ACHTUNG: This is not a “fair and balanced story.” It is an editorial by the editor:
Who or what killed the Dorr road millage request?
Pundits, broadcasters and other media types were chortling Tuesday night and Wednesday over perhaps the most lopsided defeat I’ve ever seen of a state-wide ballot issue.
Most could see the merciless thrashing at the polls coming, but few knew how devastating it would be. Proposal 1 went down by better than 3 to 1.
So now many are wringing their hands, trying to find out why and trying to determine where we go from here.
Before it was rejected so soundly, I editorialized here that there probably would be a combination of three reasons — no to taxes, the proposal was too complicated and gave away goodies to things other than roads and state legislators didn’t have the guts to deal with the problem themselves.
I am more disappointed, however, with the rejection of the local road millage request in Dorr Township. The results presented me with a mystery.
Dorr Township, which has been famous over the past several years for being really anti-tax, surprisingly came very close in the August 2014 primary election to approving a 2.75-mill request for local roads. It lost only 644 to 622, falling just 22 votes short.
Dorr Township Supervisor Jeff Miling was so encouraged that he welcomed creation of a citizens’ committee last fall to come up with an improved specific three-mill proposal for six years to fund paving and maintenance of township roads only. Then local officials began to look for the first opportunity to have it face the voters.
That opportunity showed up May 5 in the form of a special election because the State Legislature had failed to deal adequately with the nation’s worst roads and finally decided to seek a one-cent increase, from six to seven cents, in the state sales tax.
It was wonderful that the road committee’s well-thought-out proposal would go before voters so soon, but it was awful that such an unpopular state-wide issue was at the top of the ballot.
So a much better local roads proposal this week was defeated 1,202 to 665, a landslide verdict of 64 to 36 percent. Many more voted in the special election May 5 than in the August primary, which featured Miling being challenged for supervisor by Patty Senneker and John Tuinstra.
Somehow, between last August and last Tuesday, a citizens’ road committee under the capable and patient leadership of Carolyn Sandel, could pick up only 43 more “yes” votes and meanwhile were inundated by a doubling of “no” votes.
This makes me suspicious that the unpopularity of the state proposal poisoned voters so much that they turned up in droves to stop it, throwing out the baby with the bath water. A quality local proposal went down because it was unfairly associated with a real loser idea from the State Legislature.
Sandel, when contacted by the Penasee Globe the day after the election, put on her best game face, making positive comments that “her committee would continue working on the master plan and getting input from residents.”
“When the people of this community are ready to move forward… we’ll have a plan in place,” she told the Globe.
But as it stands now, the local road millage issue cannot come up again until the August primary in 2016.
If anybody in Dorr Township complains in the least about the condition of the roads, ask them how they voted on the local, not state, millage request.
