The working group will be co-led by Huntersville Mayor Jill Swain and Charlotte City Councilman David Howard, and include MTC staff, MTC member mayors or their designees, and business and community leaders from participating jurisdictions.
"As I and many others have been saying, our funding environment has changed, making it harder to see any future transit projects happening over the next 10 to 20 years," Foxx said. "We need to explore all options available to us to complete, and perhaps accelerate, our long-term regional transit plans. Connecting our region through transit is critical both to our future economic prosperity and to managing our exponential population growth."
"I believe that if we are to have a vision for the future, it's imperative for us as a collective group to look at creative financing mechanisms for our transit plan and explore anything that can help us achieve our goals," Swain said. "Analyzing our future transit issues is at least as important, if not more so, than addressing our current ones."
"There's nothing more important to Charlotte's future than figuring out our mass transit system," Howard said. "I look forward to working with Mayor Swain and the rest of the working group to find ways to make sure we move our transit plan forward as it will be one of the things that will most define us as we go to the next level as a city and a region."
The working group will submit its findings and recommendations to the MTC in a report due no later than April 15. The group will consider such financing strategies as: Tax Increment Financing (TIFs), Synthetic Tax Increment Financing (STIFs), Tax Increment Grant (TIGs), Business Privilege Licensing Tax, sales tax revenue, and incremental property taxes. It will also consider which strategies are currently available to local governments and which would require additional County, voter, and/or North Carolina General Assembly authorization.
The Charlotte Area Transit System will be the lead agency in supporting the working group.
The formation of the working group comes at a critical time for the Charlotte region's transit system:
• Transit sales tax revenues dropped during the recession to 2005 levels, eliminating capacity to fund projects beyond the Blue Line Extension.
• The Blue Line Extension, the single largest capital project in Charlotte's history, has required increased property taxes from at least three jurisdictions.
• The General Assembly has already eliminated $6 million in matching transit funding, increasing concerns that matches for future projects will be eliminated and may require increased local commitments.
• New federal policies and funding approaches may make funding the 2030 Transit Plan less predictable than in previous years.
• The Charlotte region is the fastest-growing urban area in the nation.
More information on the MTC's 2030 Transit Plan is available here.
