Why We Will Fight Now for Better Transit in Charleston
Charleston, SC- 102 Million Dollars of your Transit Funding may have been diverted, deferred, or something else. The difference doesn’t matter much when you are standing in the rain waiting for a CARTA bus which comes once an hour. I know this is long, but since I missed a day at the beach to write it, if you care, you should read it. You’ll be done before the bus arrives. If you are waiting on a bus to take you to a local beach, you can finish War and Peace as well.
Mary Doesn’t Get Her Phone Wet
Mary Smith was on her way to class when the CARTA #10 bus rolled into a thunderstorm. Mary’s the leader of the local Green party and a veteran of last year’s fight to pass the half penny sales tax to improve public transit in the SC Lowcountry. Mary is radical about the things she cares about. She can scare people. She’s the sort of person who is constantly told to leave SC.
Water was already leaking through the roof of the 22-year-old bus when it hit an extended flood pool along River’s Ave. The busy commercial corridor and highway that links the tourist mecca of historic Charleston, the threadbare 1960s era commercial strip of working class North Charleston, and the traffic clogged, sprawlopolis of Summerville.
As the deep pool of trash filled water hit the bottom of the aging bus, the floor buckled upward and a torrent of dirty drainage erupted into the bus like a fountain and rolled across the floor. The lady across from Mary pulled her feet up on the seat with the ease of experience. Mary pulled out her phone and began recording. Nobody really complained.
A Regressive Tax for a Desperate Need and a Deal with the Devil
Bus service in the Lowcountry has been so bad for so long that riders care about little more than wether or not the bus comes on time, a critical issue when many routes run only once an hour and your hours are only worth 8 or 9 dollars each to your employer. Many transit riders here spend 11 to 12 hours a day on their job and transit commute. If they get a full shift, that’s 8 hours. The rest is spent waiting at stops and crawling through traffic. If the dirty water doesn’t get too deep running across the rubber mats covering the floor to drain out of the doors, they don’t really care. They just want to get home.
Tens of thousands of people working in our coastal city can’t go to the beach because no public transit goes there. Many of their children have never seen the ocean. We’ve been pushing to get transit back to the beach for over three years. The maps distributed with the I26 alt plan prior to the election showed routes running to Folly Beach and the Isle of Palms. See our video on that fight and our occupation of Battery Beach.
Last fall they did care to vote to tax their small incomes another half penny per dollar spent in the hopes of getting 600 million dollars on better transit. It was a deal with the devil that also wasted 1.3 billion dollars on more suburban road construction which will induce more sprawl.
There was also 200 million dollars to purchase green space, which mostly means purchasing plantation land from rich people that will soon be under the ocean. The county donut holes out their plantation houses and horse stables and then grants back an easement so they may hunt, ride, and play on the land they used to pay taxes on before they got a big fat check. Sometimes a public park is created in the process, but you can almost never get there on a bus.
This was a regressive tax on poor people, of which the poorest got back less than a third of what they contributed for the hope of 250 million dollars to help build a modern bus rapid transit system in the future and 350 million dollars for improved bus service over 25 years which could begin the following year.
County Council passed a resolution saying that was the deal. Nobody believed them. Some of us (Best Friends of Lowcountry Transit and the Chamber of Commerce) watched the poor transit riders shivering in the rain at the stops which have no shelters (despite a 200-thousand-dollar appropriation two years ago to build shelters). We decided to gamble that we could hold county council’s throat to the knife and make them keep their admittedly shaky promise. We got that promise on video.
The Coastal Conservation League and League of Women Voters damned it all as a slush fund and fought the referendum. People stopped talking to each other in our community which had been allies for twenty years and may never speak to each other again. That is one of the costs of leadership that cannot be trusted- in a world where there is already too much to fight about.
Support for the referendum fell by the day as the election approached, but Best Friends of Lowcountry Transit, Americans for Transit, and the Amalgamated Transit Union spent 100 thousand dollars on our Transit Complete the Penny Campaign. Homeless people crawled out from under bridges, took showers and knocked on thousands of doors for $10 an hour to help squeak out a victory.
The night , Donald Trump took the Presidency. We won our election. It was draining, and in the context of the national disaster, a bit hollow. Here is a video of what the campaign was like.
Controlling Expectations in a State of Low Expectations
Ronald Mitchum, head of the local Council of Governments (COG) who happily allows elected officials to delegate their responsibilities to him, began talking about “controlling expectations” within a week of the election. He runs two local transit authorities, handles road projects and works on many local development initiatives. The COG had just completed its I26alt study, at a cost of over a half million dollars, with detailed recommendations for the area’s transit system. The results of the study were almost a secret. Take a look at the recommendations from that study, which include detailed plans for improved bus service. Elected officials throughout the area supporting the referendum said this was their plan.
The silence which followed the election eventually gave way to the realization that Donald Trump was going to be a very scary President. We realized would have to fight for the better transit system we had voted to build and as of May 1st were now paying for. Noone was hired. Nothing was done. The unending controversy over the I526 extension, our ten-year fight over a 700-million-dollar road the county may not have the money to pay for, as always, continued to burble into public awareness.
Members of our organization sat on both the Riders Advisory Committee and the BRT Advisory committee. The BRT advisory committee was told COG staff would handle planning new bus routes. The Rider’s advisory committee was told nothing about how the money to improve bus routes might be used. Discussion of the issue was actively discouraged at the carefully controlled meetings.
Transit Center gave our struggling organization a 20-thousand-dollar grant for the express purpose of protecting and forcing progress here. In May they flew me out to Seattle and fed me theory, practice, and high-octane superfoods for two days. We used their money to print up parts of the expensive government study the COG paid for but didn’t want anyone to see. We and spent three weeks handing it out to every business along 10 miles of Rivers Ave. We held a half dozen forums. We leafleted the growing number of demonstrations such as March for Science, sea level rise events, and Health care rallies. We hoped County Council wouldn’t cross this many people. We were apparently wrong.
The Best of Times and the Worst of Times
It is the best of times and the worst of times. We have money and the possibility of a better transit system. We competed for attention and talent with the causes of a terrified population where activists like Thomas Dixon are trying to attend gunshot funerals, healthcare rallies, events defending gay rights and still see their families. Dozens of people are getting shot in our communities as the guns flood the city where the Emanuel 9 were slaughtered two years ago.
In the middle of all this Mark Sanford, our congressman (better known for flying to the bed of his mistress in Argentina while his staff told the state he was hiking the Appalachian trail) introduced a bill to federally defund public transit. Tim Scott, one of our US Senators, chairs the Senate Committee that governs transportation and awaits his next set of instructions from the Koch brothers. Despite years of requests, neither of these men has ever taken a bus ride with us. Scott may have boarded a CARTA bus on his own on one occasion.
Public Input as a Distraction, or How We Missed Our Bus
If those distractions were not enough, the COG decided to hold another study and round of community input meetings in June. We rounded up people to attend, made sure they were informed of what the last study had produced and asked why we were being handed blank maps as if we were still starting from scratch again.
The reason, we would discover in July, was that while the COG was asking us about public transportation, they were planning to defund it. A ten-year plan was being prepared to build roads on a “pay as you go” basis at the expense of transit. The study was a diversion. While we were pressing our clickers to see bars rise on survey charts at the College of Charleston, the COG and County Council were planning to make sure our bus service didn’t get better.
The result was a plan to spend only 3 million dollars next year on bus service. 2 million would go to purchase new equipment. Only one million would go for additional bus service. Since bus service was cut by about 2 million a year and a half ago, CARTA bus service will be inferior to what the community labored under in May 2016. The 350 million dollars available to improve bus service averages out to 14 million dollars per year. See the plan.
The plan continues about a decade into the future, with similar levels of spending for over ten years. The money not being spent on bus service now will go to build roads, A total of about 102 million dollars.
Sometime in the distant future, 10 or more years from now, the buses will supposedly get the money promised. The sexier Bus Rapid Transit project’s timeline slips back every time we turn our back. Many of the people who voted and pay the taxes will be dead by the time any of this happens, including quite possibly me. Nobody with brains or ambition is going to wait that long for better transit when you can get that elsewhere now.
Greyhound, US Air, and Passports
Nicolas Bell, the field organizer for the successful referendum campaign, left for New Orleans in December where he now rides the streetcars. Another friend of the cause gave up on America completely, liquidated her assets and now lives in Portugal where she doesn’t need a car. The woman who lead the Obama 08 Voter registration effort left for Boulder, Colorado. She doesn’t even smoke pot. Many people we speak to at the bus stops about better transit wave off our material and explain that they’re planning to leave for places with better transit, higher pay and a lower cost of living.
I’ve watched brains and citizen advocates pack up and leave the Charleston area for 20 years now. Charleston is still the most progressive place in SC, but progressive seems to be devolving to having sex in unusual ways and trying a wider variety of cheeses. Increasingly the situation with the schools, environment, transit, and affordable housing seems hopeless to more and more people. The people coming from elsewhere to retire largely want to pursue some variant of the plantation lifestyle. They’re not arriving to liberate the oppressed.
Huge numbers of new activists have erupted from the resistance, but a few hard hits against the wall sends many back to their keyboards where they imagine their Facebook posts will bring down Donald Trump. The details of local issues and governance are invisible on Rachael Maddow, so they’ll be fighting for the big things they can do the least about.
The City of Charleston just announced the construction of 60 affordable housing units. Last year over 500 were torn down in the area. In December CARTA rolled out a fleet of brand new buses for its tourist oriented, DASH service. The tourist buses don’t leak in the rain.
We do not know if the transit money we could be using now has been siphoned off to build I526 or some less controversial set of turn lanes and intersection improvements. We do know our widow’s mite of transit money won’t buy a lot of asphalt. Roads cost about 8 million dollars per lane mile on our soft, moist Lowcountry topography. The 11 million dollars reappropriated buys only 1.4 lane miles of roadway.
The Fight We Promised
We promised everyone that we would fight an attempt to do something like this. Everyone knew it was coming. Our opponents in the election are free to hang banners saying “I told you so” from the overpasses and handbill the miserable people sweating in the humidity at the bus stops saying we are fools. That may be so, but they have not nor will they be able to claim we are cowards.
County Council hasn’t broken the word of their resolution yet. If we live long enough, we might see every penny of the promised 350 million spent on bus service. Of course, those future dollars will be worth less than the ones they’re spending first. However, it’s a sleazy breach of faith with the voters and taxpayers which guarantees they’ll probably never be able to pass another referendum again.
Last week the Chairman of County Council, Vic Rawl, authorized filing a lawsuit based on discussions in executive session, without public debate or vote, to force the state highway department to build I526. It clearly violates the State’s Freedom of Information act. We may intervene in the suit. Rawl used to be my friend.
He says the state can’t ask the county where it’s going to get the missing 300 million dollars from to finish the project. I doubt he’ll be telling us either without a deposition subpoena. Fortunately, I have the form for that on my hard drive. More Lawyers ride buses than most people know.
Our Struggle Begins at the Stops
It is easy to refuse an imperfect plan to fund public transit when you drive a nice, dry car to work or wherever when you will. If you park it in the shaded lot of a well-funded non-profit which claims to worry about the environment, that doesn’t’ make it any harder.
However, we daily witness the soul grinding misery of working people seeing the hours of their lives pulverized to dust by a system calculated to provide just enough mobility to keep the toilets of tourist hotels clean. We see the cost of years of 11 and even 12-hour days which allow our working poor to connect the families they barely see with the little paychecks our buses allow them to earn. Worse still are the shell shocked and confused people who wander the system, occasionally managing a five-hour bus pilgrimage out to our obscenely located county mental health office on the suburban fringe to get the meds which hammer them into muteness.
Decency requires us to run the risk of attempting to end this or ending our efforts altogether. Another four years of halfway measures would have been an exercise in hypocrisy. If we must attempt to birth both better transit and a functional democracy into the place General Sherman called, “the hellhole of secession” so be it.
We Start in August and We’ll be done Planning by Labor Day
We need help to plot our way forward. This is bigger and much harder than the happy and rewarding work of supporting the deployment of better bus service than we hoped for. At the worst possible time, we must bring together a gun violence shattered African American Community, people terrified about losing their access to healthcare or their job providing healthcare with a besieged Latino Community, and a threatened LGBT community. Together we face a hard fight at long odds in the callous misery of the deep South.
If you are from the talk it to death and get in touch with your feelings school of activism, don’t miss what we’re going to do between now and Labor day. We’re going to listen to everybody and talk for a month. After we put the cooler and umbrella away for the season, it’s going to be about relentless action, pressure and the kind of discussions you have when the PA system is plugged into a portable generator. The fight will start before dawn and alternate between the public square, courtrooms, and the hot corners of the hood. We’re going to spend a lot of money, sweat, and time. We’re not saving anything for the next fight. If conflict and anger bother you, join a yoga group instead and hope the bus line it’s located on doesn’t get canceled.
Action Cures A Sick World
Here is what we’re going to do in August. Come show up to talk, because there isn’t going to be a lot of talking after Labor Day. Twenty years of talking and waiting has been enough. Dialogue can enable dysfunction. Action cures a sick world.
We’ve been at this for six years now. We’re familiar with the weaknesses of our opposition. We know they abhor work. We can encamp our battalions in places they’re never going to go and fight them in ways they don’t understand. Southern manners protect, blind and disable.
We’re building on our long-planned partnership with the ConNECKted Art installation, itself a two-year project, which invited us to install our Lowcountry Transit Trolley Timeline as part of their exhibit on Social Justice, Gentrification, and Equity at the City Gallery in downtown Charleston. The gallery is located behind the Pineapple Fountain at Waterfront Park. The Gallery is half a block south of the Waterfront park stop on the DASH 211 Bus Line and 4 blocks East of the Queen Street Stop on the CARTA 20 bus.
Tues through Sunday Until August 27 during gallery hours– Drive our model trolley through a 400 year timeline. Learn about Charleston’s struggle with social justice and public transportation. Share the transit future you want here. See the video.
August 10– 2 pm to 8:30 pm- Transit Gets ConNECKted. Make a transit rider’s button. Build a model Lowcountry rapid transit system. Sign the Citizen’s Commitment to Transit. Record your ideas to deliver to the CARTA board and County Council. This was planned before we realized we would be fighting for funding instead of community building this year. This is the sort of thing we wanted to be doing. Facebook signup for Transit Day at ConNECKted.
August 15– 3:30 pm to 5 pm– Join our Transit Town Hall. Talk about County Council’s alleged decision appropriating $11 million from CARTA bus transit funds to road construction. County Council has been invited to make a 12 minute, uninterrupted presentation about their decision. Help decide the course of our future struggle for better transit. Facebook Event Signup for the Transit Town Hall. We have a full color 11x17 poster you can download and print featuring our signature image, Together We Go Forward. We also have printable 2 up handbills.
August 16, 1 pm– Join us as we deliver your input to the CARTA Board Meeting in N. Charleston.
August 22, 6pm– Demonstration and presentation to Charleston County Council in N. Charleston
If you want to join this fight, we have paid Community Transit Outreach Organizer positions open at $10 an hour for work in Charleston, N. Charleston and Summerville. Details about the jobs on Facebook.
Updates
Last week’s version on next week’s fight doesn’t keep very well. For updates, see our Facebook Page at https://www.facebook.com/BFLowcountryTransit/ To reach William Hamilton call (843) 870-5299 or email mailto:wjhamilton29464@gmail.com?subject=Fight for Funding - BFLTransit
Written by William J. Hamilton, Executive Director of Best Friends of Lowcountry Tranist, Inc. Hamilton is not paid for his work as Executive Director.