Where does the one half cent sales tax money come from? This chart might help. If you go to the website you will see that the majority of the money from Charlotte comes from the suburbs and not the center city as this is based on sales. This protects the center city and the very expensive tax base located there.

Fiscal Year 2005-2006

State (4.5%)
Taxable Sales* Gross Collections* Estimated 1/2%
Charlotte 10,374,589,252 458,166,938 50,907,438
Cornelius 205,833,159 9,082,480 1,009,164
Davidson 47,365,460 2,066,645 229,627
Huntersville 39,963,002 17,756,153 1,972,906
Matthews 590,433,295 26,418,638 2,935,404
Mint Hill 27,794,828 1,258,016 139,780
Pineville &Unincorporated 2,071,329,430 74,947,064 8,327,452
Mecklenburg County 13,357,308,426 589,695,934 65,521,770

per NC Dept. of Revenue
www.dornc.com/publications

This letter from Tom Ashcraft, dated: March 27th, 2007, is one you should read.

Mr. Ashcraft is a former US Attorney and currently is an Attorney here in Charlotte.

To Mayor Pat McCrory and City Councilman John Lassiter

Dear Mayor and John:

Despite what you implied at last night’s Charlotte City Council meeting, taxes are not on automatic pilot, and they are not set by City staff. Elected officials set them. Elected officials can raise or cut them. Charlotte-Mecklenburg has for years imposed the highest per capita tax burden in North Carolina among large municipalities. This is because of excessive tax rates set by local elected officials, many of them Republicans. It doesn’t have to be this way.

There apparently will be enough signatures, including mine, to call for a referendum this fall on repeal of the half cent transit sales tax. This tax was imposed after the people were misled about the costs of the 2025 Transit Plan during the 1998 referendum. Further, the light rail project on South Boulevard has experienced huge costs overruns. More are surely on the way, given chronic mismanagement at CATS.

The credibility of those running the City of Charlotte and CATS has been damaged by past actions. Many citizens just don’t trust Charlotte officials.

Why don’t you join the people’s movement and agree to a pause in extravagant spending on the current light rail and mass transit plan by repealing the transit sales tax? During the pause, we can reassess the whole transit mess and do what’s best for this community. There’s no reason Charlotte cannot be a low tax city and also have one of the premier bus systems in America.

Thank you for considering this request. Best regards.

Sincerely, Tom

Thomas J. Ashcraft

And you should be scared to if you believe any part of the mess Charlotte City Council, CATS and the Media want you to believe.

Charlotte will grind to a halt with no busses and property taxes will go up.

The true story is that they know they can fund busses and taxes will not go up if they quit this mad rush toward Light Rail.

All we have ever asked for is proof that it works, and holding off for two years of operations of the Southern route would be the litmus test.  The Southern route funding has been in place for some time.

As far as putting another issue on the ballot to fund just busses, it can be done if they merely change it to say it is only for busses, not just changing the amount of the current one.  A fact they used to confuse citizens into thinking they have no options.

So let’s review what they are saying, busses will stop and taxes will go up.

Hey what about all the other messes they have gotten us into.  Are we not heavy into debt for that third arena?  Don’t we have to pay a lot of taxes to service that debt?  That second arena had more owing on it than they sold it for, who paid for that, oh yeah, property taxes spread over a few years so we would not balk. 

Wait, could we not also borrow this loss and spread it over the years instead?  A loss this small would be a lot better than the big loss and the extensive property taxes once we get all those empty trains running around the county?

March 15, 2007 – johnlocke.org

Scrapping special Charlotte tax would boost efficiency
JLF analysts highlight bloated transit spending
Contact:
Dr. Michael Sanera  

RALEIGH – Charlotte could focus on real transportation problems and improve its bus system’s efficiency by scrapping a special half-cent sales tax. That’s a key finding in a new John Locke Foundation Spotlight report.

“The half-cent sales tax money has been an unfortunate diversion,” said Dr. Michael Sanera, JLF Research Director and local government analyst. “It has diverted the attention of Charlotte’s citizens to a light rail system that has expended vast amounts of money with little promise of reducing traffic congestion.

“It has also diverted Charlotte’s bus system onto a path of inefficient operations,” Sanera added. “It is time for Charlotte to rethink its total transportation needs without the half-cent sales tax.”

Sanera and co-author Joseph Coletti, JLF fiscal policy analyst, are unveiling their report as light rail critics work to repeal the half-cent sales tax. If those critics gather enough signatures, Charlotte voters will decide in November whether to repeal the tax.

Charlotte adopted the special sales tax in 1998. Supporters said the tax would generate funds to help expand an existing city bus system and to match federal funds for the city’s light rail system.

Sanera and Coletti found that the tax has had harmful unintended consequences. Cost estimates for the entire transit system – light rail and buses – increased from $2 billion to $9 billion. Bus ridership increased by 52 percent from 1997 to 2005, but operating costs more than doubled during the same period, Sanera said.

“The ridership increase would be a success story if the system had controlled its costs, but the infusion of guaranteed sales tax funds caused costs to spiral out of control,” Sanera said. “For example, operating costs per trip grew 118 percent from 1997 to 2005. If Charlotte cut its costs from $4.29 per trip to $3.20 per trip – the average cost for seven other North Carolina bus systems – the city could slice 25 percent off its operating expenses.”

Revenue from the special sales tax has allowed the Charlotte Area Transit System to become one of the least efficient bus systems in North Carolina, Sanera said. “Transit bureaucrats, like most bureaucrats, will always find ways to spend most, if not all, of the money available, even if they spend it inefficiently. Flush with cash, CATS went on a spending binge that resulted in an inefficient system and some of the highest costs in the state.”

Repealing the sales tax would force Charlotte’s bus system to return to more efficient pre-1998 operating practices, Sanera said. “Ending the half-cent sales tax would force transit bureaucrats to control costs and reverse spending trends,” he said. “Cutting per-trip costs would lower expenses. Then CATS could fund its less expensive bus system by taking too simple steps.

“First, ask riders to pay more,” Sanera explained. “Before the tax, riders paid 26 percent of total costs. Now they pay 14 percent of total costs. Charlotte should increase that percentage to 25 percent to bring in another $14.3 million.”

Second, Charlotte should give CATS $21.9 million, about 2.5 percent of the city’s operating budget, Sanera said. “Most cities fund bus systems without designated tax revenue,” he said. “Bus systems justify their worth in the normal city budget process. This keeps the pressure on bus administrators and helps systems operate more efficiently.”

Joseph Coletti and Dr. Michael Sanera’s Spotlight report, “Charlotte’s Transit Tax: A costly distraction from the city’s true transit needs,” is available at the JLF web site. For more information, please contact Sanera at (919) 828-3876 or msanera@johnlocke.org. To arrange an interview, contact Mitch Kokai at (919) 306-8736 or mkokai@johnlocke.org.

Material published here may be reprinted provided the
Locke Foundation receives prior notice and appropriate credit is given

You are hearing the scare tatics of desperate elected officials and people who make a lot off of your tax dollars telling you that Busses will stop with the repeal of this tax.

This is a lie.

We like busses.  They give you more flexiblily to change routes and to respond almost daily to the volume of riders.  Why not build bus corridors that could be used later for light rail, or real subways, when Charlotte grows into the size that would support rail?

Currently several media people, who are hand fed stories from the elected officials and government types, have been saying we want to stop the Southern route which is promised by the end of this year.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  We want to see just how this works.  If after operating for a few years, it works as well as they have promised, then we will be the first to get on board (get it!) with funding light rail all over Charlotte.  We want to see alternatives to our traffic woes but what is wrong with busses.  We know they are not as sexy in pictures of a city as having a light rail running but oh boy the costs is sooooo much cheaper.

Letter to my fellow CATS people.

I am on the Citizens Transit Committee for CATS.
As the only member of this list who works with and signed the Stop The Train Petition, I am happy to report that we now have close to the 50 thousand signatures we were hoping to get.  Many, many more new voters are getting behind our effort thanks to the new negative (and incorrect) wave of publicity generated by the Charlotte Observer, the big business crowd and those who careers depend on our tax dollars being spent.
To put this 50 thousand in perspective, only 78 thousand people voted in the last City election.   Almost every City Council Member is on the Council with less than  7 thousand votes.  Andy Dulin has about 12 thousand votes.  The Mayor only has 42 thousand votes.  In the County Vote only 157 thousand voted.  Every County Commissioner is on with less than 79 thousand votes.  
Recently the media has been getting a lot of information from official sources trying to DERAIL our Derailment efforts.  Why that is we can only imagine, but why be so scared of taxpayers asking for a say in what we feel will be another tax debacle in Charlotte?  This one lining up behind the many arenas and other failed pet projects wasting our tax dollars.   
Many of you have never seen the studies and information we have showing the folly of light rail so we ask that you go to www.CharlotteLightRail.com for details.  The reason we ask you to do this is that we know you soon be spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to get the publicity machine going to help defeat this during election time.  That way you can at least say you have seen the information from both sides and can study all aspects from both sides of this situation as we have.
What we have always asked for was a halt on new projects until we can all see the success promised by the Southern or McCrory as some call it line, come true. 
Political business as usual in Charlotte for the last few decades has been ignore the voters until election time.  Therefore we had no other choice but to see that our tax dollars were protected and that is why we started this effort. 
I am sure all of you are aware that the bus route with the least passengers is the bus covering the old trolley route.  This may be something to look into.  Is the trolley actually costing us?   I know we have seen some dismal numbers from the Trolley and we have to ask ourselves if we would then do the same with light rail and allow it to operate in hopes of actually making money.
Come time to vote I will be voting as early as possible and I will be voting to repeal.  However as the only person in the Citizens Advisory Group for CATS who has ever voted no to any Light Rail Proposal this will not come as a shock to my fellow members.
Thanks and I look forward to being a small part of helping us clean up the debacle and halting any further waste of our tax dollars.
By the way, Ron Tobert was quoted and published in the Charlotte Observer as saying to me something like You have been to too many John Locke Foundation Meetings during a Citizens Meeting one morning.  He verified to me during the last meeting that he did not say that.  Could somebody from CATS get with Richard Rubin and get an apology and retraction in