Based off of discussion in a House Transportation Committee meeting on Tuesday, lawmakers are still unsure how or why a $500,000 spending cap on light rail projects was included in the budget at the end of an extraordinarily-long legislative session last year.

Mecklenburg County Republican William Brawley said during the committee meeting had the cap been introduced prior to the end of the session, it likely would not have been implemented.

“Let’s be candid guys,” Brawley said, “in September, we would’ve swallowed a lot of bitter pills to get out of town.”

The item is of local interest because it was initially described as a “project killer” for the Orange – Durham Light Rail project. The $1.6 billion estimated cost of the light rail line is being split between local, state and federal dollars. The federal government would ultimately be asked to pay half of the overall cost with the remaining funding being split between the local and state levels. The local 25 percent would be funded through a sales tax increase approved by the vote of Orange and Durham County residents.

Wake County Republican Nelson Dollar said “it was bad policy when it was done last year, and I appreciate the opportunity to fix it this year.”

But not all members of the committee shared the enthusiasm to repeal the cap.

“I think we’re opening the door to the possibility of taking transportation moneys that could be better used some place else in the state for a light rail project,” said Onslow Republican George Cleveland.

The project was one of the first to go through a data-driven process as part of the Strategic Transportation Investments law passed by the General Assembly in 2013.

“The idea was to make decisions on funding based on data and local input after open hearings,” Brawley said. “It was to take out of transportation funding the idea that we decide up here how all the money’s spent based on who can get the most votes.”

Granville and Person County Republican Representative Larry Yarborough, who was elected in 2014, said he had not seen the data that supported the light rail project.

“I haven’t seen any data here that supports the concept of light rail,” Yarborough said. “Everything I know about it is that it’s a feel-good proposition that results in a very expensive cost per passenger mile and it benefits a very small area of the state.

“I know the people in my district would not benefit from a light rail built somewhere else.”

Brawley said that rejecting the data collected to allocate transportation dollars and reverting back to picking and choosing which projects to fund would be a negative for the state as a whole.

“If we leave this in primarily to kill a particular project in Durham and Orange Counties, what we’re really saying is we’re going to go back to, ‘We’re going to fund the roads we want, whenever we want to fund them. And we’re not going to worry about data, and we’re not going to worry about how we spend our money based upon what is the most bang for the buck for the citizens of North Carolina for every dollar we spend.’”

The bill passed through the committee and is now scheduled to be heard in the House Appropriations Committee. Several members of the Senate, meanwhile, have introduced an identical bill to repeal the light rail cap.

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