A coalition of local and statewide progressive organizations is calling on Gov. Josh Stein to pause the planned Interstate 77 express toll lanes project, which would expand the highway from uptown to the South Carolina line.
Groups such as the NAACP, the Sierra Club and the West Boulevard Neighborhood Coalition wrote to Stein, a Democrat, that the Department of Transportation is his agency, and that “whether or not the widening moves forward will be part of his legacy.”
Many westside residents say the highway expansion will encroach on their historically Black neighborhoods — echoing previous highway development and urban renewal that sliced through parts of Charlotte and other cities. The coalition’s letter said the project will be a “continuation of a pattern of injustice rooted in discriminatory decision-making.”
The debate over the expansion is intensifying, with both sides offering different legal opinions as to whether the Charlotte Regional Transportation Planning Organization can stop or pause the $3.2 billion project.
The CRTPO board in October 2024 approved the state’s plan to partner with a private company to build the toll lanes. But that was a year before the DOT released detailed maps of the wider highway.
Neighborhood leaders and some elected officials are upset that they weren’t shown the full impact of the expansion until after the CRTPO vote. Mecklenburg commissioner and CRTPO member Leigh Altman, who supported the toll lanes in 2024, said last month the delay in releasing the design plans was a “bait-and-switch.”
Altman asked the CRTPO attorney if there were any obstacles for the organization to pause the project.
The attorney, Mujeeb Shah-Khan, wrote in a Feb. 26 memo that there’s no going back for the CRTPO board because the DOT had already released a Request for Qualifications from contractors for the highway in August 2025.
Altman said Shah-Khan’s response did not answer her actual question.
“CRTPO asked a specific legal question and requested supporting authority,” Altman wrote in an email. “What CRTPO received was a bare conclusion with no authority. Since legal authority was expressly asked for but not provided, it is reasonable to infer no legal authority barring rescission actually exists.”
Others agree with Altman’s assessment. The Southern Environmental Law Center has said CRTPO can reverse course, and that it can also vote to pull the project from the Statewide Transportation Improvement Program.
The Charlotte City Council is scheduled to discuss its options for a pause at a retreat on Monday. Nine of 11 members have publicly said they support pausing the toll lanes. So far, Stein, a Democrat, has not discussed I-77 publicly.
The Charlotte Regional Business Alliance is pushing for the toll lanes to relieve congestion. I-77 south of uptown is one of the state’s most crowded highways and is considered a key north-south connector for commuters and freight.
