The center has done studies from local to international levels and has been contracted by other states to perform transportation-related studies.

University officials say they’ll bring it back in a new form to support a planned doctoral program in public policy. But it will have a new director.

Professor David Hartgen, director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Transportation Studies, said he learned of the program’s demise at an April 4 meeting.

Hartgen helped start and has headed the center since shortly after he became a professor at UNC Charlotte in 1989. He has largely been the center, with help from graduate assistants and other professors in projects that crossed over into other disciplines.

The Cabarrus County resident said Friday he didn’t expect news of the center’s closing.

“I don’t know why,” Hartgen said Friday. “I’m baffled by the decision and its justification as it was put to me made no sense, but I’m not privy to the inner workings of the university.”

Hartgen said that before that April 4 meeting with Provost Dr. Denise Trouth, the school’s head of academic affairs, he had no foreshadowing of the decision.

After the meeting, he said, he found that the graduate students who had been assisting with the center’s work had been relieved of those duties. And his secretary will only work until May.

Hartgen is a tenured professor at the university and is scheduled to teach courses this fall. But his work as director of the policy-analyzing center are over.

He said the “probability ... is zero” that the university would ask him to head the new program, and a university official confirmed that.

Trouth was in Raleigh for a meeting on Friday. Dr. Wayne Walcott, associate provost, said the school has decided to find a new director for the revamped program.

“I think there’s a bit of a different orientation” in plans for the new program that will require a new director, he said.

When asked about the suddenness of informing Hartgen of the center’s closing, Walcott said simply: “I think the university acted in the most prudent way it could.”

He declined to elaborate.

Under Hartgen’s guidance, the center has produced more than 200 reports on transportation policy and its effects since 1991.

Many of those have pointed out North Carolina’s low ranking in relation to other states’ funding for road maintenance and improvements.

And the latest report, released on April 10, highlighted the disparity within the state in road maintenance.

The 10 counties with the best roads in the state, according to the study, are in the eastern part of the state. The 10 counties with the worst roads — including Rowan — are in the Piedmont and western areas.

Rep. Charlotte Gardner, a Salisbury Republican, learned of the center’s closing recently when she called Hartgen to request copies of that report. She planned to distribute them to other lawmakers she hopes will support a bill addressing the disparity in road maintenance funds.

But Hartgen couldn’t produce the copies because he didn’t have the center’s facilities anymore.

Gardner said she is “mildly suspicious”of the university’s motives in closing the center and raises the possibility that it is political, given what she called the “controversial” nature of some of Hartgen’s reports.

“I do have that as a question in my own mind,” she said.“I know political pressure been brought to bear on other occasions, and I won’t say that’s not a possibility, though I hope the university would not bow to that kind of pressure.”

Walcott said the center’s closing is “absolutely not” political. He doesn’t think elected officials use their power to try to eliminate controversial programs, and it wouldn’t work if they did, he said.

“I don’t believe any of the universities would respond to that sort of thing except to ignore it,” he said. “That really runs against the grain of what universities are supposed to be.”

Sen. Fletcher Hartsell, a Republican from Concord whose district includes part of Rowan County, praised the work Hartgen and the center have done.

Even studies placing North Carolina in a less-than-favorable light, he said, are useful “to raise awareness. It tends to help us all improve in our shortcomings.”

Hartsell said he has gone to Raleigh armed with the center’s reports, and has seen its value in local transportation policy shaping and planning as well.

“Given UNC Charlotte’s growing status and, I think, its physical location in the largest metropolitan area in the state, I should say I’m surprised at this,” he said.

Hartgen has studied Charlotte’s mass transit needs and the possibilities of tying the region into a Charlotte-based system. He served as a citizen advisor on the Mayor’s study commission.

The center, part of the school’s Urban Institute, has studied the effects of beltways on growth, and has annually ranked the state’s transit systems.

It recently completed an extensive study of airline travel in North Carolina and the growing dominance of Charlotte-Douglas International Airport.

And in the works were several reports, including one on the cost of fixing North Carolina’s pavement. Arkansas and New York contracted the center for similar studies.

But Hartgen will finish that study as a professor, and without the support given to him as center director.

He says he doesn’t understand that, since the center’s funding came largely from grants, contracts and sales of copies of reports. The university paid about $90,000 a year, including his salary and other expenses.

Transportation policy study centers at other state universities — including N.C. State and UNC Chapel Hill — have annual budgets in the millions, he said.

The costs here seemed “small potatoes” to be recognized as an expert resource for policy makers and a prime location for forums and conferences, he said.

“It is curious to me that a highly visible and successful transportation program in the most congested area of the state, contributing vigorously to the debate on transportation policy issues, would be summarily ended,” Hartgen said.

To the university, Walcott said, it’s not a matter of ending the program, but retooling it to better serve the university’s plans. The doctoral program could begin in 2001, he said.