More than a bit of election backlash swirls this week, and not all involves the man who'll be commander in chief.
Tuesday's rebuff of a Regional Transit Authority (RTA) transit tax is "a massive, self-inflicted wound," the Detroit Free Press says in a sharply worded editorial.
The paper criticizes the county executives of Oakland and Macomb, where the millage lost. (It passed in Wayne and Washtenaw, but not by enough votes to change the total.)
L. Brooks Patterson of Oakland, the editorial says, "suffers from a special kind of tunnel vision, one that sees Oakland County as an island of continuing growth and prosperity amid metro Detroit's muck." His Macomb counterpart, is slammed for "spineless . . . indecision."
Thursday's reaction isn't a quick venting of day-after emotions. The editorial board uses more than 900 words to say why it regrets "we failed . . . [to] invest in transit, like every other successful U.S. city."
"It's hard to see how the RTA moves forward," the Free Press says.
Here are excerpts:
Of the many disappointing results in Tuesday's election, none is more tragically short-sighted than the failure of the regional transit millage in southeast Michigan. . . .
For a nominal sum, we could have bought a ticket to our regional future. And we failed. . . .
It's perpetuation of a massive, self-inflicted wound.
For the poor, that plays out in tremendous isolation and the inability to, say, get to a job that's not in the city where you live. And of course, that hurts Detroit most, where some 70% of the working population has to travel outside city limits and nearly 40% don't have access to a car.
For the elderly, it's much the same. If you've lost the ability to drive yourself around metro Detroit, how do you get to doctor's appointments, to see family, to recreation or entertainment, in the transit desert of metro Detroit? Often, the answer is simply that you don't.
And this is face-spiting policy for the rest of us too. Every other major metro area has at least a basic, functioning transit system . . .
Voters in metro Detroit just don't believe they and their neighbors deserve better. After nearly 50 years of trying, they're more captive to anti-tax provincialism than they are dedicated to moving forward, together. It's not just sad; it's worthy of the ridicule and pity visitors often express when they land at Metro Airport and can't even find public transportation to any of the region's population centers.
RTA's next millage opportunity is in 2018, when both SMART and the Ann Arbor Area Transit Authority will have millage renewals on the ballot — and no one is optimistic that doubling up on transit millages will lead to success.
It's hard to see how the RTA moves forward.
-- Alan Stamm
