Editorial: Nearly a year later, we are still confused about why we lost regional transportation sales tax referendum | SaportaReport

Although 11 months have passed since the regional transportation sales tax vote, the defeat still stings.

The Atlanta region has never been comfortable with failure — partly because it has enjoyed more than its fair share of successes over the decades.

So metro leaders seem hesitant to take a diagnostic look at what went wrong last July 31 during the primary election when voters in the 10-county metro Atlanta area defeated the transportation sales tax by a 68 percent to 32 percent vote.

But others believe that a failure is too important to waste — we must learn from our past so we can know what we need to do differently in the future.

We began to scratch the surface on this all-too-sensitive topic last week when the Center for Transportation Excellence held its 2013 Transit Initiatives and Communities Conference in Atlanta from June 23 to June 26 at the Loews Midtown hotel.

During a panel discussion called: “Lessons from Atlanta,” several talking points were presented.

“It was a perfect storm,” said Dave Williams, vice president of transportation for the Metro Atlanta Chamber — a key player in the fund-raising effort and the political campaign.

Panel moderator Williams (no relation to Chamber President Sam Williams) attributed the loss to the poor economy, a lack of voters’ trust in government, a first-ever regional referendum, no obvious champion for the entire region and a greater turnout than expected (675,000 instead of an expected 375,000).

“The trust issue was huge,” said Dave Stockert, CEO of Post Properties who chaired the fund-raising campaign. “Our project list was so big, it invited more distrust.”

via Nearly a year later, we are still confused about why we lost regional transportation sales tax referendum | SaportaReport.