STAC: Pushback against the pushback
We reported in the Indy this week about the Raleigh business leadership’s pushback against the STAC’s apparent consensus in favor of an ambitious “2020 plan” for regional transit service in the Triangle. (STAC, of course, stands for Special Transit Advisory Commission.) Fearing the Raleigh-Wake oppo would sink their efforts, the STAC’s chairs and co-chairs had agreed to scale it back — especially the implication that the plan was calling for higher taxes.
Today, the STAC pushed back agains the pushback. The members rallied and, with no members’ voices raised in opposition (though some were silent), they restored most, if not all, of the stronger stuff that the chairs had removed from the commission’s draft report, and they included a strong call for a regional funding source for transit in the form of a 1/2-cent sales tax increase.
Details of the restoration below the fold.
* The Cary-to-RTP rail link is back in. (I’ve been admonished to make it clear it’s the NW Cary station-to-Metro Park section … not the downtown Cary station, which was never out. Done.)
* They did, however, drop the whole 2020 date, losing a bit of what SE Raleigh’s Danny Coleman (iow, not Carrboro’s Dan Coleman) facetiously termed “the fierce urgency of now.” Now, it’s an ASAP plan.
* The effect of that was to put separation between the now-ASAP rail line and the “enhanced bus services,” which are to happen first and really ASAP.
* Said the local “circulator” routes (buses, streetcars) were the second-highest priority — again, ahead of rail.
* And very important, got behind the idea of the regional 1/2-cent sales tax increase for transit — by adopting the position that all three Triangle counties should lobby the upcoming General Assembly for the right to take the tax issue to their voters.
* Finally, and in an unexpected good move, the STAC endorsed the idea that a “Regional Transportation Authority” should oversee the bus and rail planning and financing. This “RTA,” they said, could be the current TTA — no problem there — but the TTA should be strengthened in two significant ways: 1) by a joint agreement with the region’s two MPOs to work in tandem on transit issues; and 2) by changing the governing board of the TTA to require that all its members be elected officials from the jurisdictions they represent.
On this last point: “Somehow” the tradition got started that the Durham and Orange County side of the Triangle always put elected officials on the TTA board, but the Wake County side never did. The effect was to that the Durham-Orange contingent of mayors and county commissioners put their own prestige and accountability on the line for the TTA’s plans; but over on the Raleigh-Cary-Wake County side, the mayors and commissioners kept their distance — so that in Raleigh, a ‘95 plan for rail transit in the Triangle that the TTA developed in concert with, and with the approval of, every local official in sight at the time, morphed over the succeeding decade into a “TTA” plan that was somehow foreign and extremely dubious.
February 29th, 2008 18:37
Bob, you ALMOST got your correction correct:
“(I’ve been admonished to make it clear it’s the NW Cary station-to-Metro Park section … not the downtown Cary station, which was never out. Done.)”
well, it was actually the NW Cary station that was never out.