During the coming 90 to 180 days, they will have plenty of opportunities to do so. During a discussion about the seating of the town's own Cornelius Rail Task Force advisory board at Monday night's Cornelius Town Board meeting, Commissioner Dave Gilroy, the board's most outspoken fiscal hawk, detailed his plan to bring in outside transit experts and critics to hear their point of view on the project.
At the heart of Gilroy's concerns is future development. Revenue to pay for 50 percent of the capital cost of the $452 million project as well as ongoing operations and maintenance of the corridor will come from new special assessment districts and tax increment financing. But that revenue will only materialize if the anticipated level of development occurs along the corridor as its proponents predict.
"If you have the right language in the (joint powers authority), it doesn't matter if it develops or not," said Cornelius Mayor Jeff Tarte, a member of the Red Line Task Force and the town's representative to its parent group, the Metropolitan Transit Commission.
Tarte's point is that the plan in its current form guarantees no recourse against the municipalities along the corridor for the $226 million that must be raised locally, and that all the risk is assumed by private investors with the State of North Carolina providing the backstop for that risk via short-term loans.
It was then that Gilroy, who has written occasionally about the project in his periodical online newsletter, offered his first public statements about what has heretofore been a largely one-sided discussion.
"I think a lot of people would disagree with that vigorously," Gilroy told Tarte of his assertion. "If what we are doing is setting up for a massive North Carolina bailout for these bonds if the development doesn't occur, we're all North Carolina taxpayers. I think a lot of people would believe, if this in fact is a huge North Carolina bailout over time, the legislature would find a way to rebalance and re-shift future resources elsewhere."
Let the debate begin.
And it did, even before Monday night's meeting, when an e-mail exchange between Gilroy and Tarte clearly defined the divide between their two schools of thought. Gilroy cites the lack of growth along the Blue Line Light Rail from downtown Charlotte to near Pineville, as well as crime statistics, as evidence of what can be expected for the Red Line Commuter Rail.
Commuter rail and light rail are vastly different modes of rail transit, and to what extent they can be compared is also subject to debate. The Blue Line was largely an urban renewal project — all parties agree rail transit is as much if not more about land use and economic development as it is transportation — while most of the 25 miles of the Red Line Phase I from downtown Charlotte to Mount Mourne is undeveloped with several developers claiming to be waiting for the train to be green-lighted before starting their own projects.
However, the scrutiny of the project will be intense over the next three months as the Red Line Task Force works to craft a cohesive project financing plan that must pass muster in all five affected municipalities as well as Mecklenburg and Iredell counties.
In Cornelius, by a 4-0 vote of the town board — Commissioner Lynette Rinker was absent — that process will begin with a panel that includes Gilroy and fellow Commissioner Jeff Hare, as well as developer Jeff Wakeman, former Mayor Wes Southern, real estate broker and former Mayor Gary Knox, and developer Joe Roy of Meeting Street Homes, who is involved in Antiquity, the town's first transit-oriented development. Assisting the task force will be Assistant Town Manager Andrew Grant and Town Attorney Bill Brown.
