City Council approves $50 million Silver Line contract. Here’s what happens next.
Charlotte City Council approved a $50 million contract Tuesday to begin work on the 26-mile Silver Line light rail project despite unanswered questions on how the city will pay for the estimated $3 billion to $4 billion line.
The council voted 8-2 to approve the contract with engineering firm WSP USA for preliminary design and environmental work on the line. Republicans Ed Driggs and Tariq Bokhari, who have been most vocal in challenging the project’s finances, voted no.
The line would run from Matthews to north of uptown, then westward past the airport and across the Catawba River to the Gaston County town of Belmont. The east-west route is the most ambitious of several transit projects the Charlotte Area Transit System wants to complete by 2030.
City Council had been expected to vote on the contract on Oct. 28, but the vote was delayed amid questions over the line’s ultimate cost and how it would be paid for. The delay also allowed city officials to first learn the results of last week’s referendum on raising the local sales tax to pay for arts programming and parks.
The referendum’s defeat could offer CATS a new option to help pay for the Silver Line. CATS gets a half-cent of the local sales tax, worth $107 million in fiscal 2019. The city would have to get state legislators’ approval to ask voters to raise the transit tax, CATS chief executive John Lewis has said.
Council didn’t discuss financing options in detail Tuesday. But Lewis said after the meeting that he hopes to reduce the time it will take to reach a firm construction cost and financing plan to two to three years instead of the five years previously discussed. CATS hopes the city will add financing, to be repaid by CATS, to the $50 million contract amount that will come from the transit authority’s capital fund.
Bokhari said it would be a mistake to begin investing in the line without community discussions about funding mechanisms — officials of Belmont and Gastonia, potential contributors, attended Tuesday’s meeting. Bokhari, a financial technology executive, added that advancements such as autonomous cars could overtake light rail by the time it’s built.
“When you go down the $50 million design path without having it, that conversation is held a few years from now with a $50 million gun to our head,” Bokhari said.
Driggs extracted assurances from City Manager Marcus Jones that the council will be given updates as WSP’s work advances, and from Lewis that the contract allows the city to stop work at any point. Driggs predicted the line’s construction could drive county property tax rates up by 30%, a figure contradicted by council Democrats.
Democrats cast the project as a critical part — getting low-income residents to work reliably and cheaply — of the council’s commitments to growing jobs and expanding affordable housing options.
Mayor Vi Lyles noted that residents of eastern Charlotte often face long commutes to work.
“We’re going to do this together,” Lyles told the council after the vote. “We can’t go south and north (on the existing Blue Line) and ignore the east and west.”
Democrat Braxton Winston added that “a commitment to giving people an option from the east side of the city to the west side is a matter of desegregating our city. ... A commitment to building a public transit system is a commitment to bridging equity gaps.”
Federal and state grants paid about 75% of CATS’ Blue Line light rail and its extension, but future transit grants are expected to be proportionately smaller. That would leave the city to pay a bigger share, likely from several sources such as dedicated property tax revenue from new developments along the rail line or public-private partnerships.
The WSP contract would refine the line’s cost and establish its route. Lewis has said he hopes to have firm estimates of the project’s total costs, and a financing plan, in about five years when 65% of design work would be completed.
The City Council also voted unanimously Tuesday to approve a $1.2 million contract with Kittelson & Associates to plan for “transit-oriented” development along the new rail line. The plan would include community conversations on where stations would be located, the line’s impact on affordable housing and the development that would spring up along it.
This story was originally published November 12, 2019 at 6:16 PM.