If there’s one thing last week’s transit summit proved, it’s that transit leaders and Mayor McCrory just can’t take the heat, or worse, have no interest in other viewpoints, when it comes to tough questions about mass transit.
Perhaps the biggest PR blunder the Charlotte Chamber, transit officials and the mayor made when planning last Tuesday’s transit summit was actually inviting the public. The meeting, which was clearly aimed at wooing visiting Federal Transit Administration head Jennifer Dorn, went awry when citizens in the audience began asking tough questions.
Dorn’s approval of our transit plans is key to getting $185 million in federal dollars to fund half the cost of building a light rail line down South Boulevard. But several citizens who showed up weren’t interested in the dog and pony show.
After pointed questions about trains running through historic graveyards and the escalating cost of the project, potential ridership and a question from a property owner whose land the Charlotte Area Transit Authority (CATS) may condemn, McCrory, who was emceeing the event, abruptly cut off questions from the audience, bringing the meeting to a near screeching halt an hour earlier than scheduled.
Meanwhile, behind McCrory, an 8×10 screen repeatedly flashed the names of the sponsors of the so-called transit summit. Among them were the logos of Parsons Transportation Corp. and Parsons Brinckerhoff Quade & Douglas, two of the five transportation companies who paid the Charlotte Chamber $5,000 apiece to sponsor the event.
Parsons Brinckerhoff is the transportation consulting company that forgot to factor the cost of inflation into estimates of how much our transit plan would cost in 1998 while working as a consultant for the city. The company’s cost estimates were used by both McCrory and the Chamber to sell the project as well as the half-cent sales tax for mass transit to the public.
Company representatives have yet to answer questions asked them by Creative Loafing or the Charlotte Observer about how that happened. With interest factored in, the cost of the plan they estimated at less than $1 billion rose by at least $265 million.
The company has had similar mishaps in the past, as we have reported in CL. According to a Massachusetts state inspector general’s report, Parsons Brinckerhoff and another company, Bechtel, conspired with the Federal Highway Administration and officials in that state to hide the true $14 billion cost of the disastrous Boston Big Dig project from the public, bond investors and Wall Street. According to the inspector general’s report, Bechtel-Parsons accurately reported to then-governor Bill Weld in 1994 that the project’s true cost would be $13.8 billion, rather than the $8 billion figure they gave everyone else. Billions in cost overruns and overfilling have left Massachusetts officials still struggling to untangle a financial disaster. No less than four federal agencies, including the FBI, have investigated.
Parsons Brinckerhoff and Parsons Transportation Corp. were responsible for the collapse of Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles in 1995, which resulted in $1 billion worth of lawsuits against the transit authority there. Authorities are still trying to account for exactly where an additional $900 million in cost overruns attributable to Parsons and a partner company went.
This is merely a short summary of the well-documented mayhem attributable to these companies, yet CATS continues to kowtow to them. A year ago, McCrory and other members of our Metropolitan Transit Commission told our readers they’d look into how we hired these companies and why we continue to employ them. So far, he and the other members of the MTC have never taken any formal action. When asked again by WBT radio’s Keith Larson this fall about whether he ever investigated these companies, McCrory laughed when the CL article on Parsons Brinckerhoff was mentioned and brushed off the issue, assuring Larson that everything was fine.
All of this may be funny to McCrory, but the last time I checked, no one in Boston or Los Angeles was laughing about what happened to them when they trusted these companies. Neither were the folks McCrory cut off at the transit summit. You’d think that the folks at the Charlotte Chamber and public officials like McCrory would want answers about these well-documented, very public transportation disasters. You’d think they’d be concerned that a company CATS continues to employ forgot to factor in interest when it estimated the cost of our system. And you’d think McCrory would have enough confidence in the plan he sold to voters to permit basic questions to be asked about it in public in front of a federal transit official.
One thing is for sure. If last week’s summit proved anything, it’s that our leaders believe that supporting our transit plan means keeping your mouth shut, and if you’re not willing to do it, they’ll do it for you.
Contact Tara Servatius at tara.servatius@cln.com
This article appears in Dec 24-30, 2003.
