Charlotte residents are expected to pack the City Council chamber Monday night in opposition to the Interstate 77 toll lane expansion from uptown to the South Carolina border.
Meanwhile, Charlotte Mayor Vi Lyles has asked the council’s transportation committee to discuss the controversial project on March 5.
West Charlotte residents say the toll lanes will be ugly, increase noise pollution and further divide them from uptown. They say the city and the state are making the same mistakes as decades earlier, when I-77 was first built, bulldozing some homes in their neighborhoods.
A majority of City Council members say they support pausing the project, including Joi Mayo, Kimberly Owens, Dimple Ajmera, JD Mazuera Arias, Malcolm Graham and Victoria Watlington.
Council member Ed Driggs, who is the council’s point person on transportation, has said it’s too late to stop the project.
To delay I-77, council members will have to get the Charlotte Regional Transportation Planning Organization to back a pause, or to pull I-77 from a list of scheduled projects. Charlotte has 31 of 68 votes on CRTPO, and would need just two or three additional voting members to join it.
Mecklenburg Commissioner and CRTPO member Leigh Altman last week asked the CRTPO attorney whether the organization can legally stop the project. She’s upset that the N.C. Department of Transportation drafted maps of the project two months after it said the project could no longer be stopped. She said it was a “bait and switch.”
Meanwhile, the N.C. DOT is moving ahead. On Friday, it released a shortlist of four contractors who could build the project. One is Ferrovial, the parent company of Cintra, which built the controversial I-77 toll lanes in north Mecklenburg.
