Capping property taxes and scrapping the I-77 toll lanes | Hour 3

What's going on. Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to vpetcleanershow dot com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button. Get every episode for free right to your smartphone or tablet, And again, thank you so much for your support. So, last hour, I played a whole bunch of audio from the debate that occurred on the floor of the state Senate regarding the income tax cap that's going to go to us the voters, whether we want to set a maximum income tax rate at three and a half percent it currently is seven percent, okay, And the last clip I played, the last two clips were a state Senator val Applewhite, who made the argument first in a committee and then on the floor of the Senate in opposition to this measure being put to voters. She made the argument that voters are ignorant. But I'm not calling anyone ignorant. I'm just saying they don't understand. These are people with high school degrees, senior citizens, barely literate, and also moms, but maybe just moms. I think she said driving their kids to school, So maybe it's just those moms. I don't know, But those are the four groups of people. High school graduates, but not college graduates because although she said she has two degrees and she doesn't even understand this. High school graduates, senior citizens, barely literate, and moms they are too ignorant, but she's not calling them ignorant. They just don't understand. They can't understand a ballot measure, but they can vote to elect senators there and again, this is also from the crowd that says people can't get IDs either. Do you get this sense that they have a pretty low opinion of voters. Yeah, let me go over and get to some messages now, because it's been piling up in the inbox. American pitbull says, I am horrified listening to this woman. So the people who don't understand civics, can't read, and don't know what a constitutional amendment is, vote, God help us. And if I hear the phrase pay their fair share again, it will be If I never hear that phrase again, it will be too soon. Yes, it's all a distraction, says the thought of extra money has a hole burning in the democrats pockets. Yeah, that's the idea you. From the text line to do, to do do, Kathy says, Pete schools are too busy in doctrinating our children to teach civics. Come on, we all know there are more than two genders and men can give birth everyone. Yeah, maybe less with that stuff, more with the civics. So people will know what a constitutional amendment is, Bob says conundrum. Apple White thinks her constituents know that word thoroughly. That's yeah, he says, that's the conduct. Yeah, like that's a pretty fancy word. To be used. And when people don't even know what a constitutional amendment is, Don says, the best indicator is that he calls a flat tax a permanent giveaway to the rich. Yeah, that was Senator Chowdery, a Democrat from Wake, giving away their money back to them. So what are they what are they giving the rich? This is what I mean. They don't have a a logical or persuasive argument, so they just use these slogans. This is why I say they've grown intellectually flabby. But I also I empathize to some degree with a lot of these state lawmakers, because if I had to take their positions, I don't know how I would logically argue their positions either. Okay, so like. They're they're working from a fundamental disadvantage. Corey says, pay your fair share? Makes my skin crawl. These clips are painfully hilarious. Without my daily Pete, I wouldn't have heard this governmental nonsense. Thank you, Pete. Yeah, you're I. I do this so you don't have to, because you are leading a productive life. I go through this stuff so as to inform you of what these other people are trying to do to you and me. Nine eight zero number says I'm not sure about anybody else. But after hearing her speak, I didn't know how stupid. I really am. Glad I now know right well, I mean, maybe you're a high school graduate, are you a senior citizen? Are you barely literate? Are you a mom? Right? Then you don't I don't know how to vote? What's this do? How do I drive? A politician arguing the voters are too stupid to make a good informed decision at the ballot box perhaps needs to reflect on why those same stupid voters elected them. That's a great. Point seven oh four Number says, These people are absolutely ridiculous and so embarrassing. Oh my goodness, Robin says, do we need to remind them that we are not a socialist country? All of this talk about paying your fair share and regressive taxes, that all sounds very social. Listen to me, by the way, I'm not a millionaire or a billionaire. Nine to eight oz. Numbers says, sure, we can still have a progressive tax as long as the max is three point five percent. There you go, Yeah, cut the rates for the you want to do a marginal tax rate system, a progressive tax system. Cut the rates for the uh, for the you know, middle class and the working poor. You want to cut all of that to to a lower tax rate. Does anybody remember you have to pass the bill to see what's in the bill. I guess I forgot about that. Everybody says, read the bill, the bill, We got to pass the bill? Was that was that? John Conyers? I think that said that. How come every progressive female sounds like they're about to break down in tears. I don't know. I think they may be. Well, I mean, because it's all it's all emotive and performative because there's no substance to the actual arguments. They don't have actual arguments to make, so they just catastrophize, right like, they're just like arguing from this emotional perspective. This is not like just the women. This is all This is the Democrat playbook. This is the only thing they have to substitute for an actual logical argument, an economic argument. They cannot do it. Helena says, Dear God, these people are dumb. Yes, Beth's favorite. Russ says, almost everything she is lamenting that we aren't addressing is due to government, mostly her side, Government expanding into too many areas that they shouldn't be and other things that have been approved and funded. But gov Co at every level has mismanaged funds, so they aren't able to do what they were supposed to do, Danny said, regarding an earlier caller. From an earlier call from Mike, Mike made the very point that we conservatives have always argued raise taxes on the evil big business, when evil big business never pays those taxes. All those who. Engage with the evil big business pays those taxes, including consumers who may be struggling to pay their bills. It's like the Democrats big boogeyman approach just gets recycled over and over, regardless of the issue, symbolism over substance every time. That is the case, right, because they view everything through the oppressor oppressed prism. That's it. Like once you understand that, I mean really understand it and start applying it as you are hearing the arguments. As soon as you start applying that prism to their arguments, you recognize immediately what they're doing. They're always pitting somebody as bad and somebody as harmed. That's it, and they just swap out the different grips groups no matter what the present argument is over. Seven oh four Numbers says. Rich people make jobs, they also pay much more in taxes. Government can't make jobs for all. It's all about giveaways for voters in their own pockets. Some women in politics can be so stupid, by the way, I'm a female. And eight oh three numbers says, could we please tell all of these whiny Democrats that there are only nine hundred eighty nine billionaires in the United States. That's a lot that nine hundred and eighty nine. That's a lot. It's more than I would have guessed. You know, stories are powerful. They help us make sense of things, to understand experiences. Stories connect us to the people of our past while transcending generations. They help us process the meaning of life and our stories are told through images and videos. Preserve your stories with Creative Video started in nineteen ninety seven and Mint Hill, North Carolina. It was the first company to provide this valuable service, converting images, photos and video into high quality produced slide shows, videos and albums. The trusted, talented and dedicated team at Creative Video will go over all of the details with you to create a perfect project. Satisfaction guaranteed. Drop them off in person or mail them. 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That's also going to go to voters. This would limit the local governments from increasing our property taxes too quickly too much, right, a levee limit. Normally this would be something along the lines of inflation plus population growth. Okay, so if you've got a billion dollar budget, you would not be allowed to like double it through property tax increases. Right, you would have to look at And the formula is not part of this question yet. It's simply a question to voters at this point of do you agree to put a levy limit in the constitution. So there has to be some limit in the constitution. They will come back and construct the actual formula or what that limit will look like. But the question for voters is do we want that to be enshrined in our constitution? And normally this formula goes something along the lines of if inflation for a given year is, you know, four percent, and your town has grown by one percent, you would not be able to raise your property tax rate by more than four plus one. It's five. So five percent. That's the concept. Which and now I believe I have educated probably a good deal of high school graduates, senior citizens, barely literate people, and. Some others too. So I feel like I'm doing my job in educating all of the people who are too ignorant to vote. So maybe I should send this over to val apple White and she could just like clip the audio and send it to her voters. There was also this is from the press release talking about the levy limit. They quote the John Locke Foundation analysis which found that over the past ten years, so the past decade, nine out of ten of the most populous counties. Okay, so take the ten most populist counties over the last decade, and nine of those ten collected nearly three billion dollars more in property taxes than what inflation and population growth justifies. So had this limit been put in place, those local governments would not have been able to raise those property taxes as much as they did to the tune of a combined three billion dollars. Public support for property tax reform is strong across the state. Recent polling found that about seventy seven percent of North Carolinians say property taxes strain their household budgets. Seventy three percent support a constitutional amendment to limit future increases. So this is why Democrats oppose it. Once again, this is jamming them up, This is cramp in their style. They want to be able to raise these taxes in order to pay for all of the promises they make out on the campaign trail. And if they don't get the ability to raise property taxes, if they are limited at the state level by an income tax cap of three and a half percent, then we're going to have to cut fire in police. That's literally the argument that one of the Democrats made. At the state level, they always attack the primary functions of government, the responsibilities of local government. They always hold the voter's hostage overfunding for those elements versus the larger budget items. For example, Mecklimmer County I highlighted this couple of months ago when the sheriff Gary not my fault McFadden right, was talking about how he cannot open Jail North, which, by the way, he just announced this week that he is going to open Jail North and somehow or another he's got money to do seventy five hundred dollars signing bonuses for corrections officers. Okay, so he's going to reopen it because his jail is overcrowded now thanks to Arena's Law, which says you can't just let violent. People back out onto the streets. You actually have to hold them there with some bail, and if they can't make bail, then they stay in jail. And he said that's why he was opposed to this, that oh my gosh, we're going to have people staying in the jail. We're gonna have too many people in jail. Yeah, because the county has not funded criminal justice in other words, the sheriff's office and jail construction. We haven't built any new jails been like twenty five years. We have had massive population growth, but for some reason we have fewer jail beds now. Why Well, because the county commissioners, the county commission controlled completely by Democrats for many years now. They have deprioritized public safety, so they don't fund it. They fund parks and wreck at a higher level than they do public safety. So the state, through these laws, through these different mechanisms, the Republican state legislature is telling these local Democrat run counties and cities, your priorities are out of whack and you need to correct it. And that's why you're hearing all of the whining and kicking and screaming from the Democrats at the local level and at the state level too. They want to be able to run their blue cities as massive you know, welfare programs and various services and such. Right, they do not want to spend the money on the highest priorities of local government, but they will threaten you to defund those things if you complain about the high cost that you're being charged for all the other stuff that they want to do. Instead. Let's see here we go to to do. John john says, I think the Democrats might have a point. If we limit the tax rate to three point five percent, we might have to make choices of how that money is spent. I mean, how are we going to afford both schools and a museum for teapots. Yeah, and I don't know how you choose between the two nine one two number says, can we just stop defending billionaires? No, they're they're people, they're human beings. They have the same right as you and I do. This is like if you want to point to a specific billionaire who's done something wrong, and then we could agree that, yeah, that's wrong, they shouldn't have done that. However, just because they have more money than you do doesn't mean that you get to treat them differently via the law. It's equality. So I stand for equality, you see. Okay, that's on the toll roads, which I'm going to get to here in a moment, Jeff says, Democrats threatening to defund essential services. It's kind of like their own little Strait of Hormuz. That's funny because it's true. Coach Cloak says, I am against the toll road in general, because how is it going to help the normal person? The traffic still is going to be there because you have to pay to use a toll road. In ninety five percent of people that travel on that seventy seven can't afford to use the tolling. Okay, first off, I don't know if ninety five percent of the people on the roads can't afford a toll lane. I don't know if that's actually true. I would guess that that's not true. Number one. Number two, normal people use tollanes. So it's it's not like these are abnormal people or only the richie riches or something that they use the toll lanes. Normal people use to lanes too. But here's the thing. Even if it is abnormal richie riches that use the tollanes, they're not in the general purpose lanes. Now they get moved to a different lane. They're driving on a different lane, and now they're not in your lane. But you don't have to worry about that because the according to council Member Ed Driggs, the only Republican on the Charlotte City Council, he says, the black political caucus of Charlotte made Glenberg successfully turned this into a racialized issue, and they succeeded in killing the project. So nobody has to worry about toll lanes anymore. So we can put this issue to bed. I mean, the traffic is still going to be terrible. I seventy seven is still going to be the most congested stretch of road in the state, but now we have the added benefit of not getting any money or any relief for probably another thirty to forty years. So I'm going to give everybody a. Clap for that. In a surprise move, a key regional transportation planning board yesterday voted to kill the I seventy seven toll lane project between Uptown and the South Carolina Line. Tony Mesia, writing at the Charlotte Ledger, says the vote by the Charlotte Regional Transportation Planning Organization or the Kirkbow the CRTPO the CURTIPO, composed of twenty six government entities, is a major victory for opponents of the project and could doom it Before the vote, The NCDOT said that the curtiposed decision to halt the project would mean that it would be removed from state planning documents and the Charlotte region would lose out on the six hundred million dollars that the state had allocated towards the project. The total cost, by the way of the project is three point two billion dollars. Okay, the state was going to kick in six hundred million and then private company comes in covers the rest of that cost charges the tolls in order to recoup their capital costs that they front that they fronted. Okay, that's the model. You can oppose the model. You can say I don't want to pay any tolls ever, Okay, the state doesn't have three point two billion dollars to do this road project. Oh and by the way, even if it did. The local activists that opposed this, they they would oppose it anyway, even if they were free lanes. So some people were out there opposing it because they don't want to pay for the tolls. But the local activists, the BPC, they were opposing it because it would impact mccruary Heights and historically black neighborhood, and so that's what killed it. So even if the state had three billion three billion to do the project, they still wouldn't be able to do the project because the Kurdipo objected to it because of the impact on the neighborhood, not because it's a toll project. So you got, what are your options. You can't widen I seventy seven. You can't widen it and add more lanes. Left and right and whatever, or because you're literally going through the center of the city, so you would have to buy up all the land, you'd have to knock down all those buildings, you would have an even bigger impact. On the neighborhoods. So they came up with the idea to do a double decker, and that way they would only have to take I think it was like thirty or thirty two properties. And that's and that was unacceptable as well. So the only alternative left now is a tunnel. Right, that's it. You can't go up, you can't you can't go out, so you. Got to go down. And what do you think the cost of building a tunnel through I think it's an eleven mile stretch. And even then when you pop out in center city, like where does that tunnel pop out? Where's that coming out? I suspect the tunnel is going to cost way more than three point two billion dollars. And if the state doesn't have three billion for a double decker project, why do you think they're gonna have enough for a tunnel. So this isn't getting done. That's the bottom line. Seventy seven is gonna it's gonna be congested, for the rest of our lives. A couple of text messages, Jonathan says, more trains are the answer to all of this. Haha, that's a joke to talk about costs per mile. Too soon, Jonathan, it's too soon. Let's see here, Eddie says Pete two words flying cars. I was promised those by now. I don't know what's going. On, Jennifer says breaking. Brett Jensen reported that many of the people in the neighborhood who objected don't even own the houses that they are living in. That would not surprise me. And this is seven oh four number. The Charlotte City Council is absolutely dumb as dirt. Okay, So this is from the Charlotte Observer story After the vote last night, the state weighed in. Quote this vote means the loss of seven hundred million dollars in critical transportation funding designed to address congestion, crash rates, and community driven priorities for the Charlotte region. This is a NCDOT statement that was provided to WSOCTV. The NCDOT had already committed six hundred million dollars to the project. They've already spent about sixty million dollars so that money's just I guess, mostly wasted at this point, and without the partnership, NCDOT has said, there's no financially feasible alternative to move the project forward. If you're not going to do toll aanes, then there's there's not three billion dollars that the state has laying around. And again, remember you're competing with all of the other projects throughout the entire state. NCDOT Secretary Daniel Johnson sent a letter to Charlotte Mayor Vylyiles last week confirming that Charlotte would lose out on the six hundred million dollars, along with an additional one hundred million that would have been spent on transportation projects of the city's choosing. That brings the total funding in play to seven hundred million. Johnson added the project would also be removed from the state's transportation Prioritization improvement list. I said, by the way, I warned about this a couple months ago, when NCDOT came out and they're like, hey, everybody, we're gonna show you the plans and all of this, and the immediate backlash against toll lanes and backlash against any improvement, and I said, guys, just be aware that if you block this, you probably are going to lose the funding and it's going to go elsewhere. And I cited as the example Ashville the expansion of I twenty six in Ashville, and the locals fought the DOT plans for that, and DOT finally said, okay, we won't do it. And that's how Charlotte finished the forty five loop. That's how we got the money for that was because the locals in Ashville fought the DOT project. You know what they're doing now, they've been doing for the last three or four years now, they've been doing the I twenty six project. So Johnson added, oh sorry. To address congestion and crashes on I seventy seven from Uptown to the South Carolina border, an eleven mile stretch, DOT planned to add toll lanes. The project has been in the works since two thousand and seven, so this this was nineteen years, nineteen years, and. Now it's dead. I seventy seven South, according to NCDOT, has these states' highest congestion levels. It sees over one hundred and sixty thousand cars a day. The agency estimates that with or without toll lanes, I seventy seven will see a twenty five percent increase in traffic by twenty fifty, meaning the roadway will see over two hundred thousand cars each day. So you got what you wanted. If you know you didn't want this project done, you didn't want to pay the tolls, well you're you're not going to pay any tolls. I seventy seven will continue to be toll free, it will continue to be three lanes, and it will continue to get worse as far as congestion goes. So I'm not really sure, Like I'm not really sure what other mechanism exists out there. Like if you're gonna say, well, we are already paying for it, well, yes, everybody pays to go and it goes into the state fund, and then you are competing with every other project around the state. And all of the state lawmakers that have to decide funding priorities, they rely on the locals to give them their prioritization list, what do you want done and all of this, and then they have to weigh that with all of the other projects. And even if there's three billion dollars in a fund someplace, what you're saying is take all that money. Don't let anybody else across the state build anything, and we're going to take all that money for this eleven mile stretch. But even then you can't do it because the neighborhood protested, so you can't even do that. So here we are. Like I said, congratulations, there will be no relief on I seventy seven. Doug caught the car. Now, don't know what the dog was gonna do with the car, but you caught it. Good job, all right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast, so if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to dpetecleanershow dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.