And done with class.

The Iredell County Commission voted unanimously against the $452 million Red Line Regional Rail project, which would have put their voters tens of millions of dollars in the hock.

Iredell commissioners cited national studies showing how cities often underestimate the cost of new rail lines and consequently have to scale down their plans. In the Red Line’s case, they said, Iredell County could end up paying for a line that ends far south of the county line. “I will not subject the citizens of the county to insanity like this,” commissioners Chairman Steve Johnson said.

What rocked about this was that the commissioners didn’t to this out of some irrational or ideological fear of rail, but because state and regional officials couldn’t answer simple questions about where Iredell County would get the money to pay for the line when the bill came due.

The official line is that the money is supposed to come from as-yet-unknown developers who will supposedly show up to develop land along the line once it is built. Taxes on that development are supposed to pay Iredell’s bill for it. Where are these developers, the commissioners wanted to know. Who are they? Why haven’t they met them?

It’s a question that Mecklenburg elites can’t even answer about their own South Boulevard line, which has seen a near complete stagnation in development that has left about two-thirds of the nine-mile line worse off development wise than it was before rail.

Even with incentives and $2 million in tax dollars thrown in, Charlotte has been unable to develop rail stations as close in as Scaleybark on South Boulevard. How the heck is anyone going to get developers to sink money into an Iredell line that far outside the center city if we can’t even get Scaleybark going a couple of miles from uptown? Who exactly would ride the line?

State consultants will work to address concerns over the next three months, including Iredell’s, Thunberg told the Charlotte Observer.

Uh-huh. What that means is that they’ll be putting the screws to the commissioners politically. They didn’t have the answers to the commissioners’ questions three months ago and they won’t have them three months from now because there are no answers. The days when developers could get financing for mixed use developments along rail lines are over, and they aren’t coming back for a long time.

No amount of hand-holding by state consultants will change that.