A bill moving through the General Assembly would require the Charlotte-area governments that killed the I-77 South toll lanes to repay the state an estimated $60 million for the decision, and the corridor at the center of it begins where Fourth Ward's downtown does, at uptown's edge.
When the toll project died in May, this paper traced the corridor through the historically Black neighborhoods near uptown that earlier roadbuilding had already cut through once. The new measure, written by Sen. Vickie Sawyer, a Republican whose district covers Iredell and part of Mecklenburg County, and briefed to the Mecklenburg commissioners on June 16, would reach back to January 1 and bill every local government that voted to rescind, in proportion to its weighted vote at the Charlotte Regional Transportation Planning Organization. The City of Charlotte, which holds about 41 percent of that vote, would owe the most.
The history was not lost on the commissioners. "The community is a black community where they're talking about disrupting the people as they did with Brooklyn," Commissioner Vilma D. Leake said, invoking the uptown neighborhood that urban renewal razed a generation ago. "How are you going to penalize us for saying no?"
The corridor's preliminary designs, released in November, showed the widened highway running through homes in those same neighborhoods, which is much of why residents fought it. The bill would also bar the state from formally removing the project until January 1, 2027, which means that, on paper, the rescission the region voted for does not yet count. The full account of what the bill does, and what the county board said about it, is in The Charlotte Mercury.
For a neighborhood that sits at the head of the corridor, the question the bill raises is an old one: who pays when the road comes through, and who pays when it does not.