After years of negotiations following decades of failed attempts, the four-county regional transit millage nearly didn’t make it to the November 8 ballot.

Two weeks before the language was finalized, Oakland and Macomb counties added fresh demands, including more rural service and one-county veto power over future expenditures.

“The things they brought up were things we could have looked at earlier,” says Washtenaw County Board of Commissioners chair Felicia Brabec, the county’s rep at the talks. “That was surprising.”

“Nothing they did was illegal,” says commissioner Andy LaBarre. “They played hardball and won a good deal of what they wanted. Their interests were in showing return on their investment, and the one-county veto gives Macomb and Oakland great leverage in the future. We [Washtenaw and Wayne counties] didn’t like it but not enough to deter supporting the plan. I’m gonna vote for it.”

RTA Proposal 1 would authorize a 1.2-mill tax for twenty years. The owner of a house with a taxable value of $100,000 would pay $120 a year. (A recently purchased $200,000 house has a taxable value of $100,000) The millage would raise $160 million annually across the four counties to fund public transportation, including regional bus rapid transit routes, services for senior citizens and people with disabilities, and commuter rail to Detroit from Ann Arbor.

“Regional transit and regionalism is something I believe in,” Brabec says. “When I talk with residents, folks want to be connected. Our residents are aware of the value of transit.”

She isn’t sure it’ll pass. “My hope is yes, but I don’t know if it will. My hope is there isn’t this isolationism versus regionalism. I hope regionalism rules the day.”

LaBarre isn’t sure about local support, but thinks it’ll get the necessary majority in the four-county area to pass: “I don’t know about in Washtenaw, but in Wayne and Oakland, and [with] a big enough margin to get it passed overall. The population [there] is more pragmatic about getting an imperfect regional transit authority up and running. What gets produced won’t be perfect, but it’ll be better than not having anything. And it will change over time. It’s not rocket science. It’s politics.”

Washtenaw County has two millages of its own on the ballot. Proposal 1 is an eight-year, 0.1-mill tax to provide financial relief and services for county veterans, including payment of eligible indigent veteran claims and funding the administration of the county’s Department of Veterans Affairs. It would cost the owner of our hypothetical $200,000 house $10 a year and generate $1.5 million annually.

LaBarre “wholeheartedly” supports the veterans millage. “If that millage fails, the county has a duty to provide services for indigent veterans. It’s the right thing to do morally and legally.”

He thinks it’ll pass. “People understand these are services to help people who’ve done extraordinary things for all of us and who face extraordinary challenges in their life.”

Proposal 2 is a four-year, 0.5-mill tax to “maintain, reconstruct, resurface, reconstruct, or preserve roads, bike lanes, streets, and paths” in the county, including sections of nine streets in Ann Arbor. It would cost $50 a year per $100,000 of taxable value and raise about $7 million a year.

The millages would replace taxes previously levied directly by the county board, relying on long-unused 1899 and 1909 state laws to do so without a vote. A legal challenge to the taxes was dismissed earlier this year, but to play it safe, commissioners put both on the ballot.

Brabec says she “heard from a lot of residents who said ‘Thank you so much, this is great'” after seeing the work funded by the previous road millage. But she’s not supporting this one: “We invested $14 million over two years, and it was very successful,” she says. “But if we keep doing this, we’re bailing out the state.”

Neither is LaBarre. “It’s a worthy thing, but it’s not the biggest issue we have to work on,” he says. “The big challenges are public safety costs and human service capabilities, meaning the money and the staff and the structures to do things … If it passes, it will drain people’s resources to do things that need to be done.”

“We haven’t funded roads properly in the state of Michigan,” agrees millage backer Lew Kidder. But as a practical matter, he says, whether people pay for roads through state taxes or local taxes, “it all comes from the same billfold.”

Kidder served on an ad hoc panel that evaluated the county’s road funding in 2014. He says the group found $50 million in past-due work, “and it was getting worse by $5 million a year.” They calculated that a one-mill tax would fix all the problems in eight years, but “the board was not comfortable with more than half a mill.” The group figured that a permanent tax at that rate would still gain ground, but more slowly, taking thirty-five years to eliminate the backlog.

Kidder formed a political action committee, “Just Fix The Roads,” to support the millage. They plan to spend $15,000 to $30,000 to pay for ads in the Observer, lawn signs, and possibly postcards for voters in critical constituencies. There’s also a Facebook presence and a website, justfixtheroads.org.

In a tragic twist, Kidder’s wife, the renowned triathlete Karen McKeachie, was working on the website just before she was killed during a training ride in August. Kidder says that the previous evening they went out together to take pictures of bad pavement. “There was a lot of traffic, and I said, ‘Karen, be careful,'” he remembers. “She said, ‘Listen, this is what I used to do’–she was a civil engineer doing traffic accident reconstruction.” According to press reports, the truck that hit her bicycle on Dexter-Chelsea Rd. crossed the centerline to pass another vehicle.

In addition to roads, the millage would raise $1.5 million a year for nonmotorized paths. Ironically, at the time of McKeachie’s death, a survey crew was nearby, working on an extension of the county’s Border-to-Border Trail.

No opposition to the road millage had emerged as of mid-October. Though Brabec is concerned that multiple millages may be “asking too much of our residents,” she nonetheless believes “the voters will support it because of the success we’ve had” with the previous taxes.

LaBarre too thinks the roads millage will pass: “I seem to be on the losing end of this one.”

LaBarre’s day job is working for the Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti Chamber of Commerce as its government relations spokesperson. While the group hasn’t taken a position on the road or vets millages, he says, “the chamber is fully supportive of the regional transit millage. This is a unique and good opportunity, something that’s long been needed … It’s a big ask, but it’s worth saying yes to.

“Even if you put aside the social good that comes from this,” he adds, “it’s good on a business level. Once it’s fully realized, it’ll open up the Ann Arbor-Ypsilanti market to the three surrounding counties. It could be great for new customers, great for employers and employees.”

Why would the chamber support a millage if some local taxes will be spent in other counties? “We’re not dummies,” LaBarre says. “We understand how the world works. This is by and large a positive plan. The whole will be more than the sum of the parts. We’ll get more out than we put in.”