Matt Helms

Detroit Free Press

It's up to Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan and top leaders in four counties to see if they can salvage a $4.7 billion plan for expanded public transportation for the region after the Regional Transit Authority of Southeast Michigan board couldn't come up with the votes to put the proposal before voters.

The board on Thursday couldn't overcome objections from Macomb and Oakland counties, leaving the proposal's fate in limbo even as time runs short for the plan to appear before voters in November.

Sending the proposal to voters required approval from seven of nine members of the RTA board, with at least one representative from each of Wayne, Oakland, Macomb and Washtenaw counties on board with it. But the representatives — two each — from Oakland and Macomb counties voted no, leaving at most two weeks for the leaders of the counties to try to rescue the ambitious 20-year proposal to expand transit in a region that has underfunded public transportation for decades.

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"This isn’t the plan that we're looking for," said Chuck Moss, an Oakland County representative, during an RTA committee meeting Thursday morning. "It does not provide regional transit. ... What we have now is a regional taxation plan without transit.”

Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson and Macomb County Executive Mark Hackel say they can't support the plan unless the governance structure of the RTA board is changed and more services are provided to outlying parts of their counties that wouldn't be served by the centerpiece of the plan, bus rapid transit lines along Woodward, Gratiot and Michigan avenues between Detroit and the suburbs. The plan also calls for express service to Metro Airport and a commuter rail between Detroit and Ann Arbor.

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Patterson and Hackel say the structure of the RTA should be adjusted so that decisions on where to deploy funding and service require supermajorities or unanimous board votes and not simple majorities. That would make it more difficult for the RTA board to make major changes to the 50-50 split of federal transit funding now shared by the Detroit Department of Transportation and the suburban SMART system.

Moss said residents from northern and western parts of Oakland are "screaming bloody murder that they’re going to have to pay" for transit that won't benefit their areas.

Voters in Wayne, Oakland, Macomb and Washtenaw counties would be asked to approve a 20-year, 1.2-mill property tax to pay for the transit expansion, costing the average homeowner about $95 a year.

Freman Hendrix, Detroit's representative on the board, said the plan should be approved.

“We’ve waited way too long, and it would be unfair to the … to the riders and the citizens in this region” if the plan isn’t put before voters, Hendrix said.

Hendrix said Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan told him that city leadership will do whatever it takes to reach a compromise with Oakland and Macomb's leaders, including extending rapid transit and bus routes, adding more stops and offering more on-demand and dial-a-ride options for outlying areas of the counties.

“Our eagerness is to do whatever is possible to work things out in a positive manner,” Hendrix said. He expressed optimism that the Big Four regional leaders could work out their disagreements in time to salvage the plan.

Board Chairman Paul Hillegonds said there could be as little as one week left to come up with agreements that overcome Patterson's and Hackel's concerns.

The RTA board "has taken this as far as it can, and …we essentially have one more week in which we could call an emergency meeting, and I think it will be up to the four leaders — the three county executives and the mayor of the City of Detroit — to work through the governance issue, which is a stumbling block right now," Hillegonds said.

Hillegonds said RTA lawyers are still studying what it would take to adjust the RTA's governance without running afoul of the state law that created the agency.

"We're still working on that," he said. "That's partly a legal issue, but it's also a political issue. Will the four leaders of Oakland, Wayne, Macomb and Detroit be able to agree on governance?"

Hackel said he's willing to put in long hours this week to come to a compromise, but he won't budge on the demand for requiring a supermajority or a unanimous vote to make major funding changes.

"I'm willing to compromise on every other issue," Hackel said, "It's a very simple thing for me, and it's not just a Macomb issue. It works for everybody."

Wayne County Executive Warren Evans said allowing residents to vote on the transit plan is critical.

"While individual concerns must be addressed, we cannot afford to once again delay development of true regional transit," Evans said in a statement. "Failure to place this millage on the ballot in November could impede the progress we have made in the region. I’m committed to working to address the concerns of our regional partners to bring them on board.”

It was a stunning turn for a plan that appeared to have broad political support until the last couple of weeks, when Patterson and Hackel made their concerns public, taking some RTA board members and transit advocates by surprise, given that there had been years for either county executive to bring up objections.

Hackel and Patterson released a 19-page critique of the plan, but the two main objections now center on veto power over major funding changes and providing a greater amount of localized transit service and routes that would move residents from more rural parts of Oakland and Macomb into the southern parts of their counties, where bus rapid transit lines run.

The bus rapid transit routes would run from Detroit to Mt. Clemens along Gratiot, to Pontiac along Woodward, and to Metro Airport on a route that includes Michigan Avenue. The BRT routes wouldn't directly serve large swaths of the tri-county area, but RTA CEO Michael Ford said there are creative alternatives, including large vans that feed into major bus lines or BRT stops and enhanced localized services such as on-demand and dial-a-ride services that could be provided to areas where BRT and fixed bus routes aren't justified.

Patterson said he could not support the plan as it stands.

“The current regional master transit plan abandons more than half a million Oakland County residents in 40 of our communities, leaving them with little or no transit services but demanding they pay more than $700 million in taxes over 20 years,” Patterson said. “I support regional transit, but I won’t be stampeded into a bad deal.”

Patterson said the region will get only one chance to approve a transit plan, and it has to be done right.

“I’d rather take the time to get the details right than be saddled with a system that doesn’t work well because some were willing to abandon the interests of almost half of Oakland County’s residents,” he said.

But Alma Wheeler Smith, a Washtenaw County board member, criticized Patterson and Hackel, saying that early on they insisted on a property tax of not much more than 1 mill or they wouldn't support the transit plan. That level of millage restricts how far BRT and other bus routes can go.

"To now complain that our plan, the RTA's plan, is not extensive enough is hypocritical," she said.

Transit advocates had urged board members to let voters decide on the plan.

“Is it perfect? No,” said Megan Owens, executive director of the advocacy group Transportation Riders United. “But it is a very good plan that would move our region forward immeasurably.”

Without it, Owens said, tens of thousands of people who don’t drive are stranded and can’t get where they need to go.

Joel Batterman, a coordinator with the group Motor City Freedom Riders, said he walked the length of Woodward this week, gathering about 1,000 petition signatures that he delivered to Patterson’s office on Wednesday.

Paraphrasing the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Batterman told the board members: “Transit delayed is transit denied. Please let the people vote.”

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