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Update: Suburbs Try to Derail Metro Detroit Transportation Upgrades -- Freep

July 28, 2016, 5:24 PM

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Update, 5:16 p.m. Thursday: The board of the Regional Transit Authority of Southeast Michigan on Thursday rejected a bid to put a ballot measure before voters in November to fund an ambitious regional transportation plan, the Detroit Free Press reports.  The board has a little time left to change its mind.

Original article, Thursday morning:

When you look at other Metropolitan areas around the country, from New York to Boston to D.C., from Portland to Seattle to Chicago to Cleveland, you realize just how much Metro Detroit's public transportation system sucks big time.

The Regional Transit Authority for southeast Michigan, which was created by the state legislature to coordinate public transportation, is trying to address that deficit.

But shortsighted and selfish folks like Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson and Macomb County Executive Mark Hackel are trying to derail any progress by raising objections that could keep an initiative to fund a better system off the ballot in November, says a Detroit Free Press editorial titled: "Not again! Don't derail metro Detroit transit hopes for 27th time.

The editorial says:

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.

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.

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.


Read more:  Detroit Free Press


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