At the Tuesday, June 23, Lancaster City Council meeting, the Council voted in favor of applying for $320,000 worth of 2009 Lancaster County Urban Enhancement funding. One 20,000-dollar portion of this grant money is being set aside to support an independent feasibility study of the proposed Downtown streetcar system.

The County’s Urban Enhancement grants require a funding match, which means the City would $20,000 of it’s own upon grant award. This would bring the cost of the study to at least $40,000.

As explained by City Economic Development & Neighborhood Revitalization Director Randy Patterson, the purpose of the study will be to address two primary concerns: “One is the economic feasibility of a streetcar system—that it will not require subsidy; and two is the engineering feasibility of a streetcar system….” Patterson specified that the City plans to put the study project to a public bid, if the grant funds are secured.

City resident Randolph Carney questioned the action, suggesting the implications of applying public money to the proposed project: “There’s supposed to be a non-profit corporation managing the streetcar system, so, by taking this step, you’re committing the City to go in that direction….Just by sitting and saying, ‘yes, we are going to support a grant to study streetcars,’ you’re taking a very big step in the direction toward having streetcars.”

Councilman Jose Urdaneta held that the support of such a study does not indicate that the Council will ultimately support the system: “We’re not going to base our decision on just putting our finger out there and saying, ‘yes, this could work’; ‘this will not work.’ This is a way to get information—hard data on our hands and in our minds—so that, later on, independently we each analyze that data and say, ‘yes we support it’ or ‘we do not support it.”

Urdaneta added, “This study, according to the Streetcar Company, already exists. We just do not trust that study as being independent enough. And we want to make sure that we base our decision on true, independent data, and not something that the corporation is telling us is good for the city.”

Also during the meeting, Urdaneta mentioned, in the interest of full disclosure, that he serves on the Lancaster Streetcar Company Board of Directors.

When asked by Carney whether the City Council has yet made a decision to support a streetcar system, Council President Louise Williams echoed Urdaneta’s message: “Council has not made any decision at all, yet.”