The Mecklenburg County commissioners were told Tuesday night that the I-77 South toll lanes are back in front of state lawmakers, not as a road to be built, but as a bill. A proposal in Raleigh would require the Charlotte-area governments that voted this spring to pull the project off the state's funded list to repay the North Carolina Department of Transportation an estimated $60 million for having done so.
The county's share of that bill would be small. Most of the money would fall on the City of Charlotte. But the commissioners, who have opposed the toll lanes from the start, spent part of their June 16 meeting objecting to a measure several of them described as an attempt to punish the region for a decision it was entitled to make, and to freeze that decision until 2027.
Lisette Nimmons, the county's intergovernmental affairs manager, walked the board through the proposal during the manager's report. The language is being carried as an amendment to House Bill 1094, a North Carolina Department of Transportation omnibus measure, and it was written by Sen. Vickie Sawyer, a Republican whose district covers Iredell and part of Mecklenburg County, according to reporting by WFAE and The Charlotte Observer. As of the meeting, the amendment was awaiting action in the Senate Transportation Committee.
What the amendment would do
The mechanism is a reimbursement requirement. If a metropolitan or rural planning organization removes a project from its transportation plan after the state has begun pre-development work, every local government that voted for the removal would owe NCDOT its share of the costs already spent. NCDOT puts those costs at $60 million.
Each government's bill would be set by its share of the weighted vote at the Charlotte Regional Transportation Planning Organization, the regional board known as CRTPO, whose May 20 vote pulled the project off the state's funded list. The City of Charlotte holds about 41 percent of that weighted vote, the largest single bloc, which is why the bill lands hardest there. (WFAE reported more broadly that Charlotte "would be responsible for almost all of the $60 million.") Mecklenburg County's share is smaller; Nimmons told the board it "is responsible for a small share of this vote," and that staff did not yet have an exact dollar figure for any government.
Three other provisions matter. The amendment's definitions are written to apply retroactively to January 1, 2026, reaching back to the spring votes. It would bar NCDOT and the state Board of Transportation from removing, reprioritizing, or reprogramming the I-77 South project before January 1, 2027. And it specifies that a local government may not use money from the new Mecklenburg transportation sales tax to cover the payment, while NCDOT would withhold state funding for new highway projects in the area until it is paid in full.
The most striking provision is the one that reaches backward. Asked by Commissioner Susan Rodriguez-McDowell what the 2027 date meant, Nimmons said the bill would treat the region's rescission as not yet in effect. "Until January 1, 2027, based on the language in this bill," she said, "nothing has changed with the project since the rescission vote." Rodriguez-McDowell restated it: "It's kind of like not acknowledging the rescission vote."
The board's response
The commissioners did not move their position. Vice Chair Leigh Altman, the county's representative at CRTPO, delivered the board's comment and called the bill an attempt "to threaten and coerce."
"This scare tactic of trying to assess $60 million to this region sort of doesn't make a lot of sense," Altman said. "If the bill is retroactive to January of this year, I find it very hard to believe that $60 million in studies were concluded in all of six months." She called the measure "really a power grab from the General Assembly," cited a legal opinion prepared by Daniel E. Peterson of Parker Poe for the town of Matthews that she said raises constitutional concerns, and asked NCDOT and Governor Josh Stein to make clear the state "would never hold hostage other unrelated projects because of this."
Commissioner Arthur Griffin Jr., who serves at-large, said the board's instruction to its representative had not changed. "I haven't found anyone that's embraced this notion of toll road," he said, having named the county's towns from Davidson to Pineville.
Commissioner Vilma D. Leake placed the fight in the history of the neighborhoods that earlier road and renewal projects cleared, invoking Brooklyn, the historically Black uptown community razed in the urban-renewal years. "The community is a black community where they're talking about disrupting the people as they did with Brooklyn," she said. "How are you going to penalize us for saying no?"
"In my view this is retaliatory governance as opposed to representative governance," Rodriguez-McDowell said.
Chair Mark Jerrell closed the discussion without a vote, because the item was information only. "This board has and will continue to put the people first," he said. "This is not about political posturing."
The heavier exposure sits with the city. Council Member Malcolm Graham told WFAE he wanted to "wait and review the amendment," and a spokesperson for Governor Stein said local leaders "have decisions to make about how to ensure the city's infrastructure can safely keep pace with Charlotte's growth while honoring their commitments to the communities that have been established there for generations." The Senate Transportation Committee was scheduled to take up the amendment Wednesday, and CRTPO meets Wednesday evening.
For now, by the bill's own terms, the decision the region already made does not count until 2027.