Detroit Free Press Editorial Board

Update: RTA board can't muster votes to OK $4.6B transit plan

Failure is public transit's wicked twin here in southeast Michigan.

For 50 years, we haven't had one without the other.

And thanks to Macomb County Executive Mark Hackel and Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson, things may not get better as soon as we imagined.

Twenty-six times this region has tried to create functional transit across three or four counties, and 26 times, we've come up short. Way short.

► Related: Patterson, Hackel urged to allow vote on regional bus, train lines

►Related: Oakland, Macomb concerns delay regional transit vote

Until 2012, when the state Legislature created a Regional Transit Authority for southeast Michigan. This time, with state support and a rock-solid structure built to harness cooperation among the various parties in the region, things would be different. This time, we would get it right.

But now, the RTA is poised to collide with the blind self-interests of Hackel and Patterson.

With just weeks to go before a vital deadline to fund a functional regional transit system, the two counties are raising a host of objections to a master plan that was put together over nearly a year, with input from people all over the region.

►Related: $4.6B transit plan would connect Detroit, 4 counties

►Related:It's time to get metro Detroit's broken transit system right

The substantive sum total of their objections isn't much, but it's enough to scuttle a planned ballot initiative to fund the RTA in November, necessary for the authority to get to work creating actual, functioning mass transit in the region.

Hackel and Patterson's objections show more about our regional fault lines than anything else: Got mine. You're on your own. That's the cynical governing principle that has held metro Detroit back for decades. And it's at the core of what the two executives are doing now, at the last minute, to keep us in the transit dark ages.

Here's what's happening: The Legislature created the RTA in 2012. Over the last four years, the authority has hired staff, drafted a regional transit master plan — an attempt to rationalize the two existing transit systems, add bus rapid transit and improve service — and proposed a millage to pay for it. The RTA board, comprising representatives from Oakland, Macomb, Wayne and Washtenaw counties and the City of Detroit, was expected to approve placing the millage on this fall's ballot at a meeting last week. But representatives from Oakland and Macomb objected, blindsiding RTA officials and other board members who'd negotiated in good faith. Oakland's representative delivering a 19-page list of grievances, ranging from the quasi-legitimate to the asinine.

Governance is wrong, cries Hackel. All representatives should have veto power, to ensure their regional compatriots don't take advantage. Funding needs more guarantees, protests Oakland — despite the RTA's offer of outside audits to ensure that money's going where it ought — and far-flung, sparsely populated parts of Oakland County need bus service, too. Some officials suggested Wednesday that Oakland fears that Detroit will use the board's current composition to tip transit apportionment in the city's favor.

At their root, these objections indulge the myopic policy-making that has doomed mass transit forever.

If you think of transit in terms of "this is mine, and that's yours," you can always find a way for an individual community to feel aggrieved. That's because the benefits of transit — getting people to jobs, getting cars off the roads, providing economic opportunity to those who don't otherwise have it — can't be boiled down to fee-for-service, zero-sum analyses.

If someone in Detroit can get to a job in Macomb County, who's the beneficiary? Detroit, yes. But also Macomb, because whatever business that person works for has an employee who can get there on time, every day. And what if that person catches the bus over to Oakland to shop on the way home? Who benefits then? The business in Oakland, for sure.

But the way Hackel and Patterson see it, Macomb and Oakland aren't getting anything because, maybe, folks in their counties don't ride the bus.

We're sorry, but that's not only wrong — it reflects a deep, cynical, intellectual dishonesty.

And so here's the question we should all be asking: Are these objections, raised at the 11th hour, sincere? Or are they simply a pretext to maintain our dysfunctional, siloed status quo?

Because of the ways those systems are funded, it is all but impossible to dispense with the Detroit Department of Transportation, which serves the city, and the Suburban Mobility Authority for Regional Transportation, which spans most of the suburbs, barring those communities that have opted out of service. The RTA is meant to function as an overlay, helping to coordinate SMART and DDOT, and extend services to parts of southeast Michigan that currently have none. The RTA's transit plan pairs bus rapid transit that would supply efficient, speedy transit across broad swaths of the tri-county area with a network of cross-county connectors, all grouped around major corridors and job centers. To support this new system, the RTA plans to ask voters this fall to approve a millage — a new 1.2-mill, 20-year tax that would cost the average southeast Michigan homeowner $95 a year. It's an investment that will return dividends for every resident of southeast Michigan, transit rider or no.

And if it doesn't make it on the ballot this year, there won't be another shot until 2018, when the SMART millage is also up for renewal — a tough sell to voters.

By now, nearly everyone knows the story of James Robertson, the Detroiter who hoofed it more than 20 miles each day back and forth to work in Rochester Hills because neither the city's bus system nor the suburban transit system was sufficient to get him there.





► Heart and Sole: Detroiter walks 21 miles in work commute

His story is ours, all of ours, in this region, because of the spectacular, decades-long inability to provide even basic mass transit to the neediest among us.

And his misery will continue to visit upon hundreds of thousands of others in this region if Hackel and Patterson don't come to their senses. You can't reliably get from the airport to downtown Detroit on public transit here. You can't get speedily from the further east parts of Macomb to Oakland County. And there are all kinds of places you can't get to at all, because our patchwork of half-baked transit doesn't go there.

Right now, RTA employees are working feverishly to satisfy Oakland and Macomb objections, ahead of a Thursday afternoon vote. The board — with the approval of each member constituency — must approve the millage question by Aug. 16 in order for it to appear on the November ballot.

We devoutly hope the parties involved can come to terms.

But we are not optimistic.

Transit — or lack thereof — is routinely identified as one of our region's most urgent needs. Jobs don't cluster where people live, and bus routes don't connect the two. Despite the proliferation of charter schools, said to be superior alternatives to failing public schools, too often our most vulnerable kids must choose only from the wretched schools in geographic proximity — in part because a dearth of reliable transit means they can't reach high-performing educational alternatives. And ask young people what they value in a city — attracting and retaining young people is an important part of reversing Michigan's population loss — and they invariably name transit.

► Related: Region's transit system can't get many to job centers

Oakland County wants to ensure that the RTA can't pull dollars away from operation of the existing suburban bus system and that federal and state dollars are apportioned following the same formula as RTA millage funds. It's the kind of "where's mine" nickel-and-diming that dogs every step this area takes toward true regionalism. Patterson, in particular, wields the excuse of his county's best interests like a cloak, a defense he employs to insist on massaging short-term outcomes at the expense of regional success.

Too much of Patterson's legacy is tied up in that brand of governance. Do any of us need to see the next act in that tragic narrative?

The City of Detroit, Washtenaw and Wayne counties — all of whom have representatives on the regional transit board, alongside Oakland and Macomb — are prepared to move forward.

Got mine. You're on your own.

That's the mentality that's kept metro Detroit struggling as other regions have soared. That's the mentality that reassures southeast Michiganders that our economic, social and racial divisions are natural and right. That's the mentality that embraces the nonsensical idea that suburbs can thrive as the central city struggles.

That's the mentality driving leaders in Oakland and Macomb counties, hell-bent on derailing this region's most promising plan to haul itself out of the dark ages.

There is no question that Macomb and Oakland can win this battle, that the counties' objections can keep that millage proposal — a necessary mechanism to fund a functional regional transit system — off the ballot.

But that victory will cost us all.