Matt Helms

Detroit Free Press

The $4.6-billion plan to expand public transportation in southeast Michigan appears to be headed off the tracks as divisions continue over where funding and services would be deployed across Detroit and its suburbs.

The Regional Transit Authority of Southeast Michigan is expected to take another swing at voting today — after delaying the vote last week — to put the regional transit plan on the Nov. 8 ballot. But whether that will happen was an open question Wednesday as L. Brooks Patterson and Mark Hackel, county executives for Oakland and Macomb counties, respectively, signaled they were willing to keep the matter off the ballot rather than risk voters rejecting a plan that the two leaders don’t support.

Business leaders throughout southeast Michigan gave their support to the plan Wednesday as word of another possible delay — or outright rejection — began to swirl.

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Their support was directed at top political leaders of Oakland and Macomb counties who are accusing Detroit and Wayne County of playing political hardball on federal funding for bus operations, saying that Detroit threatens to try to reverse a split that favors the suburban bus system over the Detroit Department of Transportation. Detroit officials dispute that claim, but Oakland and Macomb officials say it illustrates why they’re calling for a change in the governance structure of the Regional Transit Authority of Southeast Michigan to depoliticize decision making.

Oakland and Macomb officials said they also are not satisfied that the RTA provides enough service to customers in outlying communities not directly served by the main bus rapid transit lines along Woodward, Gratiot and Michigan avenues that are a centerpiece of the plan to modernize and widen transit options across a region that has underfunded public transportation for decades.

They have also questioned how the board functions.

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Hackel said he would prefer a board modeled after the regional authority that governs Cobo Center, where all board votes must be unanimous before contracts and plans are approved, rather that leaving it up to a simple majority of the RTA.

Hackel said that if adjusting the RTA's governance structure means having to go to the Legislature to amend the state law that created the authority, he wants the change to be made — even if that keeps the measure off this fall's ballot. If it doesn't make the ballot, the measure couldn't be brought before voters again until the next major fall election in 2018.

"It's the right thing to do," Hackel said. "If we're going to be true regional partners, we should have not just a seat at the table, but a say. People are more likely to trust that and approve it."

He said that without such a guarantee, he's not sure Macomb County voters would approve the RTA's plan because many people he's talked to don't see what they would get in return for paying the transit tax.

"It not getting on the ballot is not the worst thing that can happen," Hackel said. "The worst thing would be for it to get on the ballot and fail."

Gerald Poisson, chief deputy Oakland County executive, said that Detroit wants to go back to a split of federal funding that gives DDOT 65% and SMART 35% — a split that was reversed to 52%-48% in recent years and then changed to 50%-50% this year in a unanimous vote of the RTA board. City officials dispute that Detroit would try to reverse the split, although they acknowledge that if DDOT’s ridership continues to improve as the city works to revive the bus system, the funding formula may have to change.

Poisson said Oakland doesn’t want the SMART system every year “to face ultimatums to accept dismemberment or we’re going to impose death.”

DDOT Director Dan Dirks, who in prior years ran the SMART system, said he’s heard no discussions about Detroit trying to force going back to the prior 65-35 split. But he said that if Oakland and Macomb want to lock into a 50-50 split permanently, that doesn’t make sense because ridership and needs change over time.

“The issue is, we have to sit down and talk about it in a rational matter for what makes sense,” Dirks said. “Funding should be reflective of reality and needs. … It’s something we can all work out.”

It wasn’t clear late Wednesday if it could be worked out in time for today's scheduled vote — or in time for the RTA to develop ballot language to give to county clerks in Wayne, Oakland, Macomb and Washtenaw counties by the Aug. 16 deadline to make the November ballot. If the initiative doesn't make the ballot this year, it couldn't be put before voters before the next major general election in 2018.

The RTA board is to meet today for a possible vote on the $4.6-billion, 20-year plan. The plan is highlighted by bus rapid transit between Detroit and the suburbs on Woodward, Gratiot and Michigan avenues; express service to Metro Airport; and commuter rail between Ann Arbor and Detroit. Voters in the four counties would be asked to approve a 1.2-mill, 20-year property tax to pay for the transit expansion, costing the average homeowner about $95 a year.

The wrangling came as transit advocates urged Patterson and Hackel to drop their opposition.

"We are here today because there are tens of thousands of people who are suffering and struggling because we don't provide them the transit they need to get where they need to go," Megan Owens, executive director of the transit-advocacy group Transportation Riders United, said at a news conference Wednesday morning in Bloomfield Hills.

Joel Batterman, a coordinator with the advocacy group Motor City Freedom Riders, said that after the RTA delayed voting on the issue last week because of Patterson and Hackel's concerns, he decided to walk the entirety of Woodward from Detroit to Pontiac over the last several days gathering petition signatures he planned to deliver to Patterson on Wednesday. .

"It's time for us to stand up and tell the county executives that they cannot continue to throw up roadblocks to transit," Batterman said. "It is wrong to spend billions on widening highways and bulldozing homes while denying us even a vote on regional transit."

The RTA was to have voted last week, but Patterson and Hackel released a laundry list of complaints about the RTA plan, ranging from a lack of services provided to wide swaths of both counties and stronger assurances about enforcement of a provision that requires 85% of the revenue raised in a jurisdiction to be spent in that jurisdiction.

Poisson said 40 communities in Oakland County would pay about $650 million in property taxes for transit over 20 years but receive little to no service. Poisson said the RTA came back after the vote was delayed with a plan to provide about $79 million in localized service, but he called it a bad return on investment for those communities.

“We can’t take that money … and say you get nothing except feeling good about supporting regional transit,” Poisson said. “We need a better plan that delivers services to those communities” including possibly bus feeder lines that take travelers to the bus rapid transit routes.

Conan Smith, Washtenaw County Commissioner, took issue with Patterson and Hackel’s objections Wednesday, saying that full public transit can’t be provided to every community in the region, nor is the RTA designed to do so. More rural and far-suburban areas in metro regions around the country get localized and door-to-door service, but not full bus or bus rapid transit lines.

He called the issue of Detroit pushing for an undue share of operating funding “a complete and utter red herring.”

Smith said the RTA should stick with a data-driven approach based on ridership. He noted that DDOT’s ridership is recovering from decades of neglect and decline, making it better able to compete better against SMART for federal funds.

“That’s what I think is really at the heart of this — not that there’s some nefarious plot to defund SMART, but that in a data-driven fair system, the competition is going to be fierce,” Smith said.

Meanwhile, a group of top community leaders representing businesses, health systems, colleges, nonprofits and other institutions issued an open letter to Patterson and Hackel urging them to "work through any open issues in the days ahead to ensure that the people of this region have the opportunity to vote on the regional transit plan."

"We have come too far, after too long, to see our best shot at regional transit in a generation fall before the people are able to decide," they wrote. "We appreciate that you have expressed past support for regional transit, and that you want the time to get it right. That time is short, measured in days."

The Wednesday letter, was signed by nearly three dozen business and civic leaders, including former U.S. Sen. Carl Levin; Quicken Loans founder Dan Gilbert; DTE Energy Chairman and CEO Gerard Anderson; Detroit Regional Chamber President and CEO Sandy Baruah and Penske Corp. founder and Chairman Roger Penske.

Transit advocates are expected to rally outside the downtown Detroit offices of the Detroit Regional Chamber this morning ahead of the potential vote. The RTA board is expected to vote at a special meeting at 1 p.m. at the regional chamber's offices on the 19th floor of 1 Woodward Ave.

Contact Matt Helms: 313-222-1450 or mhelms@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter: @matthelms.