The Charlotte City Council met on August 26, 2024, at the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Government Center. The meeting included a major action review on the Strategic Mobility Plan, a proposed 1% sales tax referendum, the purchase of the Norfolk Southern O-line (red line) for commuter rail, and public hearings on historic landmark designations. Council also approved the consent agenda with several items pulled for separate discussion, and heard public comments on animal shelter, housing, parking, and airport development issues.
Mobility Update and Red Line Purchase: Staff (Ed McKinney, Sarah Hazel, Brent Cagle) presented a 70-minute action review on the proposed 1% sales tax referendum (generating ~$100 million annually for Charlotte) and the purchase of the Norfolk Southern O-line corridor (22 miles, $74 million purchase price, appraised at $69.2 million) plus a Gateway Station parcel ($17 million, appraised at $15.9 million). The draft legislation includes a 60% transit/40% road split, creation of a new transit authority (Charlotte would hold 12 of 27 votes), and a priority for the red line commuter rail. Council members expressed varied positions:
Public Hearings on Historic Landmarks:
It's a little bit on the slide. It's a little bit on the slide, and I think it speaks volumes because when we start to take one issue in isolation, you can pick that issue apart. But this council, through numerous uh annual strategy meetings and days and days of looking at goals and objectives and priorities, have really landed on what I call a three-legged stool. You know, it's uh uh a good place to live, a good paying job, and a way to get back and forth. And so I start off with that because we have uh you have continued to do a lot of great things even before the discussion tonight. A lot has happened since the Charlotte Moves group. Your efforts on council alongside the community leaders have come to advance all the priorities and not just this one. And we believe it's done in a way that's never been done before, whether it's through the corridors of opportunity program or efforts to address safety in the environment through Vision Zero and CAMP, these efforts work together. You have been building on minority business enterprise and transformational investments in affordable housing. These programs, especially when we start to think about MWSBEs, these programs provide capital, technical expertise, critical networking, as well as bringing the MBEs to the next level, um, legal assistance programs, how to navigate complex issues. And so when we start to think about some of the things that you've done, not just the the CAMP or what's happening around CBI, but even the Charlotte Small Business Growth Fund, which together with the private sector and the philanthropic community that supports 40 million dollars in lending to businesses that are unable to get traditional capital. Your two million dollar investment helped make that happen. What's going to happen tonight is Aunt McKinney does this uh presentation, you'll see um what's in it for the city of Charlotte, and that includes in year one of the ones in sales tax, the 40% portion that comes to transportation in Charlotte is worth a hundred million dollars. And that and that grows. So I guess what I'm saying is the community is poised to have a discussion around transportation, much like what you've done with affordable housing and what you've done with good paying jobs. I do want to talk a little bit about affordable housing before I turn it over to Ed. In this last budget, you doubled your efforts from the housing bond from 50 million to 100 million. There's some great work, and I won't do a spoiler alert, but there's some great work that's going on in the housing estate communities committee about how to deploy those funds in a way that's never been done before. So what I would say is that as we are talking about mobility tonight or transportation tonight, that doesn't wipe out four years of work around some other key areas that actually work together with what we're trying to do here. So with that said, I'd like to turn it over, Mayor to Ed McKinney. Thank you again, Ed McKinney, uh special assistant to the manager for mobility. Um just gonna go back real quick, just a reminder. What we're gonna do tonight is talk really about two things and two actions coming up for you. Transportation funding, which is really centered around the draft legislation, and then uh the red line. So I'll walk through, and Sarah Hazel and I will walk through the draft legislation, uh specifically around the funding, and then we'll turn it over to Brent Cagle to talk through uh the red line purchase quick schedule. Uh we've talked about this before. Here's where we are on our action review, and and again the goal next uh next week of September 3rd is these two uh requested actions. A couple things just to kind of build upon what the manager just described. Again, number of things we've been doing, certainly the plans that have already been described by the mayor. Thing that I think we wanted to sort of re-emphasize is really the time is now. This this notion of funding uh is critical to moving forward. It's certainly critical to our ability to move forward on our desired multimodal road investment, uh, specific to our to our strategic um mobility plan without any more funding. We simply can't do our rail projects that are in the plan, and we can't extend uh uh the the frequency and the extension of our bus system. And so that's it's really important that to move forward on these big plans, funding is absolutely critical. Let me talk about the funding and let me give you a sense of a little bit of context of the scale and maybe a different way to think about this as we move forward in some of these decisions to be made. This is some information uh prepared by the Charlotte Regional Business Alliance a couple years ago that just talk about uh the impact of doing nothing and the impact of doing something. And so I'm on the uh the right side you have is sort of what what you can gain out of this, and on the other side is what you can lose. And so scale on the on the red side, lots uh if we don't address congestion, right? There's some real impacts. These numbers are almost hard to kind of comprehend. And I don't want to imply uh that the investment that we could make, even transformational, would make that red go away, right? We're constantly and we'll always be managing congestion. I think the thing to remember though, and the the point to be made here is what we can do, right? What the investment we put in place will do. And so again, every dollar we spend will have an impact. Because I'm gonna use that increment in almost a casual way given the scale of what we're talking about. But but remind you know, remember this slide and think about that hundred million dollars of investment uh because you're gonna see it in some big numbers as we go through. What does this mean for Charlotte? Is the manager described? I want to spend a little bit of time and talk about uh certainly the regional impact of this investment, but but also being really clear with with you and the community about what this means for Charlotte.