gronberg@heraldsun.com; 419-6648
DURHAM — Transit planners from Durham think they’ve hit on a way to make sure at least some of the revenue that Triangle counties raise for a rail project with a prospective sales-tax surcharge flows across county borders.
The strategy appears to center on links to two key stations along a proposed rail line, one about a mile inside Durham County’s western border, the other about a mile inside its eastern border.
So far, the financial models Durham officials are hammering out with planners from neighboring Orange and Wake counties posit that Durham would pay to connect the two stations to the rest of its own, internal transit network.
But Orange and Wake in theory would be responsible for filling the mile-wide gaps between their borders and the two stations — one in the Farrington Road/N.C. 54 area adjoining Chapel Hill, the other in the N.C. 54/Miami Boulevard area of RTP.
That flows logically from using station sites “to define rational starting and ending points” for financial responsibility, Durham Transportation Director Mark Ahrendsen said.
But it also meets the hope that Durham officials like Mayor Bill Bell have of seeing revenue from the sales levy flow cross county lines, as they think it’ll have to to ensure the construction of a genuinely regional transit system.
Elected officials, however, haven’t signed off on the planners’ assumption. And some are skeptical they will.
In the talks to date, “we’ve heard grave reservations from elected officials,” Durham County Manager Mike Ruffin said.
The problem that planners across the Triangle face is that the region’s population — and revenue-generating potential — is heavily skewed toward Wake County.
Wake is home to about 69 percent of the three counties’ population. As of last year, it figured to generate about 71 percent of the revenue state financial analysts were expecting the sales surcharge to yield.
Durham accounts for 21 percent of the Triangle’s population and figured last year to generate about 22 percent of the tax’s estimated $72.7 million in annual revenue.
Orange County has 10 percent of the population, but with a stunted business sector was only expected to generate 7 percent of the sales tax’s total revenue.
Judging from the state’s estimates and U.S. Census Bureau figures, Wake and Durham were both likely to generate about $60 per person per year from a half-cent levy on each dollar of sales. Orange County figured to generate only about $38 a head.
Durham figures to become the pivot point in any Triangle-wide transit network, as any line to RTP’s jobs center has to pass through its territory.
“As a result, a disproportionate amount of the regional system is within Durham,” Ahrendsen said. “That creates kind of a financial challenge under the assumption that the revenue stays where it’s collected or generated.”
Business leaders are sympathetic to Durham’s problem.
One key lobbying group, the Regional Transportation Alliance, has said that while “the resources raised in a county [need] to be decided by that county,” that “doesn’t mean they’d be spent in that county,” said Joe Milazzo, its executive director.
Jurisdictions whose residents engage in a lot of cross-county travel could well decide “to have resources spent that way,” just to be “responsive to their constituents,” Milazzo added.
A poll Milazzo’s group commissioned last year found support in all three counties for cross-border links.
Residents polled in Orange and Durham counties generally listed cross-county travel as their top priority for new or expanded transit. Their Wake counterparts, nearly 36 percent of them at least, said travel to and from RTP merited highest priority.
Within-county travel topped the list for anywhere from about 16 percent of those polled, in Wake, down to less than 12 percent, in Orange.
Milazzo said the alliance intends to poll residents again this month to gauge their support for new transit initiatives.
