[LMich]

Detroit TRU (Transit Riders United) has a post up on their website showing that every Metro Detroit county commission (and the Detroit city council) has either passed, or will be passing, a non-binding resolution putting their support behind the idea of a regional transit authority. This is really kind of unprecedented, but it will all by for nothing if they don't pretty quickly agree on how they want to fund the new authority. It's good to support in words the concept of a regional authority, but the suburbs in particular -- at the county level -- are quickly coming upon the point where they are going to have to put their money where their mouths are.

They are going to have to do way better than what they've done with SMART, which is truly an embarrassing system for how large its potential service area is. What this will mean is that there will have to be some buy-in t the county level, because they go like they did with SMART where you allow individual communities to opt-in and out of the system, and you're essentially dooming the system before it even starts.

This seems like this is going to be the problem of starting it. Counties and municipalities can't institute a sales tax; that's only the province of a state, so the state would have to agree to raise the sales tax, and not only would that be impossible with this particularl legislature, but raising a state tax to help Metro Detroit seems very unlikely even in a better political climate. The other possibility are county-wide millages, which seem even less likely to be successful. You might get a majority of Wayne County voters to approve a transit millage; you'd probably never get Macomb and definitely not Oakland. The last option seems to be the increase of the hotel and/or liquor taxes like is down with Cobo, which would probably only be enough to supplement the running of the system or maybe for capital costs.

It might end up that this will be a very complicated funding mechanism with a little from each of these. And then, this doesn't even address how you wind down SMART and DDOT's operations, including their debt.