Transportation planners apparently plan for this funding shift onto local taxpayers to continue, despite its obvious unpopularity. Putting a lot of roads and rail on the same complex bond package was a mistake. While technically legal, this was confusing and helped make the issue politically divisive.
Expecting voters to approve using up all our enviable AAA debt bonding capacity just before a new council takes office is not only bad policy, but it is likely to be distinctly unpopular with the new council candidates.
One lesson of this bond election is that the Austin voting public is probably smarter than many politicians give them credit for. The billion dollars offered little traffic congestion relief to most voters, since it was heavily geared toward future growth rather than existing residents.
It was a mistake to assume that promoting a weak rail corridor designed to serve hypothetical growth would not hurt the proposal. Anti-rail, pro-road sentiment is relatively constant. Meanwhile, Austin has a sizable and active community of smart transit activists, many of them young and actively into social media, where information, both pro and con, travels fast. This shows money power cannot reliably overcome smart, well-organized voter power.
Posted in Austin urban rail bond campaign , Austin urban rail issues , Ballot measure campaign and issues , Highland-Riverside urban rail proposal , Project Connect urban rail plan , Roger Baker's postings Tagged austin urban rail , coa plan , Lamar-Guadalupe , rail ballot measure , rail vote campaign 2 Comments Β». Screenshot by L. Significantly, this was the first rail transit ballot measure to be rejected by Austin voters.
