Strip-Mining Wake County

Must admit I'm behind the times on this one... Read about the Wake County Blue Ribbon Committee earlier this week and found a link to their report which was published in July 2006. Not light reading, and will take some time to really digest this.

The committee was organized to evaluate projected growth's impacts on our tax structure, infrastructure and quality of life. The planning horizon is the next 25 years.

On first scan through, here are some interesting factoids:

• Wake County's population is expected to double over the next 30 years, to 1.4 million.
• Today the county has 1,320 jail beds. We will need between 3,200 and 3,800 by year 2030, as evidenty as convicts will comprise a portion of our population growth. In fact, we will need to spend $800M on additional criminal justice facilities.
  
• We will have to invest $11.7 billion on our school system as our student population grows from 120,000 to 280,000 over this period of time. To raise this capital, the committee recommends increasing sales tax by 1%, adding the 1% real estate transfer tax, and reassessing properties every four years instead of every eight.
• Going to need another $6B for road construction, plus another $6B from the fed. Committee recommendation is that we add toll roads and use part of the sales tax increase to fund this.
• Traffic: Daily vehicle traffic miles have gone from 9.5 million in 1986 to 25 million in 2003 (now I know why there seem to be more cars on the road)

I could go on, but I won't. The committee included a fair number of real estate developers. If our taxes are going to fund these kinds of growth costs, I can't begin to imagine how many billions of dollars the developers stand to make. Once the locusts (as another poster appropriately described them) are done in Wake County, they will move on to the next hot spot and start all over. We will be left living in another Atlanta.