JHart

NC in the news for a domestic terrorist attack on the power grid in Moore County. https://www.bizjournals.com/charlotte/news/2022/12/05/duke-energy-moore-county-nc-outages.html?cx_testId=40&cx_testVariant=cx_23&cx_artPos=3#cxrecs_s A few years ago Duke Energy was undergoing a giant RFP for security camera installations across the US at all sites including substations, hopefully they had some here.

There is the personal gain motif but the NCDOT also supports sprawl as a funding mechanism for itself. 40% of NCDOT revenue from gas taxes (80% from gasoline vs 20% from diesel even though almost all degradation of roads is caused by commercial vehicles), 25% comes from federal funding which again is primarily gas taxes at the federal level, and 16% from highway use taxes which again is majority funded by personal vehicles. 81% of revenue is tied to keeping NC residents on the roads, driving as much as possible. Only 6% of NCDOT spending goes towards "other modes" with over half of that going towards aviation, with just 1.2% for public transit. NCDOT spends almost the same amount of money on 12 ferries as they do on public transit for the entire state! ($51M vs $58M)

Ehh, this isn't necessarily a bad thing. The target for unemployment isn't 0%, we are actually probably still a little lower than the current goal of 4.2-4.4%. Given our higher than average tech skew a small bump over last month makes perfect sense.

Bummer. They did put in a switch and it is currently connected if that changes anything.

I followed your link and saw the TSAC had John Lewis and a few others into their last meeting to explain what is going on. It is the most I've seen him or anybody else from CATS comment and most of it is captured in the meeting notes: TSAC_Agenda_August_2022.pdf

The complete list of projects is shown in its entirety. These grants are not for state parks, they are for local government projects. Everything is in the link you just posted, please just read the page before making random commentary...

Wake County has 2 projects in the list and Guilford has 1... Plus the capital project in Wake at William B. Umstead State Park.

That is exactly what the UDO does... Certain types of urban residential neighborhoods already allowed by-right rezoning for corner lots for duplexes with much less stringent requirements for plan review; the UDO looks to extend that to other types of residential areas. It doesn't allow by-right multifamily because of the much larger strains on things like electric, water, and sewer grids as well as traffic demand which will still be necessary for governmental review, but multifamily housing will be encouraged in all zoning districts except Residential 1. Instead of the public pushback on projects like multifamily housing in NoDa, they can say the multifamily meets the neighborhood type setting and meets all current building codes and approve the rezoning. Literally nobody in this thread has said the word gentrification except you, please don't gaslight us by saying we aren't concerned about low-income residents getting pushed out of neighborhoods. We are concerned about it, but unfortunately we live in a country where housing is an investment so the only way we can talk about affordability is with regard to market rate housing. We are talking about increasing density and how du/tri/quadplexes offer a lower price point over SF which helps with affordability. We can only focus on slowing the rate of increase of home prices in the city.

What makes you say that they won't get paid? I'm looking at the JDIG report when they were awarded. Target jobs: 3,237 but only 548 required as a minimum, I believe they've met their threshold. Then because it was a "Transformative Project" they were allowed to award a higher percentage of withheld taxes and a longer grant term. The state of NC essentially sees this as 700 people hired but can only collect 25% of the normal taxes over the next 39 years. Woohoo 700 $25k jobs for the state!! Great job ED team!

People moving across state lines for jobs are not the exploited workers who require protections. Clearly there are tons of high paying jobs in the metro areas, which is a great thing about Charlotte and NC. The laws mentioned above help protect people who are behind on rent payments and can't say no when they are called in unexpectedly due to improper scheduling, even when they have children at home. Or people who manage to pay for childcare and go to work but then get sent home unexpectedly even though they were expecting a full shift. People who are sexually harassed in the workplace or who have wages stolen from them, but don't want to report it and risk getting fired and missing their bills. Why do we only expect benefits for our office workers and not working class citizens? "If you don't like it why don't you leave?" - Ahh yes, we've reached that stage of discussion. I don't want to leave, I love Charlotte and NC. If you think people who care about protecting working class citizens should move out of the state instead of trying to make positive change, I'd hate to see what kind of place you want to live in..

That is literally the route down Plaza to Parkwood to Optimist Hall. There are tons of people who bike on the lanes everyday, less so on Parkwood because the lanes stop but the other portion of the project just recently went under construction.

They are dirty, but very far from unusable. If you're afraid to bike on Parkwood, there are plenty of other neighborhood routes you can take instead to go 2.5 miles away.

That is literally a <15 minute bike ride down protected bike lanes for 80% of it and will be 95% protected bike lanes once the ongoing Parkwood project is completed. It actually would be faster to bike by the time you park your car and walk in.

The devil's in the details. Yes the station design would be fairly simple, but think of the immense coordination effort required for something like this. Everything for this station construction needs to be staged in the area the width of the rail trail on either side in-between apartments, a grocery store, and Atherton Mill. You need to do all construction off-hours or alongside an active railway. Definitely not a simple project to plan.

We've seen 5+ different postings about how NC and Charlotte tops many lists of best places to start a business, do you ever wonder why that is? Well, NC tops the list for the 2nd year in a row as the worst state to work in! https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/06/state-worker-protections.html https://www.oxfamamerica.org/explore/countries/united-states/poverty-in-the-us/map-best-states-to-work-2021/ Rankings were split between 3 major categories: wage policies (2nd to worst behind our Southern neighbor), worker protections (2nd to worst only above Mississippi), and right to organize (tie for dead last with SC & GA). Some highlights below: Wage Policies: Minimum wage is lowest allowed federally. Tipped minimum wage of $2.13. Average unemployment benefits cover only 11.6% of wages required to cover local cost of living. Bans localities from setting minimum wages above the state standard and does not cover farmworkers with minimum wage policies. Worker Protections: No accommodations for pregnant workers or breastfeeding, no paid family leave, no sick leave, no flexible scheduling, no "call-in" pay, split shift pay, or advance shift scheduling requirements. No sexual harassment protections, no pay secrecy practices, and no salary history restrictions to reduce gender/racial bias. Right to Organize: "Right-to-work" laws to suppress unions. No state provided teacher collective bargaining/wage negotiations. No project labor agreements to ensure fair wages to contract workers. No protections against wage theft retaliation. No required public worker collective bargaining. We often love to tout our tech and higher education prowess, but what makes NC the best state to start a business is the winning combination of tech and higher education for mid/high-level employees AND cheap access to unprotected workers to exploit!

Before the parking announcement every post was full of comments about how there was never any parking available. If you want to turnover parking spots faster than you charge for parking, crazy concept. Optimist Hall is chock full of people everyday; if everyone who made a negative social media comment about this never visited again, it would still be full. You can park and ride at half of the lightrail stops anyways.

Unfortunately there are strict rules about the amount of financing available to NCDOT for them to even approach something like this and everything needs to be approved by the state treasurer and the general assembly. Total bond issuance needs to be under $3B, and payments towards debts needs to be below 6% of HF and HTF revenues. You'll get projects around the state all vying for the same funds and why would the largest population city in the state get funding for a major infrastructure improvement when there are state senators who want a faster road for them to reach their beach houses in OBX? Oh, and most of the roads leading to it will be subject to major flooding and partially underwater before the end of it's lifespan...

Unfortunately open criticism of conservative points of view is frowned upon on this site. You know conservatives and their safe spaces..

I would love for it to come to Charlotte, but we don't have any public land large enough until you get way outside of the city..

They're not midlevel, but there are 0 top level US Bank personnel here in Charlotte. Even the Head of Global Banking you mentioned is several levels down from what you could perceive as "top people". This guy is one of 100s of banking VPs here.

You've got to keep the dates in mind, July 2020 to July 2021 is the timeframe referenced and that was 2,000 people. Peak pandemic time to 2.5% 30 year mortgage rates and no major employers RTO, when plenty of people moved into the surrounding areas. This does not mean people are currently leaving Mecklenburg county today.

That second apartment building built basically on top does worry me a little about their stools..

Do you actually think there are weekly riots in the city of Portland? That's not a political viewpoint, it's a lie. There will always be some element of politics when discussing public infrastructure spending or because of the influence our elected officials have over local development; but this comment was such an outlandish, unrelated claim I felt like it needed to be called out. This site is about discussing smart urban development, public transit, infrastructure improvements, etc.; it's no secret most users tend to share similar beliefs about our public institutions.

Turn off Fox News or take it to the Political Digression Thread.