Transit foes 'grass roots?' One point of view

I spent a couple of hours last week talking with Robert FitzPatrick, who spent much of the 1970s helping Charlotte neighborhoods and grass roots groups organize to fight City Hall.

My Saturday column told of his efforts to prevent Freedom Park from being plundered by an ill-conceived canal project. The project would have dredged Little Sugar Creek and trapped it into concrete embankments and locks – and would have richly rewarded land owners and real estate developers who were pushing the plan.

In those days FitzPatrick and the folks he organized mostly fought City Hall and the business oligarchy that backed city government. Among the leaders of the group that fought the canal project were a roofer and a truck driver.

FitzPatrick helped organize the North Charlotte Action Association, which focused on code enforcement and trash pickup. He helped organize the Association for Better Public Transportation, a citizen group that fought (unsuccessfully) a bus fare increase that made Charlotte's fares among the highest in the country. (40 cents in 1974, equivalent to $1.66 today.) The group also wanted the city to take over the bus system, because the private company running it was providing, as FitzPatrick termed it, “nasty, dirty buses that were never on time.”

So I asked him what he thought of the folks who had organized to get the repeal of the transit tax onto the Nov. 6 ballot. They say they're “grass roots,” because the Charlotte Chamber and most elected officials here support the transit tax.

“I hope you will not link the group I was involved in with them,” he said. “We were not financed by somebody anonymous throwing a lot of money. To me that’s not real grass roots.” (Businessman Jay Morrison, who says he's running for school board, paid to hire professional petition-gatherers to get 48,000 signatures to put the measure on the ballot. Morrison hasn't said how much he paid. "Those close to Morrison say he's paid for about half the cost for the petition drive," a June 7 Observer news report said.)

And, FitzPatrick pointed out, “We didn’t have a single elected official anywhere within a hundred miles of us.” Co-chairs of the anti-transit tax petition are former school board member and former county commissioner Jim Puckett, former City Council member Don Reid. Helping them is former U.S. attorney Tom Ashcraft. None holds those positions now, of course.

FitzPatrick is not looking at CATS through rose-colored glasses. He said the single-issue interest groups, like the one formed to fight the transit tax, are a symptom of a government (including CATS) that doesn't take the time to be responsive to the public.

Is Charlotte different, I asked him, from the days when the business community ran the city?

"If it is," he said, "it's imperceptible to me. Just look at the sprawl. It's a disgrace. Is that vision? ... Nobody ever takes responsibility for disasters, like the death of the west side, or the university area. You can't even walk around up there. Whose vision was that?"