Month: January 2013

How to pay for future transit? MTC to study

Mecklenburg’s transit agency, the Metropolitan Transit Commission, is launching a study group to look at how to pay for future transit projects.

According to a news release from Charlotte Mayor and MTC Chairman Anthony Foxx’s office, the working group’s leaders will be Huntersville Mayor Jill Swain, a Republican, and Charlotte City Council member David Howard, a Democrat who chairs the council’s Transportation and Planning Committee.

Finding new money for transit projects beyond the Blue Line Extension has been difficult. Revenues from the half-cent sales tax for transit tumbled after the 2008 financial crash. Federal funding is highly competitive, and state transit funding has been cut and with a Republican-led General Assembly, may be cut further. The study group will look at a variety of transit-funding strategies, including tax-increment financing, synthetic tax-increment financing, special tax districts, and more.

  Here’s the press release sent by Mayor Anthony Foxx’s office:


METROPOLITAN TRANSIT COMMISSION FORMS WORKING GROUP TO STUDY 2030 TRANSIT PLAN FUNDING
Charlotte, NC— At a meeting of the Metropolitan Transit Commission (MTC) Wednesday night, MTC Chair Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx urged the formation of a working group to study funding for future transit projects.  This action follows an October decision by the MTC to convene a workshop, currently scheduled for April, to consider and adopt strategies to fund the 2030 Transit Plan. 
The working group will be co-led by Huntersville Mayor Jill Swain and Charlotte City Councilman David Howard, and include MTC staff, MTC member mayors or their designees, and business and community leaders from participating jurisdictions.
“As I and many others have been saying, our funding environment has changed, making it harder to see any future transit projects happening over the next 10 to 20 years,” Foxx said.  “We need to explore all options available to us to complete, and perhaps accelerate, our long-term regional transit plans.  Connecting our region through transit is critical both to our future economic prosperity and to managing our exponential population growth.”
“I believe that if we are to have a vision for the future, it’s imperative for us as a collective group to look at creative financing mechanisms for our transit plan and explore anything that can help us achieve our goals,” Swain said.  “Analyzing our future transit issues is at least as important, if not more so, than addressing our current ones.”
“There’s nothing more important to Charlotte’s future than figuring out our mass transit system,” Howard said.  “I look forward to working with Mayor Swain and the rest of the working group to find ways to make sure we move our transit plan forward as it will be one of the things that will most define us as we go to the next level as a city and a region.”
The working group will submit its findings and recommendations to the MTC in a report due no later than April 15.  The group will consider such financing strategies as: Tax Increment Financing (TIFs), Synthetic Tax Increment Financing (STIFs), Tax Increment Grant (TIGs), Business Privilege Licensing Tax, sales tax revenue, and incremental property taxes.  It will also consider which strategies are currently available to local governments and which would require additional County, voter, and/or North Carolina General Assembly authorization. 
The Charlotte Area Transit System will be the lead agency in supporting the working group.
The formation of the working group comes at a critical time for the Charlotte region’s transit system:
  • Transit sales tax revenues dropped during the recession to 2005 levels, eliminating capacity to fund projects beyond the Blue Line Extension.
  • The Blue Line Extension, the single largest capital project in Charlotte’s history, has required increased property taxes from at least three jurisdictions.
  • The General Assembly has already eliminated $6 million in matching transit funding, increasing concerns that matches for future projects will be eliminated and may require increased local commitments.
  • New federal policies and funding approaches may make funding the 2030 Transit Plan less predictable than in previous years.
  • The Charlotte region is the fastest-growing urban area in the nation.
More information on the MTC’s 2030 Transit Plan is available here. 

Tried to read PlanCharlotte.org? Sorry it’s broken

The websites for the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute’s online publications, including PlanCharlotte.org, have been broken since Saturday, Jan. 19. The institute apologizes if you’ve tried to reach the sites, or have clicked on links in this blog that haven’t worked.

Latest word is that the sites might be repaired by late Thursday, Jan. 24, or shortly after.

Meanwhile, if you’re looking for something to read, you can help us at the institute by taking this survey of our online publications, so that we can improve our content. It’s not long, and we can’t access your name or email address for any commercial or nefarious purposes. And we really are are looking at every comment that’s made.   Click here to take the survey.

Safer sidewalks ahead

Starting next week, the City of Charlotte launches a publicity campaign to get residents to keep sidewalks clear. They’ll start with a campaign about garbage and recycling carts, yard waste and other bulky items.

This is much-needed, and some might say long overdue. A tragic accident last May killed a Myers Park High School student riding a bikee to school along a Sharon Lane sidewalk which was next to the curb. He encountered a rollout garbage bin blocking the sidewalk, and in trying to avoid it clipped the bin and fell into the street. He was hit by a car and killed.

In my walks around the city I note this is a problem in many places. The city built many back-of-curb sidewalks well into the 1990s, to save money. Where to put the rollout garbage and recycling bins? If you put them in your driveway you can’t get out of your own driveway. Sometimes there’s room to put them in the yard next to the sidewalk. Sometimes there isn’t, especially if the lot slopes steeply up or down.

Yard waste is another problem: One Sunday morning not too long ago I was walking down Wendover Road and
someone had pile massive amounts of tree branches along the whole property frontage, completely blocking the sidewalk next to a steep slope. Nowhere to walk but in the street. I was trying (helpfully, I thought) to move some of the brush up onto the slope and the resident in the home came out and yelled at me. I confess, I yelled back, something about what “right-of-way” means and that the sidewalk was one, and that I had the “right” to go that way. She just yelled back and I gave up and walked in the busy, 4-lane street. Good thing that I was not in a wheelchair trying to get to a bus stop and that it was not rush hour.

Below is from the weekly memo to the Charlotte City Council, from the city manager. I’m glad to see they’ll tackle the problem of overgrown shrubbery later. I’ve considered going out armed with hedge clippers, to hack my way through some places. The memo:
“Solid Waste Services, in collaboration with Corporate Communications & Marketing, CDOT [Charlotte Department of Transportation] and Neighborhood & Business Services, will launch the first phase of a public campaign to increase community awareness of the need to keep sidewalks clear of obstructions.
“The first phase of the campaign, which begins on January 28, will focus on sidewalk obstructions associated with solid waste collections – garbage/recycling carts, yard waste and bulky items – as well as other items such as parked vehicles that impede sidewalk traffic. Educational efforts will aim to increase public awareness of the proper placement of collection items and offer alternatives for residents with limited options. Code Enforcement officers will be monitoring problem areas and will be providing educational assistance via door hangers.
“Campaign components will include radio ads (WLKO, WNKS, WLNK, WPEG, WOSF, WOLS and WKQC), online ads (Yahoo), Solid Waste Services truck decals, a utility bill insert in March, social media, Gov Channel billboards, segments in City Source, community meetings, door hangers and community newsletters. A website, sidewalksafety.charlottenc.gov will launch on January 28 as a resource for additional information on keeping sidewalks clear.
“The second phase of the campaign, which addresses additional obstructions such as overgrown shrubs, is set to launch this summer. Staff will update Council when this phase of the campaign begins.”

A greener home for cars

I stumbled onto what’s below after Wagner Murray Architects posted a notification and link on the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute’s Facebook page. (If you haven’t “liked” us, now’s your chance: Click here or,  on Facebook, search for Facebook.com/unccui.)  The link led to the Charlotte architecture firm’s newly redesigned blog, and what especially caught my eye was the entry proposing a vertical green wall.

Update, Saturday Jan. 5: I ran into architect David Wagner this morning at the Charlotte Regional Farmers Market. (And yes, Nise was there with her fabulous lettuce, the last day until the spring crop. Mostly these winter days you’ll find local meats, sweet potatoes, kale, turnips and carrots.) He confirmed that he’s the author of the Wagner Murray blog, so I’ve edited what’s below to reflect that.

Here’s an illustration, below, courtesy of the Wagner Murray blog:

The idea architect David Wagner proposes is to convert an existing parking deck in uptown Charlotte into a green wall (constructed with living plants) topped with a photovoltaic installation. Here’s a link to the item.

It’s reminiscent of ideas others have proposed here and there to try to enliven, visually, some of the many dead spots built in our downtown during the design-bleak years of the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s.

Here’s a link to an essay, from Charlotte writer Tracey Crowe, in the PlanCharlotte.org website I run, in which she proposes using green walls to spruce up (pun intended) some bleak areas: “Turn uptown’s street canyons green.”

And PlanCharlotte’s Keihly Moore has suggested similar ideas, among others, to soften those dull walls: “The great walls of Charlotte.”


How many of you recognize the spot where the proposed green wall is illustrated?

 It’s this uptown parking deck on College Street at East Third Street:

It’s always seemed to me a wasted opportunity for some whimsy. If the green wall thing doesn’t work out, I’d like to see a game where you can drop a large ball at the top and watch it spiral all the way down to the ground floor.  

Why funding Charlotte’s streetcar is tough

Maybe this item’s headline should be Yet Another Problem with Single-Use Zoning.

There’s been chatter among city policy types about finding some creative finance tools for Charlotte to use to build the second phase of what would ultimately be a Beatties Ford Road-West/East Trade Street-Hawthorne Avenue-Central Avenue streetcar route.One tool being talked of is a special tax assessment district.

(For the purposes of this post, let’s set aside whether said streetcar is a good or bad idea. I tend to think it’s a good idea, as a way to shape and lure development to parts of the city that could use a development boost, but I know others disagree with that. Topic for another day. For now, let’s talk about financing.)

Because of a reluctance to use regular property taxes (for reasons that have not been clearly articulated, at least not in my hearing, but that seem to be taken as gospel), some folks have talked of special tax assessment districts, akin to those that fund Charlotte Center City Partners or University City Partners, along the streetcar route. It’s a tool used around the country to help municipalities pay for infrastructure seen as helping specific neighborhoods.

But here’s why that tool isn’t very sharp in Charlotte, at least not along the part of the streetcar route that is already
funded and ready to start construction this year (Presbyterian Hospital up to the Transportation Center at Brevard Street) as well as the proposed-but-unfunded second leg (from Presbyterian out Hawthorne to Sunnyside Avenue and from the Transportation Center up West Trade Street to Johnson C. Smith University). If you know what’s along that route you’ll notice that huge chunks of land along it are tax-exempt, owned by government or educational or other nonprofit institutions. The hospital. Independence Park. Central Piedmont Community College. The I-277 right-of-way. The old county courthouse. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department. Old City Hall. The Federal Reserve Building. The Transportation Center. The arena is city-owned, too. Once you pass The Square you’ve got First Presbyterian Church, the federal courthouse and Johnson & Wales University land. The I-77 right-of-way and, a few blocks later, Johnson C. Smith U.

Yes, there are some taxable parcels along the route, too. I’m just saying …

Years ago, the old and lamentably too-well-followed Odell Plan for uptown Charlotte called for a zone of government buildings, mostly on urban-renewed land appropriated from what once was a black neighborhood called Brooklyn. By creating a district of mostly government buildings, we’ve created a district without much privately owned land. And thus lowered any potential tax revenue for projects like the streetcar. It’s a good illustration of why a fine-grained urban fabric (meaning a lot of different, smaller uses close to each other, instead of huge-footprint, single-use projects) really does seem to be healthier, economically, in the long run.

Of course once you get past JCSU to the west and hit Central Avenue on the east, the amount of potential redevelopable land is much greater. But those sections aren’t even in the city’s long-range capital plan (which hasn’t been adopted anyway).

Want to read more about the streetcar’s potential economic impact under varying scenarios? To download the first part of a 2009 economic development study click here. For the second part click here.