NC budget draft gives Charlotte last chance to change I-77 toll vote before payback
North Carolina’s long-awaited state budget includes a plan to make the Charlotte-area municipalities who voted down adding toll lanes to Interstate 77 pay back millions to the state.
Lawmakers released their proposed budget Tuesday morning, a year overdue and more than two years since their last budget.
The plan includes a version of a proposal that began to circulate in early June to put Charlotte and other local governments on the hook for tens of million of dollars unless they reverse their position on the controversial highway project.
The state Department of Transportation planned to add toll lanes to an 11-mile stretch of I-77 from uptown to the South Carolina state line, and local officials approved a public-private partnership to pay for it in 2024. But the Charlotte Regional Transportation Planning Organization voted in May to rescind support for the project after months of consternation in the community over the impacts of the new lanes on neighborhoods and the environment.
NCDOT spent about $60 million on the project before CRTPO reversed its decision.
The proposal from Charlotte-area Sen. Vickie Sawyer, a Republican, would make those who voted to kill the plan reimburse the state. The state would withhold transportation funding until the money is paid back, the amendment says.
“This has been vetted, supported, and will be in the budget. This is me actually being kind to the City of Charlotte, and to those communities who did vote to rescind,” Sawyer previously said on her weekly radio show on WAME in Statesville. “And I am communicating to you right now that this will happen. This is not a joke. You will lose this, and you will have to pay back the money to the state, and until you pay back the money from the state, your Powell Bill dollars will be frozen.”
The plan calls for local governments to divide the cost among themselves based on the value of their weighted CRTPO votes.
Representatives of Charlotte, Mecklenburg County, Davidson, Monroe, Cornelius, Matthews, Mint Hill, Huntersville and the Metropolitan Transit Commission voted to rescind support in May. Monroe reversed its position after Sawyer’s amendment became public and called for the CRTPO to vote again on the issue, but the push to reopen the discussion failed.
The amendment says local governments who voted to rescind support for the toll lanes would have 90 days from when the budget passes to change their position if they want to avoid paying the state.
Some local leaders previously called the amendment a “power grab.”
“This is retaliatory governance as opposed to representative governance,” Mecklenburg County Commissioner Susan Rodriguez-McDowell said at a June meeting.
