Voters have rejected Cobb County’s Mobility Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax.
Known as MSPLOST, a 1 percent county sales tax was intended to raise $10.3 billion in transit improvements including transit centers and 108 miles of new bus routes.
Results from Tuesday’s general election show 62 percent of nearly 385,000 voters who cast ballots on the measure do not want the sales tax.
Cobb County resident and recent SaportaReport columnist Donna Wong said she wanted voters to approve the special tax.
“The future is not heavy rail,” Wong stated in a column, last week. “Cities that embraced transit decades ago have now moved on to innovative solutions like bus rapid transit– buses (often electric) that act like light rail, with dedicated lanes and “train” stations. Innovations like this in the MSPLOST plan are not wild ideas or fantasy, they’re prudent innovations that are being built all over the country that we can have here in Cobb County.”
Similarly in Gwinnett County, 53 percent of voters rejected a Transit Special Local Options Sales Tax. Unofficial results show 47 percent of the nearly 406,000 votes were in favor of the referendum.
The 1 percent sales tax lasting 30 years was to fund $17 billion in transit projects.
According to Councilforqualitygrowth.org, Gwinnett residents have rejected transit proposals five times. Prior to this election, the most recent transit tax measure failed by a slight margin in 2020.
What Cobb and Gwinnett proved is that their voters are not spending their money to offset the mis-directed priorities of the City of Atlanta and Fulton County. The City of Atlanta and Fulton need to support them. Better yet, Democratic “leaders” need to wake up and agree that Metro Atlanta means Metro Atlanta.
Not sure what misdirected priorities Melvin is referring to. Clearly these suburban counties are in need of more transit options as they grow. Road improvements are no longer a long term solution due to what are known as either ‘induced demand’ or ‘latent demand’ whereby new road availability draw more traffic until they are congested. What Democratic leaders already understand is that more transit is a necessity. The conservative voters don’t comprehend that need yet conservatives in the state legislature do as they created the ATL agency presumably to eventually absorb all the seperate systems into one cost effective system.
These transit reforms will continue to fail until community leaders can clearly demonstrate the long term value of an improved public transit network. Most people are already suffocating under inflated prices across the board, and will likely see this sales tax increase as yet another burden to carry. I think showing people that these reforms can reduce their cost of living in the long term is the best approach, but I leave that to the representatives of Cobb and Gwinnett County.
Links to older articles but the damage may unfortunately be the gift that keeps giving:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/climate/koch-brothers-public-transit.html
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/26/koch-activists-phoenix-ban-light-rail
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/06/19/koch-brothers-are-bankrolling-local-efforts-kill-american-public-transit
Even as the need for mobility options grows, so does sprawling development that makes building efficient transit network more difficult. Outside of the often racist and classist undertones of these referendums, I wonder what an average voter would say for voting against transit. Are we so devoted to the car? Or are we so sensitive to a sales tax?