RALEIGH — Charlotte officials are struggling with a tough decision, reports The Charlotte Observer.
On the one hand, its long-awaited light-rail project is going to take longer and cost more than expected to complete. One source of funds that officials could tap to help nudge things along is money currently allocated to renovating the city’s “historic” trolley barn.
Mecklenburg County taxpayers were compelled to spend $1.4 million buying the barn property back in 2003. The transit folks have since then spent $700,000 on planning for renovations designed to cost $4.5 million. Now, however, they’d like to delay work on the trolley barn so that the $4.5 million can be used for the light-rail project. Doing so risks having the county sell the barn property out from under the transit system, which would supposedly squander the $700,000 in planning expenditures.
Follow all that? Don’t worry, because it doesn’t matter anyway. The $700,000 has already been squandered, whether the trolley barn is renovated or not. It’s a barn for trolleys. This is 2005.
Plus, the $4.5 million in construction funds in question will be lost either way, too. Either they will go to renovate a low-priority county property, or they will go to construct a low-priority piece of (little-used) transportation infrastructure. Unless someone is talking about transferring the $4.5 million to an important project — say, for roads or schools — the conversation is a waste of time and effort.
Kinda like this column, now that I think about it. It would have been more productive if I’d taken the opportunity to speculate about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin — or perhaps more to the point, how many angels could fit inside a Charlotte trolley car.
(The answer is, most hours of the day, a nearly infinite number.)
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.