Category: N.C. General Assembly

Proposed bill would hobble transit across North Carolina

A bill being considered in the N.C. General Assembly would bar N.C. counties from raising sales taxes to fund both education and public transportation. The taxes could fund one or the other, not both.

The bill – House Bill 1224 – acquired some surprise provisions in the last few days. One provision would kill the plan to ask Mecklenburg County voters in November to OK a quarter-cent sales tax increase to pay for teacher raises and offer a bit of help for arts organizations.

The bill would cap any county’s local sales tax at 2.5 cents, and Mecklenburg is already at the cap. See “Senate bill would scuttle November sales tax referendum.”

The effect on transit hasn’t gotten much publicity in the Charlotte region, although it can’t afford to build its long-planned transit system with only the half-cent transit sales tax it’s had for 14 years. But in the Triangle, it’s a different story. Transit advocates are worried. (Update July 25: The bill was amended to get rid of the either-or provision. It still would cap a county’s sales taxes, effectively barring Mecklenburg from its planned sales tax referendum for teacher pay and creating a dilemma for Wake County. Here’s a summary of the bill’s process. It passed the N.C. Senate on July 24, and now sits in the N.C. House Finance Committee.)
Some background, although be forewarned, it’s complicated: In N.C., no city or county can raise sales taxes unless the state legislature gives them permission. But N.C. legislators in 2007 gave all N.C. counties permission to raise sales taxes a quarter-cent, if county voters OK’d. (That’s the tax increase Mecklenburg commissioners were hoping to use.) That money could be used for any county use. In addition, in 2009 the legislature gave three Triangle-area counties permission to ask voters for a half-cent sales tax for public transit. The heavily congested Triangle has been planning a rail transit system for years, but had no way to fund it.

Voters in Durham and Orange (Chapel Hill) counties approved the transit tax. In Wake County (Raleigh), a Republican-dominated board of county commissioners has not put the issue to voters. However, Wake commissioners had been expected to decide next month whether to put a quarter-cent sales tax for education to a November referendum.
 
The Senate bill now would allow sales tax income to be spent on education, or on public transportation, but not both at the same time. Huh? Yes, it’s confusing. This article from WRAL-TV is helpful: Senate seeks to curb local tax use. So is this one, from the Raleigh News & Observer: Senate bill would ban N.C. counties from raising sales taxes for both education and transit.

The N.C. Senate was to vote on the bill today; the vote was postponed until Monday.

WRAL’s Laura Leslie quotes a Raleigh-area legislator,Sen. Josh Stein, D-Wake, who said he was puzzled by the bill:

“Why wouldn’t we allow it, if they chose to designate a quarter-cent to transportation and a quarter-cent to education? Why must it be one or the other?” Stein asked. “What if they have needs for both?”

Raleigh-area transit advocates worry the bill could devastate plans for multicounty systems. “This is a really bad bill that could kill the transit referendum for Wake County,” Karen Rindge with WakeUP Wake County wrote in a message to supporters. Another source, speaking on background, told WRAL: “It pits transit against education, and transit’s going to lose every time.”

In Charlotte, meanwhile, the 1998 half-cent transit tax doesn’t bring in enough money to build anything beyond the Blue Line light rail, now operating, and the Blue Line Extension, under construction. No nearby counties have stepped forward to help make the Charlotte Area Transit System a regional one.

Of course, tax policy experts will tell you sales taxes are harsher on the poor than property taxes, because the poor spend a larger proportion of their income on food, clothing, and other taxed purchases. So why not just raise property taxes to fund both education and public transportation?

In my experience, no matter how practical that idea may sound, the question is about as welcome as an ex-boyfriend at a bridal shower. In other words, you aren’t likely to hear any pols — local or state — asking it.

Tree ordinance proposal raises alarms around N.C.

Photo: Nancy Pierce

Charlotte likes to boast of its tree canopy, so a proposal at the state level to gut N.C. cities’ tree ordinances has gotten Charlotte City Council’s attention. At the council’ Environment Committee meeting on Wednesday, after a briefing about the measure, the committee referred the issue to another committee to devise a lobbying strategy with N.C. legislators. Here’s the PlanCharlotte.org article I wrote yesterday after the meeting.

But if you’d like to burrow a bit deeper into the issue, here are links to news coverage from around the state:

 It’s not entirely clear how the proposal emerged late in April from a state study panel, the Agriculture and Forestry Services Study Commission, its members appointed by the legislature and the governor.

But at one March meeting, the commission heard from an Iredell County nurseryman upset over municipal regulations in some cities over who pays for trees that get planted and aren’t acceptable to local government officials. And some state legislators, as well as developer lobbying groups, have said for years that some cities over-reach in their ordinances affecting private property.

Here’s a link to the agenda materials for the study commission’s March 28 meeting, with a copy of a
presentation from John Allen of Shiloh Nursery in Iredell County. Allen’s presentation shows a variety of news clips about an incident in 2011 in which the city of Charlotte fined Albemarle Road Presbyterian Church after a church member severely pruned crape myrtle trees (horticulturists call this kind of pruning “crape murder”) on church property but which apparently had been planted because of a requirement in the city’s ordinances. After a national outcry city officials dropped the fine, and said they were working with the church to educate members about pruning techniques that would not harm the trees.

Meanwhile, in Greensboro, civic discontent continues over what many believe to be extreme tree-trimming practices by Duke Energy. Last week a confrontation between a local couple and tree-trimmers led to police and an assistant city manager being called to the scene, and Mayor Nancy Vaughan getting involved. Here’s the report in Triad City Beat. Residents there have been so angry for so many years that last year the Greensboro City Council created a new tree ordinance aimed at preventing some of the more severe tree trimming.

Over the years utility tree-trimming has also infuriated residents in Charlotte neighborhoods. Some years back, when I was at the Charlotte Observer, I got a surprise phone call from then-Planning Director Martin Cramton, as angry as I had ever heard him, complaining of a contractor for Duke Energy who showed up in his back yard intending to, from what Cramton described, essentially clear-cut a part of the yard. Cramton, phoned by his wife, had rushed home and got the tree-cutting delayed for a time. But — maybe because Duke is headquartered in Charlotte, and then-Mayor Pat McCrory was an employee, or maybe because of how often fallen limbs disrupt power here — the Charlotte City Council never seriously discussed an anti-tree-trimming ordinance. The Planning Commission discussed possible ways to get more power lines buried. Those talks went nowhere, either.

Protest petitions going the way of buggy whips

If you’ve paid attention to Charlotte planning and zoning matters you know the powerful role that protest petitions have played in stopping rezonings that neighbors oppose. The N.C. legislature is moving rapidly toward eliminating protest petitions.

It’s part of a larger bill that would remove a number of local environmental regulations that are stronger than state regulations. The bill passed the N.C. House on Thursday. (“Bill eliminates protest-petition rights in zoning cases“) It now goes back to the N.C. Senate, which passed it without the protest petition section.

Here’s a synopsis of the action, from the blog of Charlotte’s Real Estate and Building Industry Coalition. It notes how many local legislators in both parties voted for the bill, which would, among other things, scrap a key local storm-water pollution ordinance. “House passes landmark regulatory reform package.”

The protest petition is a 90-year-old section of state law that has let adjoining property owners file official protests against proposed rezonings. If enough of these protests are deemed valid, then that rezoning can’t pass without a three-quarters vote from the elected body which in Charlotte is the City Council. In development-happy Charlotte, the provision occasionally means the defeat of rezonings that would otherwise pass, although the council OKs the overwhelming majority of proposed rezonings.

Here’s an editorial from the Greensboro News & Record about the bill: http://www.news-record.com/opinion/n_and_r_editorials/article_41619342-ea81-11e2-b870-0019bb30f31a.html

The editorial says: “… There was no chance for compromise, just a wholesale repeal with little warning.

“In principle, the action contradicts what the Republican legislature has done in regard to involuntary annexations. It has empowered affected residents to call for a referendum. This measure takes power from residents.

“But some developers don’t like protest petitions because it’s harder for them to advance projects that neighbors don’t want. They’re “costly and hinder development,” Rep. Rob Bryan, R-Mecklenburg, said Thursday.”

It’s part of a bill that state planners are calling the “Billboards Forever” bill. Read this report from The Charlotte Observer’s Jim Morrill: http://campaigntracker.blogspot.com/2013/07/surprises-not-surpising-near-sessions.html

Sen. Nesbitt, welcome to Charlotte

Sen. Martin Nesbitt, D-Buncombe, the N.C. Senate’s new majority leader, visited fair Charlotte on Wednesday to meet and greet and, it would seem, reassure the business community that he will be just as business-friendly as his predecessor, Sen. Tony Rand of Fayetteville.

Accompanied by Sen. Malcolm Graham, D-Mecklenburg, Nesbitt stopped by the Observer’s editorial board – for which we are grateful – and as we chatted, before Graham arrived, he talked a bit about the need for better public transit, especially rail. Seems he had gotten caught in a lengthy traffic jam driving I-95 past Washington. “It was a hundred-mile traffic jam, from Baltimore to Richmond,” he said. “We’ve got to find another way.”

But then, he started talking about rail transit and how it hasn’t been successful. Mentioned Charlotte’s new (as of 2007) light rail line and asked how it had worked out. We told him it had beat all its ridership projections and was in most parts deemed a success. “Oh,” he said.

I think Charlotte Area Transit System (aka CATS) leaders might want to buy the man a lunch or three and take him for a spin on the Lynx some rush hour afternoon …

My colleague Jack Betts, who among his many valuable contributions writes the This Old State blog, recalled:

Back in the 1990s when legislators could still accept such trips, the Charlotte Chamber brought legislators to Charlotte for a Hornets basketball game and a tour around town. I wound up strolling around the Blumenthal with Nesbitt and another House appropriations chair, David Diamont of Surry County. It was obvious neither of them got to Charlotte much, and they seemed to be awestruck with all the new buildings, the cultural amenities – including some built with state assistance – and the can-do atmosphere that marked a city clearly on the rise. They were struck by how many things Charlotte had and aspired to, compared with the rest of the state.

The things they saw in Charlotte were not new things that no one from elsewhere wouldn’t have known about, and it struck me that Charlotte was not a part of the state that these legislators visited often.

Nesbitt’s remarks about transit Wednesday seemed to show that he had not spent much time in the Queen City since then, either. It’s not that he doesn’t get around. With a district in Buncombe, a law practice and a stock car racing team he helps his son with, and a legislative concentration on what went wrong with the state’s badly botched mental health reforms, he has stayed busy – and as Senate majority leader he’ll be busier yet.

Betts concluded: “If I were the Charlotte transit folks, I’d have a representative sitting in his office tomorrow morning at 8 a.m.”

About that ‘new’ transit tax …

You’ll remember the taken-out-of-context flap earlier this year about whether the N.C. legislature should add Mecklenburg to a bill that would let all the other N.C. counties ask their voters whether they wanted to levy a small sales tax to support transit.

Plenty of local blowhards both in local news media and elsewhere acted as if the request to be included was the same as actually imposing a higher tax. That, of course, was either deliberate mischaracterization or, to be kinder, incredibly sloppy reporting. The bill lets voters (in other counties) decide whether to tax themselves.

Anyway, it seems the bill (House Bill 148, which does not include Mecklenburg) is about to pass the legislature (it’s on tonight’s calendar), giving counties in the Triangle (Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill) and the Triad (Greensboro, High Point and Winston-Salem) a go-ahead, if they wish, to seek voter approval for a half-cent sales tax for transit systems there. All other counties (except Mecklenburg) can seek voter OK for a quarter-cent sales tax increase.

This is mostly good news, although transit supporters in Mecklenburg had wanted to be included. They wanted to have a tool in the toolkit of transit-funding options so they wouldn’t have to expend the time and effort to do what Mecklenburg did in the 1990s: get a special, local bill giving us the authority for a 1998 transit tax referendum. Mecklenburgers still could seek such a special bill from the General Assembly if they wanted to.

The good news is that surrounding counties such as Cabarrus and Iredell are now free to seek local taxing approval if they want to extend the proposed Northeast or North transit corridors beyond Mecklenburg’s borders.

Here’s a summary from Boyd Cauble, the executive assistant to City Manager Curt Walton, sent to City Council last Friday. (I tried for a link to his memo but couldn’t manage it. If anyone can find the thing online, please share the link.)

Intermodal Transit Tax
The House passed a transit funding bill (H148) in April and some questioned whether the bill would be approved by the Senate. Last Wednesday, the Senate voted 37-9 to allow the Triad and the Triangle to have the ½ cent sales tax authority for transit which Mecklenburg currently has. Additionally, H148 allows every other county in N.C., except Mecklenburg, to levy a ¼ cent tax for transit upon voter approval.

The Triangle area did an excellent job of soliciting support from over 100 separate groups and a cross section of bipartisan support in the legislature. Prior to the Senate vote, Senator [Malcolm] Graham and Senator [Charlie] Dannelly [both Mecklenburg Democrats] explored ways to honor the MTC [Metropolitan Transit Commission] and City Council’s request to include Mecklenburg in H148. Unfortunately, adding an additional taxing authority in the bill would have been considered a “material amendment” requiring five additional days for approval. The amendment alternative was abandoned because it would have jeopardized the bill’s passage this session.

Not joining the other 99 counties in getting additional voter authority to fund future transit is very disappointing, but it is comforting to know that now Cabarrus, Iredell, and other adjoining counties have the authority to fund extensions of Mecklenburg’s transit corridors.
Representative [Becky] Carney [Mecklenburg Democrat], H148 primary sponsor, said she has the support of her colleagues to push for Mecklenburg inclusion for additional funding in the future, if local transit supporters and elected officials get behind the movement.