t make a rat’s patootie’s worth of difference unless the legislature allows it. It took years to get permission to hold the 1998 referendum. If we have a transit tax and kill it, it will take years — if ever — to get permission for another one.

Get another transit tax in 2010? It would be easier, and about as practical, to just get hold of the pot of gold at the end of the next rainbow.

I spent a couple of hours last week talking with Robert FitzPatrick, who spent much of the 1970s helping Charlotte neighborhoods and grass roots groups organize to fight City Hall.

My Saturday column told of his efforts to prevent Freedom Park from being plundered by an ill-conceived canal project. The project would have dredged Little Sugar Creek and trapped it into concrete embankments and locks – and would have richly rewarded land owners and real estate developers who were pushing the plan.

In those days FitzPatrick and the folks he organized mostly fought City Hall and the business oligarchy that backed city government. Among the leaders of the group that fought the canal project were a roofer and a truck driver.

FitzPatrick helped organize the North Charlotte Action Association, which focused on code enforcement and trash pickup. He helped organize the Association for Better Public Transportation, a citizen group that fought (unsuccessfully) a bus fare increase that made Charlotte’s fares among the highest in the country. (40 cents in 1974, equivalent to $1.66 today.) The group also wanted the city to take over the bus system, because the private company running it was providing, as FitzPatrick termed it, “nasty, dirty buses that were never on time.”

So I asked him what he thought of the folks who had organized to get the repeal of the transit tax onto the Nov. 6 ballot. They say they’re “grass roots,” because the Charlotte Chamber and most elected officials here support the transit tax.

“I hope you will not link the group I was involved in with them,” he said. “We were not financed by somebody anonymous throwing a lot of money. To me that’s not real grass roots.” (Businessman Jay Morrison, who says he’s running for school board, paid to hire professional petition-gatherers to get 48,000 signatures to put the measure on the ballot. Morrison hasn’t said how much he paid. “Those close to Morrison say he’s paid for about half the cost for the petition drive,” a June 7 Observer news report said.)

And, FitzPatrick pointed out, “We didn’t have a single elected official anywhere within a hundred miles of us.” Co-chairs of the anti-transit tax petition are former school board member and former county commissioner Jim Puckett, former City Council member Don Reid. Helping them is former U.S. attorney Tom Ashcraft. None holds those positions now, of course.

FitzPatrick is not looking at CATS through rose-colored glasses. He said the single-issue interest groups, like the one formed to fight the transit tax, are a symptom of a government (including CATS) that doesn’t take the time to be responsive to the public.

Is Charlotte different, I asked him, from the days when the business community ran the city?

“If it is,” he said, “it’s imperceptible to me. Just look at the sprawl. It’s a disgrace. Is that vision? … Nobody ever takes responsibility for disasters, like the death of the west side, or the university area. You can’t even walk around up there. Whose vision was that?”

I spent a couple of hours last week talking with Robert FitzPatrick, who spent much of the 1970s helping Charlotte neighborhoods and grass roots groups organize to fight City Hall.

My Saturday column told of his efforts to prevent Freedom Park from being plundered by an ill-conceived canal project. The project would have dredged Little Sugar Creek and trapped it into concrete embankments and locks – and would have richly rewarded land owners and real estate developers who were pushing the plan.

In those days FitzPatrick and the folks he organized mostly fought City Hall and the business oligarchy that backed city government. Among the leaders of the group that fought the canal project were a roofer and a truck driver.

FitzPatrick helped organize the North Charlotte Action Association, which focused on code enforcement and trash pickup. He helped organize the Association for Better Public Transportation, a citizen group that fought (unsuccessfully) a bus fare increase that made Charlotte’s fares among the highest in the country. (40 cents in 1974, equivalent to $1.66 today.) The group also wanted the city to take over the bus system, because the private company running it was providing, as FitzPatrick termed it, “nasty, dirty buses that were never on time.”

So I asked him what he thought of the folks who had organized to get the repeal of the transit tax onto the Nov. 6 ballot. They say they’re “grass roots,” because the Charlotte Chamber and most elected officials here support the transit tax.

“I hope you will not link the group I was involved in with them,” he said. “We were not financed by somebody anonymous throwing a lot of money. To me that’s not real grass roots.” (Businessman Jay Morrison, who says he’s running for school board, paid to hire professional petition-gatherers to get 48,000 signatures to put the measure on the ballot. Morrison hasn’t said how much he paid. “Those close to Morrison say he’s paid for about half the cost for the petition drive,” a June 7 Observer news report said.)

And, FitzPatrick pointed out, “We didn’t have a single elected official anywhere within a hundred miles of us.” Co-chairs of the anti-transit tax petition are former school board member and former county commissioner Jim Puckett, former City Council member Don Reid. Helping them is former U.S. attorney Tom Ashcraft. None holds those positions now, of course.

FitzPatrick is not looking at CATS through rose-colored glasses. He said the single-issue interest groups, like the one formed to fight the transit tax, are a symptom of a government (including CATS) that doesn’t take the time to be responsive to the public.

Is Charlotte different, I asked him, from the days when the business community ran the city?

“If it is,” he said, “it’s imperceptible to me. Just look at the sprawl. It’s a disgrace. Is that vision? … Nobody ever takes responsibility for disasters, like the death of the west side, or the university area. You can’t even walk around up there. Whose vision was that?”