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Transit tax lacks Orange board’s support
HILLSBOROUGH-- The Orange County Board of Commissioners put the brakes on a plan to participate in the building of a regional light rail system, increase bus service and make street changes for bus rapid transit.
The commissioners voted unanimously Tuesday evening against putting a half-cent sales tax on the November ballot to fund a portion of the transportation plan that would include increasing bus routes in rural areas of Orange County, installing a light rail system that would run from Chapel Hill to Durham and putting in bus lanes on Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. in Chapel Hill.
They also declined to vote on or "approve in principle" a multimillion-dollar financial plan to fund the projects because some of the commissioners said they don't know enough about the financial plan to make a decision.
Commissioner Alice Gordon, who has been a member of the Metropolitan Planning Organization and the Triangle Transit Authority, two organizations that have been working on the transit plans for years, wasn't about to give up on the plan. She urged the other commissioners to discuss it again at a board meeting later this month, saying there was no time to waste.
"I'm willing to do anything I can in terms of moving it forward," she said.
Gordon called the plan important for the future of the county and the region for the sake of mobility, the environment, economic development and air quality.
The draft plan for the light rail system calls for it to start at UNC Hospitals. It would run near N.C. 54 East with stops at stations near I-40, through the area of South Square Mall in Durham, north into downtown Durham, then head east, ending at Alston Avenue.
Wake County also has a plan with Durham County for a rail system. But the Wake County Commissioners also backed out of putting the half-cent sales tax referendum on its ballot this year. Durham County Commissioners have not yet voted on the half-cent sales tax for their county.
County Commissioner Earl McKee, who represents northern Orange County, did not seem enamored with the plan for a number of reasons, including the cost and the fact that Wake County seems to be hesitating on its participation in the plan.
"This is my reality," McKee said. "A regional plan is not a regional plan unless the largest player is part of it, and the largest player, Wake County, has decided to take itself out of it this year."
It also was not exactly clear what the financial plan was, and commissioners said they wanted to know more details about it before voting on it. They were apparently given a draft of the plan just before they began discussing it, but none had time to review the document and some members of the board didn't realize they had the data until Wib Gulley, general counsel for Triangle Transit Authority, began waving it in the air just as the commissioners were ending their discussion.
The light rail project is expected to cost more than $1 billion, but the hope is that federal and state funds will pay for 90 percent of it, with Orange and Durham counties splitting the balance.
The commissioners also heard about another aspect of a plan to increase the bus routes in northern Orange County in the next three years to a total of 44,000 hours of new service.
It includes bus routes running north and south from north of Hillsborough to Chapel Hill and east and west on I-85 from Mebane to Durham.
McKee said he favored providing transit services for northern Orange County, but worried that only a few people would ride the bus.
"I'm very concerned that we're going to add routes and bus hours without an increase in bus riders," he said.
In the end, the commissioners voted against putting the tax on the ballot this fall, and decided they would develop a new timeline and schedule for considering whether to commit to the financial plan and possibly putting the half-cent sales tax on the ballot in the future. They also voted to inform the other partners, including Chapel Hill, Carrboro and Durham, that they continue to be interested in pursuing a regional transit plan.