CINCINNATI, Ohio — Voters derailed a proposed $2.6 billion light rail system for Hamilton County Tuesday, overwhelmingly defeating a half-cent sales tax that backers hailed as a bold step toward a world-class transit system for Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky but that opponents castigated as a costly boondoggle, the Cincinnati Post reported.
By a 68 percent to 32 percent vote, countywide voters turned back Issue 7, which proposed to use a half-cent sales tax to build a light rail system that could have ultimately stretched from Northern Kentucky to Paramount’s Kings Island, as well as fund $112 million in expanded bus service throughout the region.
The landslide defeat was the most lopsided loss among 33 local issues on Tuesday’s ballot, a political embarrassment for the unusual coalition of business and environmental groups pushing for its passage.
“I hope this drives a stake through its heart,” said Chris Finney, treasurer of the anti-tax group Citizens Opposed to Additional Spending and Taxes. “It should.”
Disappointed Issue 7 backers concede that Tuesday’s defeat scuttles the light rail plan for the foreseeable future. With Congress scheduled to approve a five-year transit plan next year, Greater Cincinnati’s failure to develop a source of local funding needed to lure billions in state and federal dollars means that the next realistic chance to try again will not come until 2008, supporters said.
“It’s now or never,” leading Issue 7 advocate John Schneider often said during the campaign. Voters resoundingly answered that question Tuesday, but not in the way Schneider and officials of the Southwest Ohio Regional Transit Authority had hoped.
Stephan Louis, the leader of the anti-Issue 7 group Alternatives to Light Rail Transit, said voters had good reason for flashing a huge red stop signal at the ambitious and costly light rail plan.
“I think a lot of people felt this was a good idea that just didn’t pencil out,” Louis said Tuesday night. “There was uncertainty about the financing, no specificity about exactly what would be built and no definite timelines on when it would be built. That’s just not enough to ask people to give you $60 million a year for the next 25 years or so.” (The half-cent sales tax, if approved, had been estimated to generate $59 million annually.)
Although other money issues on Tuesday’s ballot also drew vigorous opposition, the Issue 7 battle was perhaps the most contentious in Hamilton County, as the two sides’ diametrically opposed viewpoints led them to caustically question nearly every major point in each other’s campaign.
Estimates of likely riders for a local light rail network, ridership figures for other cities that already have light rail, the extent of the region’s air pollution and light rail’s potential impact on it, the likelihood of state and federal funding for the plan — these issues and others saw the two sides incessantly dispute each other’s data, analyses and major campaign themes.
Given that the ballot measure proposed a sales tax hike for an indefinite period, it was perhaps inevitable that much of the debate turned on how the light rail system would be funded.
Opponents scoffed at supporters’ financing plan, which envisioned 50 percent of the $2.6 billion price tag being covered by the federal government and another 25 percent coming from the state government. That meant, opponents warned, that 75 percent of the costly project hinged on the vagaries of annual budget battles in Columbus and Washington.
“This is nothing but — a giant Ponzi scheme on a cosmic level,” Louis said. “There are so many holes in this dike you don’t have enough fingers to plug them.”
When Ohio Gov. Bob Taft acknowledged late in the campaign that the state, faced with a deficit that could reach billions of dollars and other pressing budget demands, could have trouble paying for its projected 25 percent share, Louis trumpeted the governor’s non-committal as “the first –but unfortunately not the last — card in this house of cards to fall.”
Supporters, who claimed that the sales tax would cost the average family about $68 annually, characterized that cost as a relatively inexpensive — about $1.30 a week was the catchy figure they liked to use in campaign forums — way to relieve traffic congestion, improve air quality and create tens of thousands of jobs.
Issue 7’s proponents stressed that the proposal, which also would expand bus routes, add neighborhood shuttles and offer streetcars linking the riverfront to downtown and Clifton, would connect 95 percent of the homes and all of the major destinations in Hamilton County.
“It gives transportation access to people who need it,” Schneider said, including the elderly, people with disabilities and the roughly one-quarter of Cincinnati households with no automobile. It also, Schneider argued, would “give transportation freedom” to car owners looking for alternatives to the traffic, costs and other downsides of daily commuting.
Supporters also claimed that the so-called MetroMoves plan would make 300,000 jobs, many of them on the region’s northern fringes, easily accessible via public transit, create 36,000 new jobs, add $5 billion to the local economy over the next three decades and eliminate thousands of tons of air pollutants from car exhaust.
“It’s a clear winner for Cincinnati,” said University of Cincinnati economics professor Haynes Goddard.
Opponents, though, charged that the light rail plan would simply waste billions of dollars while having only a negligible impact on Greater Cincinnati’s environment and regional economy.