In my 10 years of covering Charlotte politics, I’ve never seen anyone sink this low. You can now add threatening to take away the livelihood of low-income black bus riders to the list of the pro-transit crowd’s dirty tricks.
You won’t find a copy of the flier the pro-transit tax campaign distributed to west side bus riders on its Web site, which is understandable. I’d be ashamed to post it, too. If the general public got a look at it, there would be some explaining to do.
You also won’t find any of the claims made on the flier on the group’s Web site, VoteAgainstRepeal.com. That’s probably because the claims are flat-out lies. That and if they posted them on the site, it would look like they were threatening transit-dependent members of the African-American community, which was clearly the purpose of the flier.
With their massive campaign war chest, you’d think the Charlotte Chamber and business-community-backed campaign to keep the half-cent sales tax for mass transit could win this fight by simply pointing out the benefits of their mass transit plan. You’d think they wouldn’t have to resort to threatening people. But that’s exactly what they are doing.
“If you don’t vote against repeal” the flier threatened, the west side bus service that many depend on to get to work will be taken away.
Charlotte Area Transit System officials have said that if voters repeal the half-cent sales tax, which partially funds the light rail and buses, there may have to be cuts to bus service. Or there may be tax increases. The issue could also be put back on the ballot for a revote that would reauthorize the tax and pay for bus service.
If there were any cuts to bus service, those cuts could occur in any part of the county, or across the board. The decision on whether to cut service, by how much and where, could fall to a number of bodies but rests primarily with the Metropolitan Transit Commission, which is composed of the mayors and managers of the city, the county and Mecklenburg’s towns.
The MTC has never addressed the issue of what services, if any, would be cut if the repeal referendum succeeds in November. Nobody knows.
But the folks behind the flier distributed to west side residents several weeks ago probably figure bus riders over there don’t know that. The flier, which bears the “Vote Against Repeal: Keep Mecklenburg Moving” pro-transit tax campaign logo, reads, “If you don’t Vote Against Repeal we will lose Sunday bus service, evening bus service, bus service to the Rosa Parks Transit Center, community circulators, the street car [and] bus service for the elderly.”
If the flier was accurate, which it isn’t, bus service along the Beatties Ford Corridor would no longer be adequate to get people to work.
The flier also uses the phrase “will lose” as if this is fact. To specifically threaten the shutdown of the newly opened Rosa Parks Place Community Transit Center on Beatties Ford Road when no such shutdown is planned is particularly thuggish.
Imagine if you didn’t have a car and were dependent on a bus to get to everywhere you needed to go. No evening service means no ability to work a staggered schedule or shift work. How would you pick the kids up from daycare? How would you get to the grocery store or doctor’s appointments?
For bus-dependent people, a flier like this, and the rumors it no doubt generated, would be terrifying. And I think that’s exactly what the pro-transit crowd was hoping for.
There is an ironic twist to this that those who received the flier should consider. Why isn’t anyone threatening to take away the bus service my father uses to get from Matthews to work Uptown? My dad rides for convenience because he likes to get things done on the way to work. But he isn’t dependent on the service and could drive if it dried up. How about bus service in Myers Park? What about the high-end buses that run from surrounding counties to Charlotte and cater to professionals? No cuts threatened there.
The difference, of course, is that polls have shown that the African-American community has the biggest issue with the tax and is most likely to vote against it. It was African-American voters who signed the repeal petitions in large numbers because they figured out the truth — that the plan has only buses for them and light rail for other parts of town. Maybe there will be a Beatties Ford streetcar by 2018 if there aren’t massive cost overruns on the two light rail lines to the suburbs that will be built first.
But given that the cost of the south line has more than doubled, and federal money has dried up for future rail lines, given the fact that we are going to have to use property tax money to build the new north line because the federal government won’t back it, those in the know understand that the Beatties Ford street car is more wishful theory than reality.
Transit tax boosters know it, too. So they are resorting to ugly tactics to scare black voters.
Shame on them.
This article appears in Oct 17-23, 2007.
“In my 10 years of covering Charlotte politics, I’ve never seen anyone sink this low.”
Really, Tara? The anti transit folks didn’t sink low when they lied by asking people like me to sign a petition to “lower the sales tax?” When the anti transit people lied by saying that the money we ‘save’ from not building transit lines will go to widen our Interstates? When they said pro transit citizens are attempting to rob the suburbanite of their grass and cul de sacs?
Should I expect anything less from you, Tara? After all, you are the same journalist who berated the “uptown crowd” for pushing out poor blacks through the redevelopment of Double Oaks, yet you yourself are a gentrifier. How are those investments doing for you, Tara? Any of the poor African Americans still around your property? Didn’t think so. Hypocrite.
ok..so ..based on the number of folks I usually see riding these buses..they musta sent..what?…7 fliers in the mail? I swear, I never see more than that actually riding that 1200 horsepower rigs.