Category: Anthony Foxx

A chat with the godfather of Charlotte’s streetcar

Driver Danny McQueen on Tuesday, awaiting a carload of dignitaries to launch Charlotte’s streetcar. The historic replica streetcars now in use would be replaced during the expansion phase with modern streetcars. Photo: Mary Newsom
Before Tuesday morning’s ribbon-cutting that launched Charlotte’s new streetcar, it seemed appropriate to check in with Ron Tober. It was Tober who originally proposed adding the streetcar to the larger transit plan for Charlotte. One might even dub him the godfather of the streetcar idea.
Tober was the Charlotte Area Transit System CEO from 1999 to 2007 – the longest-serving CATS chief to date.  The original transit plan, crafted before the 1998 voter referendum that OK’d a transit sales tax, did not include a streetcar. It roughly sketched five corridors: South (now the Lynx Blue Line), North (the still unfunded commuter rail to Mooresville), Northeast (being built as the Blue Line Extension), Southeast (envisioned running roughly down Independence Boulevard), and West possibly to the airport and possibly not.
Other than the South corridor, where the city already owned rail right of way, and the proposed extension to the northeast, it was left unclear in those early days which corridors would get bus rapid transit and which would get light rail. That did not sit well with east and west Charlotte neighborhood champions, who clamored for rail service, not bus rapid transit.
In 2004, Tober proposed a streetcar to connect east and west Charlotte. It would run in rails along Beatties Ford Road, through uptown, and out Central Avenue to Eastland Mall, which at that time was open, he reminded me Tuesday morning. The streetcar idea was adopted into the 2006 transit plan update.
Some background: The newly opened 1.5-mile streetcar segment is not funded with the county’s half-cent sales tax for transit. That money goes to the Blue Line, the Blue Line Extension and to run the bus system. Not enough revenue has come in to pay to build more of the 2030 transit plan. (See New CATS chief faces funding questions.) The first streetcar leg was built with a $25 million federal grant and $17 million in funds from the city of

Charlotte.  A hoped-for 2.5-mile expansion would cost $150 million, paid with $75 million in federal dollars and the rest from city money.

My conversation with Tober:
Me: What made you think “streetcar”?
Tober described a process in which CATS planners were studying major investments, and looked at the bus routes with highest ridership: the No. 9 on Central Avenue and the No. 7 on Beatties Ford topped the list, he said.  “So why aren’t we doing something up in there? That was a big question mark for me.”  At a 2002 transit conference he saw a presentation on the then-new Portland, Ore., streetcar. He saw that a streetcar could spur development, potentially reduce operating expenses because it carries more riders per trip, and create connectivity between east and west Charlotte. “That was the rationale.”
Me: Why’d it take so long to build the streetcar?
Tober: “Money.”
Art at the streetcar shelters along East Trade Street.
Me:  Did you suspect the sales tax should have been higher?
Tober: “I really thought the half-cent would be enough.”  The 2009 economic downturn was more severe than anyone projected, he said. That threw off the revenue projections for years.
Me: Compare operating expenses – not cost to build – between buses and a streetcar. (Streetcars run in the street, with traffic, unlike light rail which has its own dedicated lane or rail path.)
Tober: Because a streetcar has higher capacity you can reduce the frequency, which saves labor costs for drivers. Seventy percent of CATS’ budget is labor. But CATS wouldn’t notice any big changes in operating costs until it could convert all of bus route 7 and 9 to streetcar.  That would also eliminate the layover time at the transportation center uptown.
We walked over to the Transportation Center on East Trade Street, where the roar of the bus engines and hissing of brakes made for a gritty – and noisy – series of speeches by dignitaries, including U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx, who as Charlotte mayor had championed the still-controversial streetcar.  Tuesday, even some streetcar skeptics and opponents were on hand for the celebration. Tober stood quietly, almost unnoticed, in the crowd.

What does Anthony Foxx have to say about transportation funding?

Former Charlotte Mayor and current Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx gave an interview to Yonah Freemark of the website The Transport Politic. As Freemark points out, despite Foxx saying things many transportation and transit fans agree with, the secretary didn’t make any commitments to changing the way U.S. transportation is funded. As Freemark says: “At the heart of the problem, as we all know, is that the transportatoin user fee model (premised on fuel tax revenues) has collapsed and no one is willing to do much of anything about it.”

Read the interview here:
“An interview with Secretary Foxx”

LaHood-Foxx love-fest?

Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx in 2012 as city’s bike-share program opened.

When former Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood told President Obama he was leaving the job, he suggested Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx as his replacement. At least, that’s what LaHood tells Chicago magazine, in a wide-ranging interview with Carol Felsenthal, “A Complete Q&A With Ray LaHood.”

Here’s the section about Foxx, who did indeed win the job of U.S. Transportation Secretary (and who snagged some noticeable face-time on national TV on Tuesday night during Obama’s State of the Union Speech):

Q. Did you get the chance to consult with the president about who your successor as transportation secretary would be?

Absolutely. When I met with the President and told him that I wanted to leave, he and his team gave me lots of opportunities to consult with the White House.

Q. Did you suggest the name of Anthony Foxx [LaHood’s successor; previously mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina], or did you have other people in mind?

I did, but they knew Mayor Foxx because the Democratic Convention was in Charlotte and they liked very much working with him on that. One of the reasons I suggested him is because we worked with Mayor Foxx a lot on his streetcar and his light rail project…. He was a transportation leader so it was pretty easy to recommend him.

Photo credit: Mary Newsom, 2012

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. 

NCDOT moves ahead with new uptown train station. But …

After years of planning, the N.C. Department of Transportation and the City of Charlotte are officially seeking developers for the proposed new passenger rail station in uptown Charlotte. They’re issuing a Request for Qualifications (RFQ), with proposals due Sept. 21.

If you’re an interested developer, click here for more information.

“This RFQ is the next step in selecting a master developer for the project,” says the NCDOT press release issued Thursday morning. What’s being called the Charlotte Gateway Station is envisioned as a central hub for Amtrak, Charlotte Area Transit System bus and streetcar service, the long-proposed-but-still-unfunded Red Line commuter rail project to north Mecklenburg County, Greyhound Bus service and the county greenway system.

Unfortunately for the Red Line and possibly for the streetcar, Mayor Anthony Foxx said in an interview Wednesday that, when it comes to any transit services beyond the Blue Line, “We’re stuck.” (More from that Q-and-A format interview will be posted at PlanCharlotte.org as soon as I can type up the transcript.)
The streetcar has funding only for about a mile and a half between Presbyterian Hospital and The Square at Trade and Tryon. An expansion proposal using city funds only, that would take it to the Gateway Station site on West Trade Street near Johnson & Wales University, was killed by the City Council in June.

The N.C. General Assembly has, for two years in a row, tried to kill funding for the planned-but-not-yet-built Blue Line Extension. Both times the BLE was saved in closed-door bargaining.

But this year the legislators decided to make any rail transit projects compete head-to-head with funding for highway projects, a prospect that most transit supporters believe will all but doom any further rail transit in the state.

But to end on a more cheerful note, replacing the dreary Amtrak station a couple of miles north of uptown on North Tryon Street will be a relief to many rail passengers who use the state’s three daily trains to Raleigh and back.

Voters oust GOP, raise their own taxes

Durham County voters OK’d a transit tax Tuesday

Tuesday’s municipal elections in Charlotte and across the state offered some unexpected results, especially if one considers that the state legislature is dominated by conservative, anti-tax Republicans. Voters in four N.C. counties voted to tax themselves, with Durham voters opting for two new taxes, one for transit.

In Charlotte, voters re-elected Mayor Anthony Foxx, a Democrat, over a conservative Republican and political newcomer, Scott Stone. That wasn’t unexpected. But voters swept into office all four Democratic candidates for at-large City Council seats, ousting moderate incumbent Republican Edwin Peacock III  in favor of Claire Fallon, a planning commissioner and neighborhood activist, and Beth Pickering. Pickering had never run for office and just arrived in Charlotte five years ago from Denver, Colo.

That gives Democrats a 9-2 council majority, which I believe is more than at any time since the council went to districts in 1977. (Are any political historians out there to confirm or deny this?) The two lone Republicans, Andy Dulin and Warren Cooksey, didn’t have Democratic opposition in their districts; Cooksey dispatched a Republican opponent in the primary.

But across the state, voters in four counties made a kind of history by agreeing to raise their own taxes, something that conventional political wisdom has said isn’t likely during an economic downturn, or in a state that just last year sent to the General Assembly a slew of conservative Republicans.

A quick rundown:

– Durham County voters approved (about 60-40 percent) a half-cent sales tax for transit, making it the state’s second county, after Mecklenburg in 1998, to do so. Voters in Orange County (Chapel Hill) and Wake (Raleigh) are expected to face similar ballot measures next year, with Orange voting in the spring and Wake sometime later.  That should finally give the Triangle area a funding stream hefty enough to start building a long-awaited rail transit system of light rail and commuter rail.

– Durham County voters also OK’d (57 percent) a quarter-cent sales tax for education.

– Orange County passed a quarter-cent sales tax for school building improvements and economic development infrastructure. The county voters rejected the tax a year ago. This year it passed with almost 61 percent of the vote.

– Buncombe County voters approved a quarter-cent sales tax increase to pay for renovations and new buildings at Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College.

– Montgomery County voters also approved a quarter-cent sales tax, for buildings at Montgomery County Schools and Montgomery Community College.

The N.C. Association of County Commissioners’ website tally shows a clean sweep for those taxes for this year, with Cabarrus voters approving one in May, Halifax County in February. Compare that to 2010 results. The same quarter-cent sales tax was on the ballot in 23 counties at various times throughout that year. Of the nine votes before Nov. 3, seven were successful. Of those Nov. 2, all lost, including in Orange and Montgomery counties.  Does this mean the Nov. 2, 2010, anti-tax fervor was a one-time blip? Or was Nov. 8, 2011, the oddball election?

Sales taxes, of course, are an easier sell to most taxpayers than other types of tax. Suzanne Leland, a UNC Charlotte associate professor of political science, tells me voters usually prefer sales taxes over income or – the most hated – property taxes. Sales taxes, as Leland and many others point out, disproportionately hurt low-income households, where a higher proportion of income has to go for necessities such as housing, transportation, food, etc. Nevertheless, many voters consider them a more fair way to assess a tax.

Our mayor in Spandex?

Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx, at his regular news briefing Thursday, mentioned that he’s been teaching his kids, 6 and 4, to ride bikes and said he went out and bought himself a road bike, the kind with toe clips that he’s still learning how to use.

The last few days, he said, “I’ve gone out at 5:30 in the morning and gone down to the Little Sugar Creek Greenway.” He talked about wanting to make the city friendlier to bicycling.

All of which leaves the obvious question, which yours truly was the only journalist in the room willing to ask: “So, are you wearing Spandex?”

Foxx: “I’m not answering that.”

Which I think means he must be.

So, dear readers, if anyone wants to volunteer to be a citizen journalist and go down on the greenway at – as my friend Brenda would say, “O-dark-thirty” – and try for a mayoral Spandex sighting, please let me know what you discover.

When introverts hold office

I’m live-blogging from the Charlotte City Council’s retreat. I’m also Tweeting, follow @marynewsom.

I caught some possibly significant discussion for a time this afternoon, post-lunch and before the current budget presentation. Facilitator Mike Whitehead pointed out that most of the council members are “sort of introverted,” which means there’s a tendency for less communication. “You flaming extroverts know who you are,” he said, and laughter erupted from the table where Andy Dulin and James Mitchell are sitting. Those two are not what I’d peg as introverts.

Then Whitehead gave the formula he says is sometimes used in corporate America NC = MSU. That stands for “No communication? Then people make stuff up.” The lesson, he said, is to communicate better with each other, so people know what’s going on.

And, he said, you could communicate better with the media. (Colorful type font for emphasis is mine.) Answer questions and give data, he said, especially since a lot of the data is public record anyway.

But Mayor Anthony Foxx said he’d had experiences when C = MSU “and that’s a problem” He has sometimes talked to council members (“and you know who you are”) and then they tell reporters something else. Hmmm. So I think he just accused some council members of lying to the news media. If you’re a journalist, let me note, the only thing surprising about all that is for the mayor to call it out publicly.

When introverts hold office

I’m live-blogging from the Charlotte City Council’s retreat. I’m also Tweeting, follow @marynewsom.

I caught some possibly significant discussion for a time this afternoon, post-lunch and before the current budget presentation. Facilitator Mike Whitehead pointed out that most of the council members are “sort of introverted,” which means there’s a tendency for less communication. “You flaming extroverts know who you are,” he said, and laughter erupted from the table where Andy Dulin and James Mitchell are sitting. Those two are not what I’d peg as introverts.

Then Whitehead gave the formula he says is sometimes used in corporate America NC = MSU. That stands for “No communication? Then people make stuff up.” The lesson, he said, is to communicate better with each other, so people know what’s going on.

And, he said, you could communicate better with the media. (Colorful type font for emphasis is mine.) Answer questions and give data, he said, especially since a lot of the data is public record anyway.

But Mayor Anthony Foxx said he’d had experiences when C = MSU “and that’s a problem” He has sometimes talked to council members (“and you know who you are”) and then they tell reporters something else. Hmmm. So I think he just accused some council members of lying to the news media. If you’re a journalist, let me note, the only thing surprising about all that is for the mayor to call it out publicly.

Consolidation – promises kept?

Talk’s on the upswing again, and not just in Charlotte-Mecklenburg, about trying to run local government more efficiently by consolidating. And at his media briefing today, Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx gave yet another big plug to the idea, saying, “It’s hard to shape community priorities when you have resources siloed.”

A timely new piece on the website of UNC Charlotte’s Urban Institute takes a look at what happened in 18 other city-county consolidations. The big headline? No real efficiencies were proved.

I asked Foxx today if he’d read the report, and what he thought about its findings. He said that while he believed there would be cost savings if Charlotte and Mecklenburg County governments merged, “I don’t think that is the only driver.” He thinks local government should be structured differently.

The UNCC report is by the authors of a new book, “City-County Consolidation: Promises Made, Promises Kept?”: Suzanne Leland, associate professor of political science at UNCC, and Kurt Thurmaier, director of the Division of Public Administration at Northern Illinois University.

Here’s what they conclude:

• Consolidation can improve economic development
“… Consolidated governments have performed more effectively in economic development than their comparison counties. … This is one promise the majority of consolidated governments delivered on.”

• Consolidation does not necessarily lead to more efficient government

“Our study yields little systematic evidence that consolidated governments operate more efficiently than their comparison communities. While about half of the cases in our sample seem to have lower rates of expenditure growth … the other half of the sample does not produce the same data.”

• Pro-Merger Campaigns delivered on most of their promises

In most cases (not all) they write, “the evidence is quite strong that the particular promises made to voters were kept, with very few exceptions.”