Last week, we were treated to the spectacle of Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson and Macomb County Executive Mark Hackel campaigning for renewal of a four-year millage for the SMART bus service.

They used the press conference to rail against the Regional Transit Authority. Patterson called it a "glorified SMART."

But the reason they were ostensibly there — the SMART renewal — underscores the need for the RTA or something like it.

The RTA debate has seemed to take metro Detroit's transit systems from fractured to fractious. Instead of two systems, we now have three, one of them without much of a portfolio.

But the RTA has two things SMART doesn't: the ability to go to the voters for a 20-year taxing authority instead of coming back to them every four years for a renewal.

That four-year renewal window makes capital investments in buses and infrastructure difficult to make. Financiers don't want to bond against a revenue stream that isn't guaranteed for any longer than that four-year window.

And unlike the swiss-cheese service area of SMART in Oakland and Wayne counties, the RTA has no opt-out escape hatches for communities to duck investing in transit needed to move people to and from jobs.

Ironically, the RTA is the baby Patterson spent years trying to conceive — and now he wants to throw it out with the bathwater after one narrow voter defeat of a regional transit proposal in 2016.

The even-more-splintered system gives local leaders a political hammer that they can use to rile up their voters. Hackel and Patterson's appearance and sharp rhetoric implies that any hope of putting a new RTA proposal on the ballot this fall are dead in the water.

Maybe the time has come to examine merging SMART and the Detroit Department of Transportation, the region's other transit agency.

This has been proposed before, and there are major obstacles to overcome, including governance, separate labor contracts and pension obligations.

But DDOT and SMART are already working more closely together than they ever have before, coordinating express lines and other improvements that have made both services more efficient and reliable.

Banding them together under the umbrella of the RTA would be more efficient overall and give the system the financial stability of a longer-term funding source.

It may take further action by the Legislature to make this happen. But it's time to change the terms of the argument in order to move forward.