Davidson flips on I-77 toll lanes, and the regional board votes tonight with the outcome all but set

Davidson’s town commissioners voted Tuesday night, September 22, to reverse their opposition to the I-77 South toll lanes, WSOC reported, joining Charlotte, Cornelius, Huntersville, Monroe and Statesville in switching from no to yes under the threat of a state penalty. The Charlotte Regional Transportation Planning Organization votes Wednesday night on whether to restore its own support for the project, and with Charlotte’s 31 weighted votes now back in favor, the outcome is close to certain.

The vote will end a saga that began in May, when Charlotte City Council rejected the project 6 to 5 and the regional board followed by withdrawing its support. We reported Monday’s 7 to 4 council reversal yesterday. Davidson’s flip removes one of the last holdouts.

Why Davidson changed its mind

Davidson’s commissioners do not like toll lanes. The town already has them on I-77 north of Charlotte, and when the board debated the issue on September 8, Commissioner Ryan Fay called the state’s penalty government coercion, both political and financial, according to WFAE. Mayor Rusty Knox and other commissioners said they did not want to support the project but had to weigh the fine against a town of about 16,000 people.

That fine would have been about $1.5 million for Davidson alone, WFAE reported. The mechanism is a provision Republican lawmakers added to the state budget signed in July: local governments that voted against the project had 90 days to restore support, and those that did not could be billed for a share of the design money the state had already spent. The Department of Transportation put that total at $69.5 million, divided among the governments that stayed opposed. If the regional board approves the project, no one pays.

Davidson’s vote in May had been described as a show of solidarity with Charlotte. Once Charlotte switched on Monday, the town was being asked to pay $1.5 million for a position that could no longer stop the project.

The math on the regional board

The CRTPO is not one member, one vote. Voting power is weighted by population across the board’s 74 votes, WFAE and The Charlotte Ledger have explained, and an item needs a majority of the votes present, not of all 74. The numbers that matter:

• Charlotte holds 31 of the 74 weighted votes, about 41 percent of the board.
• Mecklenburg County holds three votes and has said its position against the lanes has not changed.
• Charlotte and the county together, at 34 votes, could have blocked the project only if enough other members stayed home, which is common at CRTPO meetings but was never something to bank on.
• Cornelius, Huntersville, Monroe and Statesville had already announced reversals before this week, and Davidson followed Tuesday.
• Matthews, whose mayor John Higdon had asked Charlotte to cover the town’s fine if it stayed opposed, had not announced its position as of Tuesday. Charlotte’s city attorney said the city could not pay another town’s penalty.

With Charlotte in the yes column, the Ledger wrote before the vote, the 11-mile project is certain to move forward. Davidson’s switch makes the margin wider and leaves Matthews and the county as the likely remaining dissents.

The money the state already spent

The penalty is built on design work the DOT has done since 2018. Financial records the department released this month show it spent $69,577,547 on I-77 South between November 2018 and August 2026, according to WFAE, including nearly $28 million to the engineering firm RS&H and about $5 million in legal fees. Charlotte alone risked owing more than $30 million of that.

The project itself is far larger. The DOT estimates the express lanes will cost between $3.2 billion and $4 billion to build, running two toll lanes in each direction from I-277 at Uptown to the South Carolina line, under a public-private partnership in which a private contractor builds and operates the lanes and keeps toll revenue. The state has committed about $600 million. Charlotte’s city attorney, Andrea Leslie-Fite, has questioned whether the reimbursement provision is legal, but no council member has pushed for a lawsuit and Malcolm Graham, one of the two who flipped, said he did not want to file one.

What the neighborhoods were promised

The flip in Charlotte was helped along by a memorandum of agreement in which the DOT offered up to $300 million in community investments along the corridor, which city officials considered legally binding, WFAE reported. Neighborhood leaders along I-77 through south and west Charlotte had largely opposed the lanes in May, and the benefits package was the state’s answer.

Environmental objections have not gone away. Mecklenburg County commissioners said in March that they had never been warned about the project’s effects on parkland and streams along the corridor, Axios Charlotte reported, and the county’s environmental committee argued the lanes mainly benefit drivers who can afford to pay. The DOT delayed its request for proposals to June to address those concerns before the May votes derailed the schedule entirely.

What happens tonight

The CRTPO meets Wednesday evening. If it votes to restore support, the DOT can resume the procurement it paused, and the reimbursement threat lapses for every local government. If Matthews and Mecklenburg County vote no, they would be the only members exposed to the penalty under the budget provision, and how the state would collect from a town that cannot pay is a question no one has answered publicly.

Construction is years away in any scenario. The procurement, environmental review and financing for a $4 billion partnership take time, and the lanes north of Charlotte that Davidson’s commissioners dislike took most of a decade from approval to opening. What tonight settles is whether the project is alive. Ten months after it appeared dead, it almost certainly is. We will report the vote and the roll call when the meeting ends.

Have a tip about this story? Send it to us through our contact form.