KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- Kansas City voters on Tuesday dramatically reversed course, turning down a light-rail tax by a resounding margin, The Kansas City Star reported.
With gas prices plunging and the economy in the dumps, only 44 percent of voters backed an extra 3/8-cent sales tax for a 14-mile light-rail line.
"Too many things broke against us," said Kansas City lawyer Pat McLarney, a leader of the campaign supporting light rail.
Opponents said a lack of specifics in the route, along with the economy, doomed the plan.
It was a vastly different outcome from two years ago, when Kansas City voters approved a plan crafted by Clay Chastain that the city later decided was unworkable and too costly.
A half-cent sales tax for light rail passed Tuesday in North Kansas City with 59 percent support, but officials there said they would find a way to ensure the tax isn't collected if the Kansas City plan failed.
Kansas City Mayor Mark Funkhouser said Tuesday night it was now time to devote his attention to a regional network, which would have to include a downtown spine.
"We haven't passed a starter line with a tax increase ever," Funkhouser said. "We had our best shot this time, but we had very well-organized campaign against us."
Funkhouser said that as far as he was concerned, the starter-line plan was dead. "We need to come back with a bigger plan, a more regional plan," he said.
Others were less sure about the future of expanded transit.
The city now has voted eight times on light rail. As for regional transit, it has yet to gain much traction. Work had started on a regional plan last summer, but efforts were set aside until after Tuesday's vote on a starter line. McLarney said the area would have to look carefully at how mass transit can be expanded, either with express buses or some kind of rail transit.
"We've got to get everybody on board with one plan, and we've got to put a lot of effort into trying to figure out what that is and not start down a road that's going to fail again," McLarney said. "I don't see any clear answer to that."
City Councilman Russ Johnson, who helped steer the light-rail campaign, seemed equally perplexed about what to do now. "I don't have any good answers," he said.
Johnson said the city must regroup and plot a new course. He said he would consult the rest of the City Council, something that could occur at a planning session Thursday.
Councilman Ed Ford said that in hindsight, light-rail supporters missed their opportunity for an August election, when gas was about $4 a gallon. He said they did not foresee the economy collapsing and the cost of gas plummeting.
Ford agreed that his colleagues should carefully examine the election results in determining light rail's future.
"We should be realistic about its chances of ever passing," he said. "I am not sure light rail was ever alive in Kansas City."
But Jackson County Executive Mike Sanders said he still was committed to a regional plan. "A good regional mass-transit plan that lays out in detail routes, levels of service and governance structure would have broad support," he said.
Pete Levi, the president of the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce, also refused to write an epitaph for light rail.
Levi said that regardless of Tuesday's outcome, the Kansas City ballot measure led to discussion in Missouri and Kansas about how mass transit might be expanded regionally.
"I don't think there's a funeral here," he said. "I think there's maybe the birth of a better discussion."
Two years ago, voters approved a 27-mile route that would have run from the zoo to the airport -- but did not require a tax increase.
The city repealed that plan, crafted by Chastain, because it diverted money from an existing bus tax. Experts also concluded that the plan had an array of engineering issues.
Engineers and a citizens task force put together the plan that voters rejected Tuesday, but transit advocates still were confronted by a litany of questions from opponents in the campaign.
When voters approved Chastain's plan in 2006, gas was $2.02 a gallon and rising. Gas prices now are about 9 cents per gallon cheaper than two years ago.
It was a tough time to go to the voters for a transit tax, said Jeff Boothe, a national transit lobbyist.
"Anybody going to the ballot (Tuesday) for funding a referendum was walking into a time where the economy is the foremost on everybody's minds," Boothe said. "Divorcing how they feel about the economy from individual referendums has got to be tough."
Indeed, the economy weighed heavily on the minds of some voters Tuesday, including some who voted for the Chastain plan in 2006 but changed their vote this year.
"I'm don't really want to go forward with anything that's going to cost a lot of money when we're on such shaky grounds economically," Heather Murphy said after voting at a polling place on State Line Road in south Kansas City.
Doubts about the route and lack of service to the inner city emerged at a Ward 2 precinct at Sycamore Groves apartments.
"I don't think we need it," said Andrew Taft, 41. "We have the Metro buses. They need the money, not light rail."
With the aid of more than $100,000 contributed by mortgage banker James Nutter Sr., light-rail opponents used TV and radio ads to hammer away at the measure.
They raised questions that transit planners still have not resolved. They took advantage of the fact that planners still had not decided which downtown street light-rail trains would use, and they pounced on the uncertainty of federal funding.
A few dozen of opponents of the light-rail measure gathered Tuesday night at Lew's Grill & Bar in Waldo.
Campaign spokesman Pat O'Neill said generally voters support modern transit, including light rail, but the dearth of answers to many important questions doomed this particular measure.
"There were so many questions," he said. "They wanted to build the road before they'd drawn the map."
O'Neill and former Kansas City Councilman Bob Lewellen said area business and political leaders need to work methodically and cohesively now to build a regional mass-transit network that includes buses. Lewellen said that should include Kansas.
(The preceding article by Brad Cooper was published November 5, 2008, by The Kansas City Star.)
