Rita Rondina had a dream.
She wanted to expand her dried silk and floral arrangements business into a multinational floral powerhouse — or something like that. It would have been downright cruel for Rondina to be denied her dream just because the banks weren’t particularly jacked up on lending her all the money she needed to do it.
So the city of Charlotte stepped in with a $150,000 loan to bridge the gap. The money could have been used for desperately overdue roadwork or to put police officers on the streets, but the dream of one woman was more important. When the silk floral arrangement market went to hell, the city’s loan money went with it. On April 10, the city council shrugged its shoulders and wrote off $126,000 of the loan.
Three days later, City Manager Pam Syfert made a plea for a tax increase. The city budget was so tight she just didn’t know where she’d find the money for the desperately overdue infrastructure work or the police officers we need.
“Unfortunately, the magnitude of the problems facing our city cannot be addressed with existing resources,” Syfert wrote to the council.
She and the city council want you to believe this was caused by the highly complex economics of “growth,” a financially murky problem taxpayers couldn’t hope to understand.
The reality is that the lying bastards spent the money on everything under the sun and now they think they can take you for more. They figure you don’t know about Rondina, and that you haven’t been paying attention to the millions they blow on junk every month, expenditures chronicled online in their agendas, which every taxpayer should read. City leaders know if they starve the police department and the infrastructure budgets, they’ll look really broke and they can hold you hostage for a tax increase to pay for police protection.
It took me one hour, 12 minutes and 31 seconds to find more than $20 million worth of potential savings in the last year of city agendas. Here’s a sample of what was more important than the police, roads and infrastructure the council says it can’t afford:
• $11 million to buy off the rental car industry. The same day Syfert made her plea for a tax increase in the Charlotte Observer, she also announced that she’d miraculously “found” an extra $11 million in property tax revenue in her oh-so-tight budget. The city needs the legislature to jack up the rental car tax to generate the dough to build the arts groups the new buildings they want — one shared building isn’t good enough — but the rental car industry planned to fight it. So instead of lobbying to raise the tax by five or six percentage points, Syfert announced they’d bridge the gap by using more property tax money so they’d only have to raise the rental tax by three percentage points. The $11 million would have paid for almost twice the number of police the department is asking for. That means the city will now put about $20 million into the projects.
• $200,000 for the CIAA tournament scholarship fund to bribe the CIAA to ditch Raleigh and bring the tournament here.
• More than $1 million to build elevators in the convention center so workers can safely move tables and food over the light rail line that will run through the center.
• A $200,000 donation to Habitat for Humanity. The money won’t be used to actually build homes, but to “improve the architectural design features of the homes.” Can’t have no stinkin’ ugly Habitat houses in “nice” areas.
• $800,000 for signs directing people from the light rail line and parking decks to downtown attractions and electronic boards to guide people to open parking spaces.
• $5.3 million from various city funds to buy up the property around what will be Scaleybark Light Rail Station so that the city can sell it back to developers at reduced prices, thus allowing the city to micromanage what goes there. City staff and light rail consultants assured council members considering a mass transit tax in the late 1990s that rail would attract business and the city wouldn’t have to spend money on redevelopment.
• More than $5 million in grants and land cost reductions to the company that is renovating the Carolina Theatre.
My personal favorite was the small business survey the city funded with the Charlotte Chamber to find out what concerns businesses here. The number one answer: high taxes. That could explain why the annual number of new businesses moving here peaked in 1994, when the county added 1,052 new firms in a single year, and has been steadily declining ever since. In 2005, the number of new businesses locating here was half that, at 562.
Maybe the stuff above and the millions more the city spent that I don’t have space to chronicle here was worth it. But that’s not the argument city suits are making. They say they’re broke, and that’s bull.
Got a story idea? Email Tara at tara.servatius@cln.com.
This article appears in May 17-23, 2006.
