Author: Mary Newsom

Bike-sharing deferred, but tax talk moves forward

Did I mention that a Charlotte City Council committee scheduled to discuss a possible bike-sharing program this afternoon was also going to talk about “finding new revenues” for roads? I believe I did.  And you don’t have to be a political science professor to know elected officials won’t breeze quickly through any talk of new or higher taxes.

The result: Much information about higher registration fees, new sales taxes, new toll roads and even a vehicle-miles-traveled tax. (For details, see below.) The council’s transportation and planning committee voted to refer the whole topic to the council’s budget committee and to urge city staff to make sure the topic comes up during the council’s retreat next winter.

But no bike-sharing discussion. The committee ran out of time. That discussion is now scheduled for the committee’s Oct. 10 meeting.

For transportation policy geeks and tax policy geeks (I plead guilty), the how-to-fund-it-all discussion was meaty and even, well, sort of fun. The presentation from developer Ned Curran, who chaired a 2008-09 citizen group called the Committee of 21, is here. (For details, read that PowerPoint.)  In a nutshell, the Transportation Action Plan, adopted five years ago and due for an update, lays out a series of countywide transportation improvements. The Committee of 21 concluded the gap between identified road needs and known funding sources (federal, state and local) over 25 years is $12 billion. So … how do you find that money?

Curran, CEO of the Bissell Cos., made clear that the committee’s charge was to look specifically at roads, not at other transportation modes. They looked at 19 different revenue options, such as sales tax and gas tax increases, driveway taxes, impact fees, sin taxes and even parking surcharges. (The full list is on page 6 of the presentation on the committee agenda.) They assessed the options based on how related they were to driving, how much revenue they’d produce, how easy to implement and operate, political reality, etc.

The Roads Final Four:

  1. Doubling the $30 vehicle registration tax from $30 to $60 = $18 million a year.
  2. A half-cent Mecklenburg sales tax increase for roads = $81 million. Note, that estimate was before sales tax revenues plunged in 2009. A more recent estimate would be $55 million, Charlotte Department of Transportation chief Danny Pleasant said.
  3. Tolls on all existing interstates in the county = $52 million a year. This, obviously, depends on the toll assessed and what revenue-splitting agreements would be forged with the federal and state governments. 
  4. A vehicle miles traveled (VMT) tax. Curran said this option has gotten plenty of national discussion and would likely have to take place nationally, but as federal and state gas tax revenues sink due to more efficient cars and and people driving less, the VMT tax will get more credence. Privacy concerns? “If any of us have our phones on in our car, we’re being tracked anyway,” Curran quipped.

As Curran and Pleasant discussed the toll roads situation, it got interesting. A multistate agreement is in the works, they said, with which other states would agree to help each other capture the cents-per-mile tolls if, say, a New York driver zipped through North Carolina on I-95 and didn’t pay the tolls. New York would collect the money (how? that wasn’t clear) and send it to N.C.  Meanwhile, North Carolina is one of several states applying for a program to inaugurate tolls on parts of I-95. With more tolls and more states cooperating – and with innovations such as a High Occupancy Toll lane being planned for I-77 in north Mecklenburg – pretty soon you’ve got a VMT anyway.

One doubter about all this: Council member Michael Barnes. “There has never been the political will among elected officials to deal with it [funding transportation],” he said. “I am tired of it.” Count him among skeptics who think council members will, once again, after discussion fail to enact any specific measures to fund the city’s plans for transportation.  

Bike-sharing in Charlotte – soon?

A Charlotte City Council committee today takes up the question of what should happen next if Charlotte is to have (or not) a bike-sharing program. It also takes up an even more hot-potato topic: How to pay for the city’s road needs.

For those unfamiliar with the term bike-sharing, those programs have sprung up in cities all over the country, as well as in other countries. For a small fee – typically paid online – you can become a member or pay for a temporary membership. That gives you the ability to take a bicycle from a bike station, ride it for a certain number of hours and return it to another bike station

In its August meeting, the committee heard a presentation from Alta Bicycle Share, a consultant group that manages the Washington bike-sharing program known as Capital Bikeshare. (Photo courtesy of Capital Bikeshare, taken from the City of Charlotte’s website.) 

If you click on the link in the first sentence of this item, you’ll see that the committee agenda also holds a discussion on the sure-to-be-controversial topic of what revenue sources (read: tax or fee increase)
might be available to provide money for the Charlotte region’s huge transportation needs. The agenda says “provide detailed information on a variety of potential transportation revenue sources.”
The presentation will be a reprise of the recommendations from the Committee of 21, led by developer Ned Curran, which met in 2009 to look at the city’s “road needs.” It did not look at transit needs.  It did not look at “street” needs. None of which is to say that the city doesn’t need some work on its roads. It does. But in Mary’s Perfect World, we’d talk more about streets, which is what you have in a city, and less about “roads,” which are what you have between cities. And we’d mostly talk about “transportation” needs, which means looking at driving, transit, bicycling and walking, i.e., the Big Picture. We need to serve all those transportation forms.
The Committee of 21 looked at a gigantic list of possible funding, including such  Big City ideas as charging a fee for driving into uptown. It rejected most of those. For instance, congestion pricing (the downtown fee) can work well where residents have plenty of good options for transportation other than driving. Charlotte is not one of those places.
Why is the Committee of 21 presenting a reprise? I asked committee chair David Howard that very thing when I chanced to run into him Saturday at the UNC Charlotte Student Union. (I was walking around campus for exercise; he was waiting for his daughter to finish an educational program on campus.) He said he asked for it to be put on the agenda, because it’s a conversation the community needs to have.
The committee meets at 3:30 p.m. today in Room 280 of the Government Center.  

City pedaling and wilderness paddling

Bicycling and canoeing are kindred spirits in helping you explore your world, writes Joe Urban (a.k.a. Sam Newberg). In “Pedaling and Paddling in City and Wilderness,” Newberg writes about his experience in a canoe in the northern Minnesota Boundary Waters and its perhaps not-obvious relationship to bicycling through a city: 

“Just as the paddle is an “extension of your arm” in a canoe, the bicycle is an extension of your feet, enabling harmony and oneness with the street and buildings around you. As well, a canoe can cut almost silently through water, and a bicycle slices a quiet path through urbanity.”

 I shared the piece with a friend who’s a retired UNC Charlotte professor who used to bicycle to campus from East Charlotte and who goes on wilderness canoeing trips each summer. He replied:

“The essay comparing canoeing and bicycling strikes a very strong chord with me.  I would rather paddle in the Boundary Waters than be anywhere else on earth, except bicycling to UNCC.  The two experiences are so similar in my basal reptilian brain that I dream about them as one thing: flying over the landscape a few feet above the surface with no visible means of support.  Jung would have fun with that.”

At long, long last, a park for Romare Bearden

Bearden collage: Maudell Sleet’s Magic Garden (1978)

It took years, multiple political strategies, a bond vote, patience, weathering a brutal and ongoing economic downturn, more patience, and – finally – a multimedia event under a tent on a hot asphalt parking lot. But Friday, ground was broken for a new park in uptown Charlotte: Romare Bearden Park.

It’s notable for many reasons, including being the first significant honoring of  a major 20th-century artist, Bearden, who was born in Charlotte. It’s also the first major public park built in the heart of uptown in years. I am not counting Polk Place at The Square because it’s tiny and because I’m still hacked off that the city knocked down the oldest retail buildings downtown for a not-so-wonderful park modeled on what looks like the U.S. Northwest mountains. The late Al Rousso’s fight against the city to save his store got him elected to City Council. But it didn’t save his store. Nor am I counting The Green because it is private space. Lovely, but private. Just try standing and taking photos of the condos, and you may find yourself getting kicked out, as I hear happened to some architecture students.
 Romare Bearden Park is named for New York artist and Charlotte native Romare Bearden, born 100 years ago today about two blocks from the scene of Friday’s ceremonies, in his great-grandparents’ house at 401 S. Graham St. on the corner of what was then Second Street and is now Martin Luther King Boulevard. Bearden’s parents moved North when he was a young boy, but he visited frequently and some of his later works evoke (and are named for) Mecklenburg County and the people he knew here, including Charlotte neighbor Maudell Sleet (above).

St. Michael’s now-demolished church. Photo: www.bearden1911.org

That “multimedia” part refers to the agenda for Friday’s events. Of course you had politicians present and past, governmental officials and reading from ceremonial proclamations. But we were also treated to the choir from St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church – where Bearden was baptized. The church, founded in 1882, was formerly at South Mint and West Hill streets (where the Panthers’ stadium now sits) and is the oldest traditionally African American Episcopal church in the state. (For more information about Charlotte in 1911, at the time of Bearden’s birth, visit www.Bearden1911.org.)

After the pols came playwright/poet Ruth Sloane reading dramatic excerpts from her original play, “Romare Bearden 1911-1988,” commissioned in 2003, and accompanied by flautist Michael Porter. Then we followed the Johnson C. Smith University drummers out to watch Mecklenburg county commissioners’ chair Jennifer Roberts knock out a section of the back wall of a row of buildings that until now had, miraculously, survived on Church Street between Third Street and MLK Boulevard.

I chanced to sit next to Charlotte developer David Furman, who recalled, “When we started marketing the TradeMark [condo tower on West Trade Street] we were marketing this park.” That was six or seven years ago, he said. The park site was part of a multipart, still controversial land swap deal that was expected to bring a minor league baseball stadium uptown, to a neighboring and larger parcel that was the original site for this park. That deal has been mangled by the recession and long-running lawsuits.

But, Mayor Pat, do you back light rail?

Photo of Third Street station courtesy Charlotte Area Transit System
(See update at end, 6:30 p.m.)

Ex-CATS chief Ron Tober sends along a link to a nice little video about the Lynx Blue Line and South End. It praises the way the light rail line brings neighborhoods together, helps people move about the city without cars and builds for the future.

The film (apparently made by Siemens, hence the talking heads from that company) quotes many Charlotte notables, including Charlotte Planning Director Debra Campbell, Duke Energy’s North Carolina president Brett Carter, UNC Charlotte Dean of Arts + Architecture Ken Lambla, UNCC profs David Walters and Jose Gamez, Levine Museum historian Tom Hanchett …

… and former Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory.

This is worth pointing out because McCrory, a seven-term mayor who is all but certainly running again for N.C. governor in 2012, has been a strong transit supporter. He has a national reputation for being a strong transit supporter.  That much isn’t really news for politics buffs.  But here’s a new wrinkle. His Republican Party in North Carolina now appears dominated by anti-transit conservatives.

During the recent General Assembly session, state legislators from Mecklenburg County made several stabs at outright killing any more state funding (and thus, any more federal funding) for Charlotte’s light rail system, as well as trying to off the state’s long-planned high-speed passenger rail between Charlotte and Raleigh. Last spring, McCrory said he had made calls to Republican legislative leaders about transit, but wouldn’t say what he talked about.

This all leaves Mayor Pat with a dilemma.  He can continue to tout his accomplishments as a moderate, pro-transit mayor, which will help him with independents and with any Democrats who have cooled on Gov. Bev Perdue. But that would definitely rile the people now in control of the state Republican Party, not to mention many legislators. Or he can play to his right and somehow distance himself from Charlotte’s nationally praised light rail system, one of his most praiseworthy achievements.

I note that on this video, McCrory doesn’t say anything that might be pulled out and used as a pro-transit film clip by enemies on the right, who kicked him around a lot when he was mayor, calling him a RINO (Republican in Name Only), or even a socialist, for supporting mass transit. On the film he says innocuous things,  that cities should look to the future, and this “infrastructure” is a good investment.

(Update and rewrite, 6:25 p.m.) McCrory just phoned me back and was pointed in saying he supports mass transit “where it works.” If the transportation experts and federal funding formulas say it would work in a certain place, McCrory said, then he’s for it. He said he just asks, “What will the numbers look like?”

This is all consistent with his remarks as mayor. But, I asked him, a lot of N.C. Republicans oppose mass transit, so how will he handle that in his campaign? “I’ll handle it exactly the same way I handled it as mayor,” he said. Some Republicans won’t like his answers, he said, and neither will some Democrats.

I’ve been wondering how McCrory, who is a deft politician, will handle this GOP-hates-transit dilemma. He’s on the record now – at least with Naked City Blog – on mass transit. It will be in interesting political show to see how his campaign plays out on this particular issue.

Time-traveling to a lost era in city history

I spent rather too much time yesterday looking through a new website that lets you view old maps of Charlotte a century ago, pegged to the 100th anniversary Friday of artist and native son Romare Bearden’s birth. The site, www.bearden1911.org, (put together via a partnership of the Levine Museum of the New South and UNC Chapel Hill) superimposes old photos and information about Bearden on an old Sanborn map. You can see old building outlines, where the streets used to be. (Note the small lot sizes, compared with today.).

I got interested, also, in the companion site www.charlotte1911.org, another collaboration by the Levine’s historian, Tom Hanchett and UNC. It uses 1911 Sanborn maps and city directory information to show you, for instance, where people holding different jobs were listed as living. You can locate where the boarding houses were, by race, as well as attorneys, mill workers and “bag agents.” The slider bar lets you superimpose an aerial photo of today’s buildings atop the century-old maps.

Of course, using this site, I scrolled out to see my own neighborhood  –  a subdivision whose official plat name is Pharr Acres. I’d heard it was “old man Pharr’s farm.”  Yep, there on Providence Road, just south of  Briar Creek, is a dot labeled “W S Pharr.” Into the late 1970s the large, old farmhouse house still stood. Like so much else on the map, it’s gone now, with a cul-de-sac subdivision in its place.

The Bearden site also offers some opportunity to mourn, including for the segregated world into which he was born, and for the loss to this city of a talent like his, when his parents moved North in search of a better life. As Levine historian Hanchett says in his article for the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute’s website (disclosure: my workplace) “Bearden’s 1911 birthplace: A fateful time for Charlotte,” a city where downtown neighborhoods had been comparatively integrated was hardening into rigid segregation during the years before Bearden’s birth. A new city park was closed to black residents. Black passengers were ordered into the back of streetcars.

But as you look through the Bearden locations and see photos of what’s there today,  mourn this, as well:  Most of it is gone. The good, the bad, the spacious front porches, stores, churches – almost everything. Including, in some cases, even streets  What you’ll see in photos showing today’s scenes in the places where Bearden and his family lived is not newer buildings – after all, cities do evolve – but surface parking areas, empty grass-covered lots. It’s one thing when old buildings are lost but replaced by newer ones that also over time contribute something to the city’s life and, then, its history. That is not what has happened here. We’ve just lost the reminders of the past, without gaining anything. At least this online exhibit can, if only virtually, restore something of what went before.

Photo: Artist Romare Bearden, born in Charlotte 100 years ago, moved to New York. His great-grandparents are shown in the photo next to him, on the porch of their Graham Street home in Charlotte.

A drive through the layers of a city

(A shopping cart, removed in recent days, at the desolate North Park Mall.)

I probably shouldn’t admit this, but when I took my new job at UNC Charlotte, the one thing I dreaded was my new drive to work. For more than two decades I’d commuted 4.2 miles to downtown from a neighborhood near Wendover Road along streets lined, for the most part, with half-century-old oaks. Depending on the hour and the traffic karma, it took as little as eight minutes up to (on rare occasions) 25.

My new drive is 12 miles, along streets decidedly unlike Providence and Queens roads and Morehead Street. Even apart from the extra time out of my day (it’s a 25- to 30-minute trip) and extra auto expenses to absorb, I was not looking forward to it. This new commute goes through neighborhoods that had little urban beauty even when new, and now are decidedly down-at-the-heels.

 But I was wrong.  What I lose in visual splendor is giving me a better-rounded view of the city.
The commute takes me through parts of Charlotte that of course I’ve seen before – I’m a journalist, remember – but never daily, or even weekly.  And an occasional cruise up Eastway Drive is not at all the same as seeing it daily, because it’s those routine views that inevitably shape our understanding of and expectations for, the places we inhabit – what urban design writer Kevin Lynch (who worked in Greensboro early in his career) described as “mental maps.”

Knowing, intellectually, that Providence Road runs through some of Charlotte’s most affluent neighborhoods isn’t the same as absorbing, every day for years, the sight of tree-shaded sidewalks, well-watered lawns and well-proportioned four-lane streets. For years I’d drive through neighborhoods built as early 20th-century streetcar suburbs. Now I see car-oriented suburbia, much of it tattered. But despite its lack of obvious beauty, it offers something just as interesting, which isn’t easily found in those more static neighborhoods: a quality of visible transition through time.

I drive north to where Wendover becomes Eastway, then all the way to North Tryon Street, finally turning onto University City Boulevard. Along the way, I notice massive oak trees which don’t get near the publicity of Myers Park’s but are just as impressive. A few years ago I spotted chickens in someone’s yard across the street from the Aztec Apartments, and enjoyed the sight. This was before the chic urban chicken craze hit the city. Now, though, while I have looked daily since late June, I have not seen a single fowl there. On Tuesday night, however, I did see, near the Kilborne intersection, a white rabbit hopping along the grassy verge.

I drive past strip shopping centers of various ages, in varying degrees of transition, decay and stability, and marvel at how Eastway Crossing at Central and Eastway has kept up its rental spaces over decades. How will it fare after its Wal-Mart closes, once the new store on Independence Boulevard a mile away opens?

Nation Square, a new strip center on North Tryon Street.

I notice that the view of  50-year-old Garinger High School, designed by renowned local Modernist architect A.G. Odell, is all but obliterated by mobile classrooms plopped out front. I have become familiar with the extremely rough Norfolk Southern Aberdeen, Carolina & Western railroad tracks between Sugar Creek Road and The Plaza, possibly the bumpiest on any major thoroughfare in the city. I eye taquerias, Latino grocery stores and African braid salons, and today I caught a glimpse, as I zipped past, of a small business near Shamrock whose sign read: Cambodian Video.

Once on North Tryon Street – which has been a designated light rail transit corridor for, oh, about 13 years – I
marvel daily at how much new retail development has gone up in recent years that’s not at all transit-friendly: Amid mobile-home graveyards and the vintage Holiday Motel sit numerous newly constructed small strip centers and even a fast-food joint with drive-through windows.
I stopped one recent morning at one of the newest strip centers, Nation Square, which houses a handful of businesses including Panaderia Odalys, a Mexican bakery. I sampled cookies with guava and other sweets and was surprised to learn that Odalys is a small chain, with outlets in, among other places, High Point, Asheboro and other nearby Carolinas cities. Who’d have thought?

One of the bleakest spots is North Park Mall, where Eastway ends at North Tryon. Those jutting sawtooth skylights on its roof evoke the old Richway store of the mall’s founding in the 1970s. Richway later became Target, which left the mall more than a decade ago. A Kroger Sav-On became a Bi-Lo and now sits empty. The mall is all but derelict, with weeds and pockmarks in its parking lot. Right next to it, a much newer strip center seems fully occupied with small businesses – braid shops, salons, etc.

Baked goods at Panaderia Odalys at Nation Square

The overall condition of that section of east and northeast Charlotte is of concern, naturally.  Some areas (that strip center on The Plaza at Eastway, for instance) all but shout “disinvestment.” But it’s the evidence of change – thriving ’60s and ’70s suburbia that has passed through down-at-the-heels and, in many places, into immigrant entrepreneurialism – that make this drive so much more interesting. With so many small-scale businesses, you see more evidence of changes than along the oh-so-sedate section of Providence Road lined with the big Myers Park churches or along Morehead Street, where most of what changes is Carolinas Medical Center consuming ever more land. It’s more intriguing to spot a new taqueria, an African grocery store or something called Cambodian Video.

My daily commute now shows me a living city, one changing visibly from decade to decade, its modest neighborhoods evolving with the outflows and inflows of different people from different places.  I compare that with uptown Charlotte; for all its wealth of nightclubs, restaurants, museums, sports arenas and people, uptown’s virtually all-new development has mostly obliterated evidence of the multi-layered past. Cities have memories, made visible in the layers of buildings, pavements and history. We all need to be able to see the evidence of what went before us, what James Howard Kunstler called chronological connectivity. In his 1996 book, Home From Nowhere: he wrote: “Connection with the past and the future is a pathway that literally charms us in the direction of sanity and grace.”

For me, it’s the places where small stores go in and out of business, where new signs sprout in Spanish or Vietnamese or English, that are making it easier to sense the past as I travel toward the future.

Bike-share idea moves forward in Charlotte

Charlotte City government officials will discuss whether to push ahead with what’s now a fledgling idea for the city to launch a bike-sharing program, preferably in time for the Democratic National Committee in September 2012.

The City Council’s Transportation and Planning Committee this afternoon (Monday, Aug 22) heard a presentation from Alison Cohen, president of Alta Bicycle Share, which operates the Washington, D.C., bike share program, Capital Bikeshare, launched in September 2010. Also at the meeting was John Cock of the affiliated Alta wing, Alta Planning + Design.

Bike-share programs let customers pay (via memberships, or kiosks) to rent bicycles temporarily from a system of stations around the city. In Washington, yearly membership is $75, which buys you an electronic key you insert to free the bike from its locked slot at the station. Day-pass users ($5) get an unlocking code to use.  The first 30 minutes of a ride have no other fee bu the longer the ride, the more it costs. 

It’s important to have places for bicycle riders to ride, Cohen said. Washington went from 3 to 50 miles of bike lanes in the last 10 years and saw bicycle commuting rise 86 percent, 2000-2009. The average distance of a Capital Bikeshare ride is 1.2 miles, Cohen said. (Charlotte is up to 50 miles of lanes, city bicycle coordinator Ken Tippette said.)

Today’s meeting had no specific proposal on the table for council members; it was an information session arranged by Tippette with the encouragement of City Council member Edwin Peacock III, who chairs the council’s Environment Committee and who described his experience using Capital Bikeshare when he was in Washington recently for a National League of Cities meeting.

Cohen said the D.C. bike share program is the nation’s largest to date, although New York City plans to launch one in 2012 with 10,000 bikes. Other cities with programs: Denver, Minneapolis, Boston – even Spartanburg, S.C., which has only two bike share stations according to Cohen. Also in the works are programs in Chattanooga, Tenn., San Antonio and Miami. And yes, you read that right. Spartanburg.

Council members David Howard, Patsy Kinsey and Nancy Carter had questions for Cohen and Cock, but no one pooh-poohed the idea. At the end of the meeting, Howard, who chairs the committee, asked Assistant City Manager Jim Schumacher to talk with City Manager Curt Walton about what, if anything, the city should try to do.

Reading the tea leaves, as we pundits try to do, I predict the city will explore some sort of small-scale bike sharing program limited to center city and possibly one or two nearby neighborhoods, and will look for private sponsors to help with costs. A year is a short time frame for setting up a full program, but with enough push it could be done. After all, if you were in Charlotte in 1994 for the Final Four you saw center city enthusiasts create a fake nightlife scene, setting up bars inside vacant buildings. It worked. Doubters saw the huge crowds of people willing to come uptown for a night out, and it helped spark more authentic night life uptown. Setting up a real, if small, bike share program might have the same kind of inspirational effect.

The council committee also, with little discussion, unanimously recommended approval of the Center City 2020 Vision Plan, which goes to the full council Sept. 12  Here’s a link to the draft of the plan, and here’s a link to some commentary from my UNC Charlotte colleague David Walters and me. Also, here’s a previous Naked City Blog item from me.

If I’m nuts, then Joe Nocera is too

I couldn’t help but laugh when I read New York Times’ op-ed columnist Joe Nocera’s piece on Monday, “What Is Business Waiting For?”  In it he suggests that U.S. business leaders should consider hiring more people because that, in the end, will help the economy and thus, their business. “If enough companies started hiring — while wrapping their actions in the mantle of patriotism — even Carl Icahn might have trouble complaining about it,” Nocera writes.

I proposed a similar idea deep in a column I wrote last December for The Charlotte Observer, “Is the U.S. entering a ‘hate the rich’ era?”

I wrote: “If you’re a ‘rich person,’ especially if you run a company, should you be worried? Who knows? The wealthy still seem to have Congress in their pocket. But maybe now is the time to start heading off rising animosity. I know that some wealthy people truly do care about their country and their community. So prove it: CEOs could decide it’s an act of patriotism to start hiring workers. Why not challenge fellow CEOs to a patriotic campaign to fill jobs, akin to Warren Buffet’s push to get billionaires to give half their wealth to charity?” 

The commentariat, both online and in my email inbox, beat me up severely for saying I hated the rich – even though I specifically said I didn’t – and for being so ignorant about business as to suggest such a dumb thing. Maybe I was just too far ahead of the curve?

And speaking of hostility toward the rich, check out Pulitzer-winning Steven Pearlstein’s “Blame for financial mess starts with the corporate lobby” from the Aug. 13 Washington Post. It’s blistering.

Density pays off better than sprawl

A Colorado study for the Tucson-based Sonoran Institute by Asheville’s Joe  Minicozzi concludes that across the board, downtown commercial and mixed-use buildings outperform their big-box counterparts when comparing tax revenues per-acre. The study looked at properties in and around Glenwood Springs, Colo. (Hat tip to Planetizen.com for the link.) Minicozzi looked at both property tax and sales tax revenues.

I wrote a year ago about Minicozzi’s analyses of property in Sarasota County, Fla., and Asheville. It’s another way that public officials should think about “growth” as they decide which projects to approve and which ones not to. In that previous posting, Minicozzi added a reply to some of the commenters, saying:

“When we ran the model in Asheville, our numbers show that our downtown continually out performs suburban low-density time and time again. A conservative estimate on multi-family services of government (sewers, water, schools, etc.) shows the costs roughly to pencil out to $16k/unit in compact development vs. $28k for low density. The simple way of thinking about it is that mile of pipe picks up more people in compact development, than it does in the low density stuff.”

I recall that about 10 years ago, the town of Pineville outside Charlotte, a place known regionally for extreme sprawl retail, opted to reject a Wal-Mart Supercenter after running the numbers and concluding it would cost the town more in police and other services than the town would recoup in property and sales taxes.

In checking out the Sonoran Institute website, I noted this article from the Bozeman, Mont., Daily Chronicle in which a Sonoran Institute official points out that impact fees were a vital tool for the city. “There simply is no substitute,” he said. The article is about a spat among city officials and developers over the city’s hefty impact fees, which the city charges to cover the cost of roads, water, sewer and fire protection. “For the average single family home, impact fees cost $11,516,” it says. ” In Missoula, it costs $3,638 in impact fees for the average home.”

In most of North Carolina developers pay no impact fees. The N.C. legislature must approve any city or county’s impact fees on a case-by-case basis and hasn’t OK’d any in several decades. That’s just food for thought for anyone paying property taxes.