The public hearing Monday night was about the developer of the Bailey’s Glen senior living community petitioning to change 96 planned condominiums into an equal number of apartments.

The market has changed significantly in the last five years since the development was first approved by the Cornelius Town Board of Commissioners, and there just isn’t an appetite for single-unit ownership among the 55-and-older set. The conversion requires a reduction in buildings, an increase in surface parking and a reconfiguration of the multi-family portion of Bailey’s Glen, which fronts N.C. 115 and the tracks that could one day be home to the Red Line commuter rail.

When the discussion turned to how the development would interact with the proposed Red Line and a more recently suggested accompanying “rail trail,” Commissioner Jim Bensman couldn’t hold back the frustration that had been building up for weeks any longer. 

“The point is there is no Red Line trail,” Bensman said. “And there is no Red Line, either, but that’s something we’ll talk about later.”

Bensman has been irritated for weeks, and has expressed so in his regular e-mail newsletter to Cornelius residents, over what he perceives as a lack of communication with the board regarding the activities of the Red Line Task Force and the Lake Norman Transportation Commission. And later in Monday night’s town board meeting, he told Mayor Jeff Tarte, who like all north Mecklenburg mayors sits on the Red Line Task Force — a subcommittee of the Metropolitan Transit Commission (MTC) — that he’s been reading and hearing more about the task force’s activities from outside sources than from the mayor and town staff.

“The Red Line Task Force is making recommendations to the MTC, and yet the town boards are not going to be briefed on it until a month later,” said Bensman. “I don’t think it’s appropriate for the mayors to vote on issues of this importance without the board members having the opportunity to weigh in and have that vote reflective of the opinion of the board.”

Bensman is describing a “directed vote,” which is a requirement that a town’s representative of a multi-jurisdictional body must cast any vote that reflects the majority opinion of a town board.

The next significant action of the task force would come next Wednesday at the regular monthly meeting of the MTC, the county-wide body that sets the agenda for and oversees the Charlotte Area Transit System. The task force is set to recommend a four-point action plan it unanimously adopted last month, recommended by consultant-turned-NCDOT Deputy Secretary of Transit Paul Morris.

Morris is scheduled to brief Cornelius commissioners on his big-picture vision for the Red Line at its pre-meeting on Monday, Oct. 3, the week following the task force’s recommendation and presumed MTC vote.

Bensman doesn’t like the timing.

“That should at least be delayed until after Oct. 3 because Paul Morris will be here and the board will have the opportunity to ask some questions and you will have more of an idea of what this board is thinking about,” Bensman told Tarte. “There are some serious things going on here, and depending on how you look at it they are positive, but also very dangerous.”

Dangerous in that Bensman is concerned about what the town’s obligations may be regarding any municipal responsibilities to the Red Line costs. The jurisdictions along the line — the City of Charlotte; the towns of Huntersville, Cornelius, Davidson and Mooresville; and Mecklenburg and Iredell counties — would be responsible for crafting a plan to raise about one-half of the cost through a variety of strategies, upwards of some $200 million. The current funding model calls for the state and the Charlotte Area Transit commission to each fund 25 percent of the capital costs of building the Red Line. The remainder would have to come locally.

“I don’t want to get backed into a corner, and that’s what I am afraid of, where we’re sitting here two years from now being told that we have to vote on something (that night) or something bad is going to happen,” Bensman said.

In a rare alliance, Bensman was backed up by Commissioner Dave Gilroy, whose contribution to the conversation sparked a brief but heated exchange between him and Tarte. Gilroy compared what he called a rush to find a way to build the Red Line to the acquisition of the former defunct Adelphia Cable franchise by Davidson and Mooresville to create MI-Connection.

“I don’t see any kind of critical thinking on this subject,” Gilroy said. “It’s more everybody approaching this with an agenda of ‘how do we make this happen?’”

Tarte took exception to Gilroy’s comparison of Red Line discussions to those that led to MIConnection, and told the board that the subcommittee has no policy-setting authority and serves merely as an advisory body to the MTC. He added that, prior to any real movement regarding the Red Line, all the town boards will weigh in.

Dissatisfied with that, Gilroy shot back, “For you to sound bite it and expect us to just nod in approval is asinine!”

Bensman is no stranger to all things Red Line. He served as the town’s first representative to the Lake Norman Transportation Commission and, in that capacity, took fact-finding trips to Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C., regarding Red Line issues. He still regularly attends LNTC meetings, where the Red Line is often discussed.

Perhaps more than how the local jurisdictions will congeal to form a single authority to figure out how to pay for the Red Line — vehicles such as special assessment districts and tax increment financing have been discussed — Bensman is concerned about how his own town will accommodate a transit station, more to the point, how citizens will be able to get from west of I-77 to the proposed transit station in Antiquity, near the corner of N.C. 115 and Catawba Avenue.

“I’ve been worried for a long time how to get from Exit 28 over here because we have that two-lane road (Catawba Avenue). If it takes longer to get from Exit 28 to the station than it takes to get from there to uptown Charlotte ... that’s a whole different discussion.”

Assistant Town Manager Andrew Grant closed the topic by saying all talk is preliminary, and commissioners will have plenty of time to vet the Red Line as it moves forward.

“Let’s have Paul Morris come and give us the big picture, and then we can drill down into the details,” he said.

As for Bailey’s Glen, commissioners want to further pursue alterations to the parking configuration and other fine details with developer Jake Pallilo, so they kept the public hearing open. But at least the first piece of the rail trail is already in place, when and if the Red Line is running beside it.