Published 08/25/2024
If you have been reading the local news, you probably have heard that Charlotte-Mecklenburg may be on the cusp of a generational opportunity to improve our transit and transportation future. As leaders for this community, we want to tell you why this juncture is so momentous and ask you to support.
We know that in a community as vibrant and as attractive as ours where more people are arriving every day, we must provide infrastructure to support a good quality of life. Travel around our community has become significantly more frustrating in recent years.
The 1/2 sales tax for transit enacted over 20 years ago is no longer adequate for a community of our size. But by law, we cannot raise more funds without permission from the General Assembly to take that referendum to voters. Up until recently, that permission had been out of our reach.
We believe that our ability to obtain that permission from the General Assembly is now within our grasp. However, it requires that we devote more of a proposed 1 cent sales tax to roads than was originally envisioned. The next step is for the Town Boards, Charlotte City Council, and the Mecklenburg Board of County Commissioners to take up resolutions expressing our desire for this tax to the General Assembly.
Here’s the key: when and if the General Assembly passes legislation authorizing our local referendum, then we will undertake to update the 2030 Transit Plan. We will undergo a very detailed, in-depth, public process to evaluate all the potential projects, update their costs in today’s numbers, and make difficult decisions together and as a community about how and what we can afford.
Then and only then, when that plan is formulated over the course of the next year, would the voters be asked to vote yay or nay in the fall of 2025. The moment to make a final decision on any tax or what it would build is not yet here. But we have to successfully achieve the legislation at this moment in time to even have the choice a year from now.
Every day we delay starting this process, the costs of the projects steadily climb and the range of what we can achieve with each precious tax dollar shrinks. In addition to rising costs, delaying this process also means that the region loses out on the estimated $5.9 billion of additional revenues generated, primarily, from federal transit grants. These programs currently exist, but they require local matching dollars. Without the new revenues, the Charlotte Area Transit System does not have the financial capacity to provide these local matching dollars.
It seems that we have broken an impasse on road and transit funding in Charlotte-Mecklenburg and finally have the long-sought ability to get the legislation we need for a sales tax that will bring an additional $7.8 billion for roads, $3.8 billion for bus improvements, and another $7.8 billion for rail projects, plus the billions of dollars in federal transit grants over the next thirty years.
Simply put, we cannot afford to miss this once-in-a-generation opportunity.
