Vote YES for regional transit!

[swingline]

Well thank you for explaining it to me. In that rosy scenario I would get to look forward to the "Appreciation of my homestead" resulting in a further increase in property taxes and still would not see any additional services. What a deal!

So you would prefer that your home's value go down so that you can pay lower taxes? That's a hell of a plan for wealth accumulation.

The Johnny5's of the region may have defeated this important vote but the sharpest blame should be directed at the RTA leadership and the media and communications consultants they hired to promote the millage. The Johnny5 rationale for opposition to any transit that doesn't directly serve them personally was not some kind of under the surface voter viewpoint. That uninformed position is blatantly out in the open in SE Michigan and has held up transit progress in this region for decades. It previously held up progress in other regions as well. But cities like Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, Salt Lake City, Denver, Minneapolis, Charlotte and Portland overcame this ignorance with fact-based creative and informative ballot campaigns that persuaded their voters of the benefits of transit. The RTA and pro-transit people from the top down failed to account for and address the Johnny5 voter and it was a fatal mistake.

As just one example, the common playbook for transit ballot campaigns in other cities involves discussing the benefits of transit oriented development which adds jobs and tax revenue to the region. Billions of dollars of such development have spun off from their transit systems. Nothing like that ever got into any media campaign promoted by the pro-transit groups here. Instead, all we got was a few ads telling us that we needed to vote for the millage so we could help poor car-less people get to their jobs. Of course, that is a good reason to vote for the millage as well but it was never going to win the majority. And certainly it was never going to win with the Trumped up Johnny5 voter living in Lake Orion, Walled Lake or Shelby Township.

This was obvious stuff missed by the pathetic RTA media campaign. We had the wrong people running the show and got a completely ineffective media campaign as a result. Our region is no different in its makeup [[either density-wise or voter-wise) than other regions that have recently voted for and built new mass transit systems. All of these regions are enjoying steady economic growth to which transit is in no small part contributing. Yet we continue to banish ourselves to last place in transit usage and transit dollars spent per person. President Trump would call us losers.

Oh well. Johnny5 has opened my eyes. I'm going to let my house go to hell. Persuade the assessor to lower my taxes. And then I can retire early.