The Orange County Board of Commissioners meeting on Tuesday night at times felt like a funeral service for the Durham-Orange Light Rail Transit project.
Commissioners gave, in their own words, a “post-mortem” on the light rail, after which the commissioners unanimously voted to discontinue work on the project.
This is one step in a series of votes to formally end the light rail project. The GoTriangle Board of Trustees voted last week to recommend to Durham and Orange Counties that they discontinue their efforts. Now, Durham commissioners are scheduled to vote next on April 8.
Commissioner Mark Marcoplos, who is the county’s representative on the GoTriangle board, gave a list of several factors he said contributed to the project’s failure. He pointed first to “disingenuous” project partners Duke University and North Carolina Railroads. The state legislature also made things difficult, Marcoplos said, and so did the federal government shutdown, which set the project back two months at a crucial time in its development with the recent partial government shutdown.
“One or two of those problems would have been surmountable,” Marcoplos said, “but it was a cascade of fairly arbitrary circumstances that led us to this point.”
Marcoplos said that the influx of people to the Triangle was going to continue, with or without the light rail, and the need remained for a comprehensive regional transit plan. Commission chair Penny Rich agreed.
“We have a problem; we need to keep moving people around. And if we keep growing, we have got to really think about how we are going to do that.”
Commissioner Earl McKee, a longtime critic of the project, said any future transit planning needs to better prioritize the needs of Orange County. He said Tuesday that the light rail would have left many county residents, especially those in rural areas, behind.
“I would never agree to go back to an agreement that allows anything other than Orange County’s Board to control the direction of where we are going to go on transportation,” McKee said. “We need to have control over our own destiny.”
After Tuesday’s vote, county staff will come together in the next month to amend the Orange County Transit Plan and reallocate the $149.5 million Orange County set aside for the now-defunct light rail project. Deputy County Manager Travis Myren said a new transit plan would start from scratch and could include Durham or other counties as part of an agreement around regional transportation.
But the process for the transit plan will start again from the beginning and need public input and new agreements from county partners to move forward.
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