More toll road outrage and a familiar face for interim Charlotte mayor | Hour 2

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 of the links, become a patron, go to thepeakclendarshow 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. All Right, I'm not going to spend any more time really on the toll road issue, the I seventy seven issue, but I do have some text messages from the last hour that I shall read and offer witty responses to. Hopefully. Let's see here, Harry says, has anybody thought about the air pollution increased when the traffic slows fifty percent? How about double slower, more carbon monoxide, heavy metals and chemicals. What will the cancer rate for the thirty homes be that protested? How about giving a bonus above the fair price for the homes and renters? Simple answer to make every happy, not a drop in the bucket of the total cost. Monica confirms that it was Pineville that thwarted the light rail line low those many years ago, and the idea was to eventually take that all the way down to Rock Hill. To stand. Says, if you can enforce. Collection of new toll road fees, why don't you enforce collection of light rail tolls and use that money to help pay for other necessary road projects. Well, number one, even if you could collect one hundred percent of all of the fares from the riders, I still don't think that would make the Charlotte area transit system profitable. Okay, so all of that money would be used to fund cats services. Number one. Number two. In order to do an enforcement mechanism like the toll roads, you would have to I guess maybe surgically implant an easy pass on everyone's foreheads, I think. Or maybe you could do a barcode. Just do a bar code that scans, you know, or maybe an RFI D chip. You stick it right in the forehead there so it scans people as they walk through. Okay, seven oh four. Number This tolling issue just fries me. That's all caps, he said, all caps? All right, We already have many tollines that nobody uses. That's not true. People do use them. You may not see a lot of people using them at the times you're on it. But trust me, the private company on like the Northbound Ice or North mech I seventy seven tollanes, they are collect revenue. I guarantee you they are collecting revenue. And if they're not collecting enough revenue, they will lower the prices to get more people to use the lane. But they don't want to jam up the lane. That's why traffic is always light on in those toll lanes. The purpose is to with the surge pricing. It's to you know, raise the prices so fewer people use it. This is supply and demand, right Like, that's if you know you're using the price as essentially a rationing mechanism, because nobody's going to pay to drive in a toll lane that is as congested as the general purpose lanes. Otherwise, what's the point. I'll just if I'm gonna sit in traffic, I'll just sit over there for free. But if I'm going to pay to get around the traffic, then I expect that lane to be moving. If I'm going to drop you know, fifteen dollars or whatever it is. In North mech regular people can't afford the outr A tolls. I often sit dead still on I seventy seven as I watch the few very rich people zoom by me on the empty toll lanes. Okay, so this smacks of. Envy, right, So but here's the thing. Those rich people they're not blocking your traffic anymore because you realize if they were to tear down that toll lane, just open that lane up, you would have three lanes sitting like that's I mean, I don't know what to tell you, like people who are like, oh, that's the richie rich lane. Well yeah, but the richie riches then aren't in your lane. The traffic would be even worse. So you're getting you're getting rich people to get out of the way. Right. So, even if that's who you know, you're thinking that these are the rich people, could just be somebody like, Oh, I don't know me. I don't drive that route very often, and if I go up there, I have an easy pass and I keep like fifty dollars in it. And because I don't use the easy pass lanes a lot, but if I'm going up to North Mech once every six months, I'm probably going to use that lane if it's all congested. A few commercial vehicles pay tolls yay, so that cost is added to whatever thing or service I ultimately pay for more. Yea, interstates are federally funded roads. Working people who tie roads up at rush hour pay taxes. We deserve adequate free lanes where tolls were. Tolls were toll lanes made into regular lanes, traffic instantly would vastly improve. That's actually not that's not accurate. However, many lanes you build, they will be filled. Look at Atlanta. How despicable that this is not the case. Though private companies pay for some of the toll road system, I suspect my tax do are used as well. But I derive no benefit from these lanes. Outrage you See again, you do derive a benefit. It moves some of the traffic out of the general purpose lanes to lanes. I hang on a second. It's a very long message to lanes are a discriminatory abomination, quite a perk for wealthy people. Again, See like, when you say it like this, it comes across as as class envy, you know, as like oh they're rich or whatever, yeah, and they're paying, they're paying for that lane. They're not using your lane. You have your free lane, and they're using this other lane that they're paying for separately, and they've also paid for that free lane that you're in. Disgusting to think even more tolls will be added when the only true fix is to eliminate all tolls on the major interstate highway through and around Charlotte. If this is not done, a rush hour commute will extend from an hour per day to two hours per day as the city fills up with more residents. Charlotte has become a nightmare city. From KST in Fort Mill, you're not even paying our taxes. KST, what are you talking about. You're not contributing unless you're filling up for gas in North Carolina versus South Carolina, which that's not smart. You should fill up in South Carolina because it's cheaper gas because your state has a lower gas tax, which funds your roads. Aside from the Pennies for Progress project that was done in York County right where they slapped an extra penny on the sales tax to pay for road improvements, it's good program. Don't get me wrong. They've built a lot of additional roads. They widened I seventy seven down there, lo those many decades ago. They did that back in the nineties, late nineties, so yeah, I'm not. Yeah, Okay, we'll just go to David's text here, who said the problem with toll roads in particular is the toll never goes away. Can you think of one example in the US? Hecked the world in the world where a toll was in place and then was removed, And yes, I did. I wrote him back and I said, yeah, I remember they pulled up all the toll plazas up North New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania area, because I remember, like, that's how I learned to take a different route from New York down to Charlotte. You know, once a year I'd drive up to go visit the folks and learned very quickly, do not take I ninety five slower speed limit, but also tons of tolls everywhere, and then you know they've so I started going seventy seven, eighty one, seventy eight, and I did that route, no. Tolls and faster speed limits. And then. I remember seeing that, oh yeah, they were ripping out all of the toll plazas and getting rid of those tolls. I'm not saying that's normal. Don't get me wrong. I'm like most of the tolls are here to stay me. It's GOVC after all, right. Danny says the light rail is operating on fifty percent of the people paying. No normal business could operate that way correct, and that was a design failure. Doug says, I don't travel up by seventy seven often, but when we do, we enjoy HOV for free. My wife and I have a nine year old daughter, so when we are riding together, it's free on seventy seven. New lanes on for eighty five are not h O V free slash friendly. Amy says Pete stop making sense. Too many people can't handle it. I understand people want stuff. They want the roads to be, you know, free of traffic when they are on them, and they want it to be as near to free as possible. I get it, But as I always say when talking about traffic, you are traffic. We are all traffic. I'm sorry, but like when you need to go someplace, you become part of the problem. When you buy a house in Charlotte, when you have to go to work, you take a job in Charlotte, and now you have to make that commute. You are in rush shower. You are part of the problem that you're complaining about. Don't get me wrong, I complain about traffic too. I am originally from New York. And that's why when you talk to somebody, anybody from New York, if you start talking about how to get someplace, they've got like three different ways to get everywhere, just right out of the gate. And that's It's like people who complain about noise and congestion in the downtown area. It's like, but that's what cities are, you know. And I'm not saying you have to like that. I'm not saying you have to live there, you have to work, I'm not saying you have to do anything. I'm a libertarian, lowercase hel libertarian. Like, I'm not telling you how to live your life or what to do. I'm just saying that if you're going to travel into the city for whatever reason, you want to live in a city, that's part of living in a city. I mean, along with like the the vagrancy, the crime, and the needles on the sidewalks and stuff like that. Apparently I don't know, like I like, that's a fairly new phenomenon, that part of it. But like it's always been the case that living in highly dense areas means you're going to sacrifice congestion and noise. That's kind of the jam. That's what you get with living in a city. 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. 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I said that I was trying to move off of this topic. You guys said on the text line. All right, back to the text line, I go. People have they have some grievances. All right, So this is from Brett Pete. Let's talk about the ridiculous projects that were done years ago, instead of where it's needed around the bigger cities, like one hundred plus miles of Highway sixty four from Raleigh to the outer Banks, or the forty miles spur around wilmy Wood. Makes a trip there easier when I go there once or twice a year, but would have been much better here. See, Okay, there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for why all of those sweet sweet highway dollars went down east. It's because that's where the Democrat leadership lived. Okay, See makes sense, right When they had to drive to Raleigh, and they are the leaders of the state, and they control all the appropriations, and they're the power brokers and all that, they wanted to make sure that their roads in the middle of nowhere that had nothing on them were brand new, nice and wide fed funded drive down whatever, like easy to drive down. And that's really what it's all about. In fact, Pat McCrory when he became governor, that was one of the first things he did was to revamp or to try to reform the way that NCDOT allocated the funding because in the way they prioritized projects. He wanted them based on population and need versus political power. But then the toll road in North Mech, which was approved you'll recall under Bev Burdue, his predecessor, and then people turned against the toll lane up in North Mech and they blamed him, and so they voted him out. And so now we're yeah, I mean, oh, it's you showed him. Really great job we got we got eight years of Roy Cooper and nc DOOT seems to be operating back to the way it was. So but your your opposition to BEV produced toll lanes is noted. Bebop in Rock Thrill said Monica's correct. Pete Pineville did not want people getting stabbed on the train at their stop. That was the It's funny because it's true. And then he says if we got thirty five percent of illegal aliens off the roads, traffic would be reduced by roughly thirty five percent. Yeah, that is Look, that is part of the issue here as well. You have a large illegal alien population, and that puts pressure on the infrastructure, puts pressure on the schools, puts pressure on the housing market. Right, So that's if you get people that are here illegally out of the country, then it freeze up a lot of that space. Seven oh four number says. Four hundred north of Atlanta pulled up their tolls after twenty years, Bill says, ask not for whom the tolls bill they are billing the I see what you did there, Scotty says, Come on, people. The solution to all of this is very simple. Retire. That's what me and the wife are doing at the end of this year. So long, suckers. Joseph says. The Cross Island Parkway in Hilton Head used to be a toll once it was paid for it. Now it's free, and the Monroe Bypass is a godsend. I will pay ten dollars a mile to never look at Monroe again. We took that on the way to the beach. This weekend, And yeah, I take the Monroe bypass every chance I get, because when I met Christy, she was living in Monroe. So I have made that trip to Monroe down seventy four. And if I never make that trip again, it's fine by me. Seven oh four number says, eliminate toll roads for the privileged, and institute a payroll tax for all the people that want high wages from Charlotte but don't want to pay property taxes, and keep our roads congested by traveling back and forth, and use the money to build more roads. Okay, good luck with that. Ashville has tried to do this a payroll tax inside its city limits because they make the exact same argument. And this is why I came. Up with the cartipoult idea, right, because you don't want the people here, but you want their money. So that's why I said, how about you just create tribuchetes on the interstate and when people coming from outside city limits, when they drive over, you just fling that vehicle right over the city, and as the vehicle's flying through the air, tumbling through the air, all the money falls out and lands on the streets. There you go say, problem solved. Don't know how to. I'm not sure how they land yet, but it's an engineering thing. Nine eighth numbers says, can't even imagine what kind of disaster the lie and parkways must be across Long Island. Now. The LIE had a sinkhole the other my cousin was telling me, apparently recently, just like a massive sinkhole opened up on the Long Island Expressway. Noah says, my dad won't even drive on I seventy seven anymore because of how bad traffic is. I think we should add to lanes to fix this. And Frank says me not driving right now, enjoying not being told. On I eight five in Giberis County, the best way to avoid a toll is to just not. Drive, all right, I am now moving on. We have a familiar face who has thrown his name into the hat and then his hat into the ring, to be the interim mayor of Charlotte. Longtime city councilmen James Smudgie Mitchell. If you hear somebody pronounce it smuggy, that means they are probably new to town because he spells it smuggy, but it's pronounced smudgie. And the reason why. According to his uncle Norman Mitchell, who was a longtime county commissioner, was that he always would have he would like when he was a kid, he would have like dirt smudged all over his face and stuff. That was the story. I don't don't know if that's true, but that was the lure. So James Smudgie Mitchell, he is pitching himself to his colleagues to be the interim mayor after Mayor vy Lyles resigns on June thirtieth. Mitchell sent his vision to his colleagues on Sunday by email. This is a piece by Joe Bruno at WSOCTV. Got a look at the PowerPoint presentation that Smudgie put together. He says, quote, as I come to the close of my public service career, if given the opportunity to serve as interim mayor, I will adhere to our tradition of not running for the office of mayor in twenty twenty seven. Okay so, there is no legal prohibition against the interim mayor running for mayor. Okay so. And this has happened a few times in Charlotte's history where a mayor has been unable to serve out the remainder of their term, and so the city council appoints a replacement as an interim. They've done this off also for city council vacancies, and so when the vacancy appears, they have to appoint somebody of the same political party to that seat. And I do find this interesting that Smudgie is promising that he will adhere to the tradition of not running for the office. Yes, you know, but there are there are some other traditions that city council has had too. For example, if you are running at large across the city for city council and you are the top votainer you finished first, you would be the mayor pro tem. That's what the tradition always was until they until Democrats. Well first they first did it to Why who did they rook out of that? I think it was Patrick Mumford, Republican. He was the votainer and they rooked him out of mayor pro tem and gave it to Pat Cannon. Because then they came up with a new tradition and they were like, hmmmm, it's the top votainer of the majority party. Because the Republicans had lost the majority on city Council, so they gave it to Pat Cannon, who then tried to parlay that are run from mayor. He eventually does become mayor, and then he gets indicted for bribery and corruption and that opens up then a vacancy in the mayor's office, and that's when the city council names State Senator Dan Claudefelter to the post. And Dan Claudefelter is like totally going to adhere to the tradition, not going to run for mayor. Then he has a change of heart and now he does want to run for mayor. And that's when I think Jennifer Roberts got into the race, and then she beat him in the primary, right, and then of course she launches the jihad on the bathrooms and prompts the HB two bill from the General Assembly. We end up in this big fight. Like fifteen years ago, we really were ahead of the curve on all of that, and then she gets ousted in the next primary by vy Lyles and she's been there ever since. Over on the city council side, there have been several election cycles where the top voteener among the at large candidates has not been named the mayor pro tem dimple Ajhmira. She's finished first like twice I think. And because I guess the other city Council members they don't like her so much and so they would they would not give her the mayor pro tem position. So I'm not really sure this promise of adhering to the traditions is really worth a whole lot. But for what it's worth, he is saying he won't run again. Council is set to discuss the vacancy at its meeting tonight. If appointed, Mitchell promises he won't run for mayor again. Joe Bruno at WSOCTV obtained a copy of the PowerPoint that Mitchell emailed his colleagues. And he's calling his vision Team. That's what it's called, and it stands for it's an acronym. It stands for together, everybody achieves more. That doesn't give you the war fuzzies. I don't know what would I mean? My goodness, he's gonna have a year and a half. To team. You know. One of Mitchell's most significant proposals is he wants to create committee vice chairs. This is groundbreaking stuff here, okay, because the committee the city council committees, they have chairs that they don't have vice chairs. Now, I don't know if. You're gonna get paid anything extra for being a vice chair or what, probably like maybe in another budget cycle, but for now. I mean, remember they gave themselves the big pay raises. That was one of the big things. I think it was probably the only thing that Braxton Winston got done before he went off to lead the union. The pay raise for city council members put him at somewhere. I think they were around fifty k, now, something like that, because it really is a full time job, and for Braxton Winston, like literally was his job, so like he needed the money, so they raised all of their pay So I do feel like, Okay, if we're going to pay you fifty k for this quote part time job, which they will claim it's definitely not a part time job, but I don't know of like fifty k, like you're into full time job status there. But they also have other jobs, so maybe it's like a three quarter of a job. I don't know. It would ensure all council members are either chair or vice chair of a committee. Other proposals include creating monthly newsletters, a monthly TV show and a dashboard to track priorities. I'm looking forward to the TV show. I got to tell you if he could do that, dude, do you know how much content I'm going to have. It'll take six votes to appoint Mitchell or anybody to be into a mayor. If he's appointed, then counsel is going to have to appoint somebody else to fill out his unexpired term, and then right and yeah, so they would have to pick a new mayor pro ten and then new position or a new person for his at large position. Former Charlotte Mayor Jennifer Roberts has also said that she would be interested in the gig, as well as former mayoral candidates Brendan McGinnis and Delter Delter Gwynn. They've expressed interest as well. City leaders have not decided on their appointment process or timeline, but again, they are set to discuss this tonight. Meanwhile, the deputy opinion editor over at the Charlotte Observer says, what's the big deal with the NAACP Charlotte Meckleberg Chapter president saying that the interim mayor position needs to be filled by a black person. What's the big deal. Deputy opinion editor of The Charlotte Observer, Paige Maston had a piece the other day called the NAACP said Charlotte should appoint a black mayor. Why the meltdown? Well, that's the big deal with that. I don't understand. Why Why are people losing their minds over this? In a recent Facebook post, she says to Charlotte Mecklinberg, NAACP called for city leaders to appoint a black interim mayor after vy Lyles steps down at the end of June. The post said, quote, if the city council votes a non black person in as interim mayor again, voters will hold you accountable next year. The post also noted that it was quote seriously disturbing for white folks to be lobbying to be appointed to the position while black representation is being undermined and stripped nationwide. Okay, As I mentioned when the NAACP leader Karin mac first made these comments, I did a breakdown. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I did a breakdown of the black representation on city council and compared that to the black population as a proportion in the city of Charlotte, and you'll never guess, but blacks are overrepresented on the Charlotte City Council. They are like two thirds of the city council, and they're only somewhere in the neighborhood of about I believe thirty five percent of the total population, so they are represented by a two to one margin. There are I believe two white people on the city council, and whites make up forty percent of the population. So if we're going to play this game that skin color matters the most, then a bunch of city council members need to be stepping down. That's a consistent standard. The remarks have since spiraled into a larger controversy online, drawing outrage from people who have called it quote racist and toxic. Okay, hang on, there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for why people are calling this racist and toxic. It's because it is That's why people are saying that. Right, you are saying that the only person who could or should be named to replace the current person must share the same race. They must be of the same race. Why is there something that makes another race inferior just because of their race that they are now not able to do the job because of their race. See how this might be considered to be racist. That's why people are calling it racist. It's even caught the attention of Fox News. But the outrage largely misses the point of the post, which is not that a white person can't be mayor of Charlotte. The point is that voters in Charlotte elected a black mayor, so the interim appointment should reflect that choice until voters have the chance to weigh in again. In other words, they only voted for vy Lyles because she's black, which I should point out Page Maston is white. Okay, so what so you think you're speaking for every black person that voted in the Charlotte City count or Charlotte mayor's race because vy Lyles was opposed by a white woman who was a Republican and Republicans are like, there's like four of them left in the city of Charlotte. But we are to believe that you know the reason why one was because she's black. It wasn't because of her deep connections to the deep state in Charlotte, the bureaucratic class. Right she's been in She worked for the city manager's office for a very long time. That's where I knew her from years before she ran for mayor. She was plugged in with the Foundation for the Carolinas. She was warm to the business community. They could deal with her. She was not perceived as a radical, flame throwing leftist moon bat right. None of that matters. None of her skills, her experience, none of that stuff matters. It's just that, oh, black person, vote for them. That's what page Maston is saying here, and she doesn't even realize she's saying it. That's how deeply embedded this way of thinking is on the left. Max said in an interview with WCNC Charlotte that quote, it would not be a good look for us to give a seat that originally was a black woman's seat that we dually elected in the Charlotte Mecklenburg area. Actually just the city of Charlotte, Okay, Mecklenburg. People don't get to vote for the city mayor, right, that's just the city of Charlotte that we dually that we give a Do we give a black woman seat to a white person at this time? Why she says it's not a good look? Why Why would that not be a good look? What if the person has all like, has the identical resume, identical disposition, identical leadership skills, business connections, government connections. Right, it's vililes, but she's white. You would disqualify her because she's a white Democrat. That's why people say that's racist, and that's why people say it's toxic, because if you keep playing this game, Page Maston, NAACP, you keep playing this game and making people see only race and making people or giving permission for people to make decisions based only on a candidate's race. Do you know what happens. If other races start playing that game too? See, it only works for the elected officials that comprise the city council right now, and they're backers the Black Political Caucus, the NAACP. Right, this works because you're the only ones playing that game. But at some point, when you racialize everything, all of the races then start playing that game, and that is a very dangerous path to be on, one that one would think we would know a little bit about in America in the South. Right, you start playing this game of identifying yourself by your race first and then rejecting everybody that isn't part of your race, bad things happen from that. That's why people are calling it toxic. She goes on to say, there is value in identity politics, but it can also be incomplete because descriptive representation is not the same thing as substantive representation. We shouldn't discourage any qualified candidate from raising their hand for the job, or council members from considering. But that's exactly what Corin mac did. That is exactly what she did. She said, why do we have all these white folk that are that are lobbying to be in the position, Like she doesn't even think that they should be raising their hand to volunteer for the position. They should not even. They should not even volunteer for the job because of the color of their skin. That's what the NAACP is saying, and that's what makes it racist, and that's what makes it toxic. I'm glad I could that up, but I also yeah, she goes on to say, other leaders in groups also have a voice, and our elected officials can then decide what's fair right for everybody. Yeah, so I guess the what Association for the Advancement of White People? They can also advocate for an only white mayor? Can they do that 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 thepetecleanershow dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.