Thirty-nine votes is how close Macomb County came to losing SMART bus service, in an unexpectedly tight August election battle to renew the system's operating millage.

On election night, the millage seemed to have passed by 23 votes. At the end of a recount requested by anti-tax and -SMART activist Leon Drolet, a Macomb County Commissioner, it was up 39, a margin of victory so narrow that if I were in charge of SMART or if Macomb County, I'd still be breathing into a paper bag every time I thought about it.

And when I wasn't hyperventilating, I'd be devising a plan to stop SMART from ever again treading this close to the abyss.

Roughly 70,000 people ride SMART buses in Macomb County each week, relying on those buses to get to school or work, to get groceries or medicine or health care. Losing bus service would make life difficult and dangerous for many of them; the economic impact on the county would be devastating.

The millage that supports the Suburban Mobility Authority for Regional Transportation must be approved by voters every four years. It's normally a slam dunk in Wayne and Oakland counties, and even in less regionally minded Macomb, where votes for taxes to support the Detroit Institute of Arts or the Detroit Zoo have been hard-won.

For a lot of Macomb voters, regional taxes to support the geographically distant zoo or DIA don't figure. But the benefits of SMART are centered in Macomb communities — and those are benefits that SMART's supporters need to communicate clearly to Macomb County residents.

SMART spokeswoman Beth Gibbons says this has been a strange year for the transit agency. SMART has scored big wins this year, with FAST, a new express bus service. Ridership has soared 37% in those corridors, and 11% overall. SMART’s county ombudspeople regularly meet with local elected officials to help calibrate service to need. And the transit system looks for community partners that can connect riders with service.

“We’re always working on outreach, telling the story at a personal level and giving people the opportunity to see how SMART can best serve them,” Gibbons said. “Bottom line, we do the best we can educating people within our limited resources.”

But because SMART is a taxpayer-funded government agency, it can’t advocate — even for its own existence.

“Our hands are tied when it comes to any type of advocacy,” Gibbons said. “So we look for external groups and organizations that would take that role on.”

And for partnerships with local officials whose interests intersect with SMART's.

Macomb County Executive Mark Hackel has insisted repeatedly that Macomb County voters understood the relative worth of SMART and the Regional Transit Authority, a plan to rationalize and improve regional transit that became largely defunct after a millage question failed in 2016.

But Hackel, who via a spokesman directed questions about SMART's future to the Macomb County Board of Commissioners, has also warned that voters fussed about the RTA might take it out on SMART.

He's got a point. Hackel and Oakland County L. Brooks Patterson held a joint press conference back in May to denounce the RTA and support SMART. For voters, it's a mixed message: Not that transit, this transit. Both men have also railed against what they are the disproportionate benefits Detroit and Wayne County reap from regional transit; it'd be naive to assume those messages haven't penetrated.

"You can’t split those hairs with the public," said Detroit political consultant Diana McBroom, who worked on the 2016 RTA campaign.

Nor did Hackel campaign particularly hard for the SMART millage renewal, critics say.

All of which certainly primed the pump for Drolet's modest but remarkably successful anti-SMART campaign. Drolet believes that SMART is inefficient and that it should be replaced with government-paid vouchers for ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft. Drolet targeted absentee voters he knew were likely to cast August ballots with anti-SMART mailers.

Megan Owens, executive director of transit advocacy group Transportation Riders United, says the voters Drolet targeted never got pro-SMART campaign materials to counter his message.

"If someone never thinks about transit, and sees a mailer that says we’re spending all this money we don’t need to, and gets no other information, that's the impression they'll leave with," Owens said.

It's a public relations truism: If you don't tell your own story, someone else will.

"SMART is like any public agency — there’s a pressure to not spend money touting yourself, to be good stewards of the taxpayer dollars, and they want to put as much money into the actual service as they can, as opposed to marketing and promotions," Owens said. "But this shows there’s really a balance. You’ve got to do somewhat more of the education and promotion if you want to be able to sustain the service."

But making that case in the weeks or months before an election isn't enough.

"We have to acknowledge that 90% of people never use transit, and don’t have much in way of friends or family who use transit," Owens said. "So education has to be both continual and has to really ramp up around a campaign, and not just assume that 70% of people have supported us before, so we’ll be fine this time."

A successful campaign, McBroom said, would pair continued service improvement with effective promotion of the system’s successes.

"That’s the conversation for the next two years,” she said. “And two years out, we'd better have a plan."

Transit is "a years and years conversation," McBroom said: "It’s like marinating meat."

Nancy Kaffer is a Free Press columnist. Contact her at nkaffer@freepress.com.