Wayne County SMART Bus Tax: $570M Millage Fight Explained

Wayne County voters will decide on the August 4 SMART bus millage, a public transportation proposal tied to SMART bus service, the Wayne County Transit Authority, and former opt-out communities. Matt Wilk and Patty Pozios from Not SMART Wayne join Joe Steagall to explain why their group opposes what they call a new $570 million SMART bus tax after House Bill 6088 changed the opt-out system in Wayne County.

This episode covers the Wayne County SMART bus tax fight, the Wayne County SMART millage, local control, Detroit and DDOT, Livonia, Plymouth, Northville, Canton, Van Buren, Downriver, fare revenue, taxpayer subsidy, senior transportation, ballot language, and where voters can check the receipts before the August 4 ballot.

Matt and Patty argue that Wayne County voters need to understand what changed before this proposal reached the ballot. They say communities that had the ability to opt out of SMART for decades lost that local control after House Bill 6088, and they believe many voters are being sold a softened version of the cost, the service guarantees, and the financial reality behind the system.

The conversation covers Not SMART Wayne’s claims about 3% fare revenue, 97% taxpayer subsidy, 3.88 riders per bus, a $570 million Wayne County cost, senior transportation, existing local transit programs, broken promises from Oakland County, pension and legal liability concerns, and why opponents believe the word “replacement” in the ballot language deserves a much closer look.

This is not about telling voters what to think. It is about understanding what is on the ballot, what changed with opt-out communities, what the opposition is claiming, and where Wayne County voters can verify the information before they vote.

In this episode:

• What is the Wayne County SMART bus tax?
• What is the Wayne County SMART millage on the August 4 ballot?
• Why Not SMART Wayne calls it a new SMART bus tax
• How House Bill 6088 changed opt-out communities
• Why local control is central to the opposition argument
• What Detroit, DDOT, Livonia, Plymouth, Northville, Canton, Van Buren, and Downriver have to do with the issue
• Why opponents focus on the $570 million Wayne County cost
• The “only $8/month” framing and why opponents reject it
• The 3% fare revenue and 97% taxpayer subsidy claim
• The 3.88 riders-per-bus claim
• Whether the proposal changes existing senior transportation
• What “replacement” means in the ballot language
• Where voters can check Not SMART Wayne’s receipts

Chapters:

00:00 — Cold open: 3% fares and 97% taxpayer subsidy
01:12 — Matt Wilk and Patty Pozios introduce Not SMART Wayne
02:21 — What changed with House Bill 6088
06:59 — Why local control and opt-out communities mattered
08:36 — What the Wayne County SMART millage could cost
11:53 — Why Not SMART Wayne says $570 million is only Wayne County’s portion
12:27 — Fare revenue, taxpayer subsidy, and SMART’s financial picture
16:56 — The 3.88 riders-per-bus claim
18:42 — Traffic, roads, bus weight, and emissions
21:29 — Senior transportation and existing local programs
25:48 — Ballot language and the word “replacement”
30:51 — Patty reads the ballot language
33:37 — Pension hole, legal costs, and financial concerns
37:23 — Broken promises and Oakland County’s 2022 transit plan
43:56 — Government efficiency and the economic argument
47:45 — Where voters can check the receipts
55:32 — Closing statements and August voting information

Guests:

Matt Wilk
Not SMART Wayne

Patty Pozios
Not SMART Wayne

Website:
NotSmartWayne.org

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:03

Enough that stops now. The middle ground mic. Tax dollars wasted? Voters being sold one thing while the fine print says another. That is the fight behind the Wynne County smart tax. On August 4th, voters are being asked to approve a 10-year millage. Before they do, the question is simple. What exactly are Wing County voters buying?

SPEAKER_03 0:29

On their financial reports, all right in front of them. Of their $188 million, I think the total was five million is fares. 3%. Their subsidy from the taxpayer is 97%. One of the comments that we hear pretty frequently when people are talking about this kind of stuff is that, well, people who use the roads should pay for the roads.

SPEAKER_02 0:57

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 0:57

So I looked and looked up the state budget and I said, what is the roads subsidy? So the cost of the annual cost of amount of money we spend on repairing roads minus fuel taxes, minus auto registration fees, which are ridiculous. Okay. And the answer is about 17%. 83% is paid by those two, 17% by the taxpayer. The smart system has a subsidy.

SPEAKER_00 1:20

All right. Uh my name is Patty. I live in uh Plymouth, Michigan. Uh and I've been following this uh topic for about a year and a half. Other than that, uh, I'm I guess I pay attention to local politics. My motto is think locally, act locally.

SPEAKER_01 1:35

So No, that's great. That's important.

SPEAKER_00 1:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:38

And Joe, thanks for having us. Uh my name is Matt Wilk. I'm one of the organizers of what's called Not Smart Wing. We're now an official ballot question committee. And Patty and myself are the two co-organizers, and we're uh have been working on this issue sort of 2024 ending, 2025 start.

SPEAKER_01 1:55

Oh, that's you know, I think I believe it's what $570 million is the tax. You know, yeah, that's that's a lot of money. Tell everybody a little bit about the backstory of this tax and like or you know, this proposal, how it came about, Patty.

SPEAKER_00 2:10

Uh well, basically in Mich in Southeast Michigan, we have smart, that's the bus system, and that is for Oakland County, Macomb County, and Wayne County. However, we in Wayne County had the ability to voluntarily choose to opt in. And that was taken away from us in December of 2024, December 10th, 2024, House Bill 6088. So that was a bill that took away uh Wayne County community's ability to opt out. That was the House bill, then it went to the Senate, and then Whitmer signed it. So a 30-year right was taken away. The we yes, we've been opt out in Plymouth, Northville, and all uh Canton, Sumter, Van Buren, downriver communities, most of the downriver, and very importantly, the city of Detroit has been opted out since 1994. Livonia originally opted in and they had a citywide vote in 2005 and chose to opt out. And then they had another tax that they just levied locally, and that funds their senior transportation in in Lavonia. So that they thought that was a better use of of their funds because they saw even back then what we're seeing now: empty buses. So um, yeah, McComb County. I mean, there's parts of Macomb County that they've been opted in for 30 years. They've never seen a bus line, they have no transit, they are strictly northern Macomb County. Matt, what do you think? Probably north of M59, possibly, is just that's it. They're just donors, they just pay. And then same in Oakland County, they were subject to this in 2022, sort of, through their county commission, but same thing there. You know, they all went with countywide and the lines just don't exist. So we envision the same thing as and said, you know, all these lines are coming, and I can say with fairly confident they're not gonna come. Those lines are not gonna happen. And if they do, how efficient are they? They run once an hour, if that I mean, they're completely impractical, especially far out here where we live. Yeah, so that's kind of that's the history, and unfortunately, our own representatives and senators in Wayne County, you know, voted to take away our right to opt out. Not all of them, but it lately, this is non on all sides of the aisle are against this tax, but it was rammed through strictly along party lines. So every Democrat in Wayne County, in the state house, and the state senate voted to take away our their constituents' rights to continue to opt out. Wow. I don't want to get too partisan, but that's just a fact.

SPEAKER_01 5:10

So that's just that's disheartening.

unknown 5:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:13

Do you care to elaborate on that part a little bit there, Matt?

SPEAKER_03 5:16

No, she's got it quite quite accurate. So what we started doing was after that happened, that that law was signed in the first waning days of January. This was one of the ones where there was this issue whether they were presented or not. This one's actually signed. So we started sort of thinking to ourselves, when is this gonna happen? And then uh sort of later on in 2025, we started hearing about rumblings about meetings about putting it on the ballot. Okay. And and we were putting our ears to the ground because what we had seen around that same time in our in Lavonia, which is as Patty mentioned, uh formerly opt-in, now opt-out community, is they had just turned down this massive tax. It was hundreds of millions of dollars. I think it was 160 million dollars to build some sort of quasi-downtown plus some uh fire and safety stuff. So we started listing and hearing, and then in February, the uh the executive county executive Warren Evans announced that this was gonna be on the ballot in the coming year. And it's so that's when we really that's when we really kicked it into gear and started investigating sort of what is going on here. It led us to some interesting discoveries, some interesting facts that we found. Uh, we'd love to talk about it.

SPEAKER_01 6:37

So, Matt, look what's you know, we'll look at it from like a local control, you know, because that's what we've been talking a lot about, and the fact that you know people's power was like essentially yanked from them without, I'm not gonna lie, not most of us even knowing. You know, uh, you know, so a lot of supporters, I would say they probably argued, you know, the old opt-out system because some of what I read, you know, created gaps, right? From your eyes, you know, because this is a lot of people that are gonna go, well, how does that translate, you know, the old system to you know the opt-out system to where we're at now? To how do we get to where that makes it okay for them to take that vote away? Is it because they knew, hey, we bring this in front of the people, it's dead on arrival.

SPEAKER_03 7:17

Well, so go the most important part of the history is the reason why they had opt-outs is because of D DOT. Detroit had its own service. So interestingly, and we'll get into this because this is one of our five main points, is that Detroit already pays taxes for a bus system. Detroit comes out of the general operating village, it's 19 mils. They uh and and they already pay. So for them, it's gonna be a double tax. So for years, that was sort of honored. And we said, okay, we're gonna make this exception, we're gonna rope in Detroit, it's gonna allow sort of the Western Wayne communities and the downriver communities to opt out in a lot of other places. If you look at the the map, the the route map, and you look at, as Patty mentioned previously, look at live in Washington Township, where I was this afternoon playing golf, there's no bus line anywhere near you. If you're in Oakland County, and we'll get into that specifically because there were promises made, promises unkept. Same thing. If you're north of effectively Waterford, you're paying for a bus tax. You're nowhere near bus service. So they couldn't go to us and say, you're gonna pay for something that you're gonna use, but that doesn't stop them from trying. So we'll talk about that one too.

SPEAKER_01 8:28

Wow. You know, Patty, going to you, where like, you know, so some people may not understand what the millage means to them, right? Because they may just be clueless. Where where would they see this like hitting their pocketbook at? Mile per person, like the average person.

SPEAKER_00 8:41

Well, we I mean, it's a $570 million tax, right? I mean, they proponents of the tax do try to break it down to a monthly basis because it seems more palatable to people. But um, so they they do have a number, I think like eight dollars a month. But I mean, I did the math. And in my mind, I'm like, you know, we for how long, what was the topic? The price of eggs, right? So in my mind, I'm like, okay, you you say eight dollars a month, but that's a family's eggs for the month. You know, that's a household's eggs, you know what I mean? So you can either buy like 42 dozen eggs a year or pay for empty buses to ride around.

SPEAKER_01 9:24

Right. It's an easy choice.

SPEAKER_00 9:26

You know, and so you gotta, that's my, you know, I I know they try to say it's only eight dollars. You went, what's wrong with like the people that you know, in favor of it that have kind of commented on our stuff, you know. But I'm like, yeah, number one, it's not your eight dollars. And and number two, you're not gonna stop there because if I just saw something about an hour ago of Mary Sheffield's plan, and um they're talking about, you know, and part of it is transit. And I mean, they're not gonna stop at one mil. And anybody who believes that, no, their goal, and we've overheard it with our own ears, Matt did, is five mils eventually.

SPEAKER_03 10:06

The law, the law allows a transit millage of up to five mils, and they have described one mil, $570 million over 10 years, as a start.

SPEAKER_00 10:16

Wow.

SPEAKER_03 10:17

So I I wholly reject the concept of dividing the cost into break it down into some small increment. And you know why? Because my my dad passed away a couple years ago and and I got his mail and so I still get his request for funding from this old, generous old man who must have paid, given money to all these different people. And they break it down to the per day, always. It's only five dollars a day.

SPEAKER_00 10:43

It's a thousand dollars. Coffee a day, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 10:46

Yeah, it's a cup of coffee a day for you to support this uh, you know, African village. And it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait, wait, wait. That's like $1,500 a year, Dad. Is that how much you were spending? So they always try to break it down to a small number to make it appeal palatable. I disagree with that. It what's the total bill? We go out to dinner and a bill's three hundred dollars, it's three hundred dollars. It's not a hundred dollars a person, it's not ten dollars a month, it's not three, three, you know, thirty-three cents a day, it's three hundred dollars. And and this tax, and and they can't argue with it because that's what you can do the math.

SPEAKER_01 11:19

Right. No, I mean, we you know, uh I worked in the service industry for a long time, and they used to love to call it that the nickel and dime, you know, or they used to like to call it a penny profit business, you know, where it's where you don't notice it, but they just keep and that's you know, and they're taking the same approach because when you go, hey, would you like to add on the the gum at the counter? Oh yeah, it's only a quarter, boom. So they they try that approach to try to manipulate people, but like people don't see Target. $8 can eight water and cereal because the milk's too expensive. You know, and milk, I don't know about you guys, but the milk I've gotten from the grocery store these days never makes it to the expiration date, it's always bad before the expiration date.

SPEAKER_00 12:00

Sure.

SPEAKER_01 12:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:02

So yeah, and keep it, you know, and also like 570 million, that's only Wayne County.

SPEAKER_01 12:09

Yeah. Wow. Oh, that's just the Wayne County aspect of it.

SPEAKER_00 12:14

That's only the Wayne County portion across three counties.

SPEAKER_03 12:18

Wow. When we dug into, like I said, we dug into the numbers. And when you dig into some of those numbers now about how they how they operate. If you wanted us to get into it, we can just jump right in if you'd like.

SPEAKER_01 12:31

Yeah, I mean, like like what's like the you know, what's like what would be the sum of the tri-county area?

SPEAKER_03 12:36

Like just like a ballpark idea, or do they their revenue is about 188 million dollars a year? Who? Okay, so they get revenue from various different sources. They get it from local tax dollars, of which I said, so Wayne County is gonna be a new, it's 57 million. I think the uh I think we did the math. I think the opt-out is like 30 some and the opt-in is 20 some. So they're gonna pick up 30-ish million dollars. They get money from the Feds, they get money from the state, yeah, right. They get all kinds of different things. However, yeah. The question that we asked, and we'll go out of order if you want. The question that we asked was how much of their revenue comes from fares? Yeah, fair.

SPEAKER_01 13:21

That was gonna be my next question, actually. Tell them.

SPEAKER_03 13:24

Okay, so I mean, every time we this is this is the this is how this journey has been. Every time we have done the math on this stuff, it's always been a ridiculously bad answer. Okay, it's very simple. It's all you have 97 that's just a pure insanity.

SPEAKER_00 13:38

So it's local taxes, they get money from the state, they get money from the feds, grants, this, that, whatever. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:46

Wow. I that is uh, you know, 97% subsidy is that's that's quite high. I mean, that's right up there with some of the most generous subsidies out of almost any program. That is correct. I mean, I could I mean, I know there's some that are 100%, but I can't think of very many that are that far up the ladder.

SPEAKER_03 14:06

No, no, this is a complete, this is a complete and and you look up other transit systems in other states, it's not that bad. They actually have riders. This one generates five million dollars. And and they're happy. The funny thing is they're now they run around and they say, Well, we're we're doing this, we're giving this for free. You're not charging anyone anything.

SPEAKER_00 14:27

Well, yeah, the free the students ride free.

SPEAKER_03 14:29

Yeah, they were only paying a dollar anyway.

unknown 14:34

Right.

SPEAKER_03 14:34

Give them a dollar off, uh, it's a dollar.

SPEAKER_01 14:37

You're it doesn't city wants to let that city put it in.

SPEAKER_03 14:40

Yeah, exactly. Well, I mean, that the whole the whole premise of this, when this when when Lavonia originally had its discussion, they had they were in smart for years, for almost a decade, or a little over a decade. And the thing is it didn't work. It didn't work for a very particular reason. And uh Patty did the math. So tell them about the math about population density, Patty.

SPEAKER_00 15:03

Well, yeah, so from Greece, and they got married and they didn't have a car for 10 years. So they rode the bus, and the bus came right down our residential street. They didn't have to walk. Uh so at that time in the city of Detroit, the population density was over 13,000 people per square mile, like in the 1950s, and now it's around 4,500 per square mile. So it just it's completely you know impractical. And you know, and then the up, you know, the proponents say, well, it's it's because we don't have bus lines that that's why this is it's like it's like they take that opposite logic or illogic. I mean, it's kind of hard to wrap your head around what they're saying, but like, oh, then people are gonna move closer to the bus stop, and then like all the all these wonderful things are are gonna happen. No, they're not because they would have already happened. You know, if the system worked, there would not be 3.88 riders per bus. There wouldn't be. It would be higher.

SPEAKER_03 16:10

Wait, we we should probably get into that number at this point.

SPEAKER_01 16:12

Yeah, well, that was the bill. I was gonna ask X, because I mean, when you look at not making it national, but when you look at pictures or you know, videos of people on buses and like uh I know New York City is like you know, a lot bigger than Detroit, but you can see the bus is packed. But then you know, I'm not gonna I can't lie. When I've ever when I'm driving around, whenever I see a bus, I'm like, like nobody in that thing.

SPEAKER_00 16:34

If if you can see inside, have you noticed what they've started doing?

SPEAKER_03 16:38

Yeah, the we so we They're blacking out the windows. They're blacking out the windows. So we we did the math.

SPEAKER_00 16:44

Or they or they wrap, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 16:45

Right, they did the wrap. So we did the math around this particular thing. So it turns out that the they call passenger miles, it's something like 48 and a half million passenger miles in the last year reported, which was 2024. Sounds like a big number. But a pat what's a passenger mile? A hundred passenger miles could be a hundred people going one mile or one person going a hundred miles. You don't know enough to figure out the answer to our question, which was how many people are on a bus? Well, they don't report in any of their local reporting the other necessary number, but they do report it to the federal government. Whoops. So we pulled the federal government report. It's called the annual agency report, uh, specific for SMART. And it shows the 48.5 million passenger miles or 48 point something. And uh the denominator is 12.5 million, what they call vehicle revenue miles. Vehicle revenue miles like your odometer, how many miles was the vehicle in service? Okay, so when you do the math, the answer is 3.88 people per bus. Now, by the way, that's down from about four and a half in 2023. The average bus, mathematically, irrefutably, is three has three point eight eight people on it. Okay, that's those things are massive too. Yes, great point, great point. So that was our second one. So we said, okay, this is ridiculous. 3.88 people for bus, you gotta be kidding me. So a lot of the things you hear about buses and transit in general becomes untrue when you know the bus has only 3.88 people on it. Okay. So for example, buses make for less traffic. No, because when you take a bus, when you add a bus and you take off, say, the three cars that have 3.88 people, a bus is about three times as long as a car. A bus is slower to react, slower to make turns, has to stop at uh railroad crossings. It doesn't make traffic better, it makes traffic, in fact, worse. Second point, this every time we like I said, every time we turn over rock, it got worse and worse. I did not know this. A bus is approximately six to seven times as heavy as a car. So when you take a add a bus to the road, take three cars off the road, you get more potholes, not less.

SPEAKER_00 19:23

More weight, more weight going down the roads, more weight going down the road.

SPEAKER_03 19:29

And nobody who has ever been around a bus doesn't know this one. Buses emit something like six to ten times the amount of particulate matter as a passenger vehicle. And and fascinatingly, so I I live in Northville, Petty lives in Plymouth. One of these fantasy things, we'll talk about line locations, but one of these fantasies has this line going sort of through our downtown and through her downtown. Is that what you want? We're all eating outside and a diesel bus pulls up and goes past us. How quaint. No, no, we don't. So all of those benefits that they say come from adding buses and taking cars off the road, they're all backward. It makes everything worse. And uh and to Patty's point, which I'll put a little bit of a finer point on, I used to live in Chicago. I lived five-eighths of a mile from the brown line, and I would walk to the brown line, and that was pretty far walk in the winter. That was cold. I can imagine. That's with an ultra-dense community that is the north side of Chicago. We don't have that here. Okay. It doesn't work mathematically when you have to have everything interspersed. It just doesn't work and as a fixed line. So there's this fantasy that sort of that Patty alluded to that sort of built have grown, the opt-out communities or the opt-in communities? And the answer is almost exclusively the opt-out communities, including Detroit. Right? It's where there is their downtown. But all the rest of it has been the suburbs that don't have bus lines because that's not what people want and people need. Right. This isn't Chicago.

SPEAKER_01 21:20

It's not New York.

unknown 21:22

No.

SPEAKER_03 21:22

Yeah. And it's and it's not LA and it's not Atlanta, where you where in the winter it's passable to walk. When it's 15 below zero and you have to walk a mile to a bus, you aren't doing it. It's not a viable option.

SPEAKER_01 21:38

Well, you know, from what I was understanding, you know, the senior transportation, right? We're kind of you guys talked a little bit about that. You know, and I believe Lavonia, I believe you said the funds it now. Funds their own, I should say. Because I know a lot of times people use it as a scare tactic, right? Grandma's gonna be left hanging out to dry, you know, grandma's Going to get to her doctor's appointment or get her prescriptions. I, you know, that's like that's the that's the common go-to when it when it comes to something like that. You know, because that's so important, and you know, to a lot of people that do have parents that really can't drive, you know, explain some of the myths behind that because there's a lot of things that are missing half-truths.

SPEAKER_03 22:18

Go ahead, Patty.

SPEAKER_00 22:20

Well, yeah, so I mean, let's start with. I mean, uh, should we get into the ballot language, Matt, or waiting for the biggest?

SPEAKER_03 22:25

No, let's just talk about the money first.

SPEAKER_00 22:27

Yeah. So basically, yeah, they are running around town. I've seen Warren Evans going to all these events and other proponents on social media saying, yeah, for seniors, this and that. Well, if you look at their report, their transit proposal, I don't remember the exact wording of their that report that they published. Less than 1% of this $57 million is for seniors. Wow. But yet they're using it and actually put it in their ballot language, which we'll go into more later. But they're it's completely they're trying to tug at heartstrings and mislead people and think this is what the money's for. And if you look at it, it's less than 1%.

SPEAKER_03 23:09

$550,000 out of a $57 million annual budget will go towards local community partnerships. Fascinatingly, Northville has Northville Connections, Plymouth has Plymouth Senior Transit, Livonia has live and go, Nangan Transit in Canton is sort of quasi-divided between in and out because it includes Westland. These are already funded locally by their local communities.

SPEAKER_00 23:32

While our business in your community, maybe, Joe, but yeah, go ahead.

SPEAKER_03 23:36

Yeah. While the bus says smart on the outside, it's paid for by my community, and the bus driver is paid by my community, and the service is arranged and timed by my community. So that is already there. We spend, I used to sit on my parks and rec board, that was part of what we did, and we spend a couple hundred thousand hundred and fifty thousand ish a year subsidizing this service, and we are happy to do it. Okay. It has nothing to do with this millage, right? And they didn't even try. They didn't even say we're going to be five million dollars out of the 57 million dollars. We're really going to amp up senior change. They didn't do it. But what they didn't and shame on the person who is allowed to put on the ballot that as a question to tell the world this is what your money is for, list off a whole long list of things and knowing that the one you're trying to get people's attention with is less than one. Because there's a there there are seniors out there in my community and elsewhere that would like expanded service. They really would. And what they have to do now is they go to their local community. Now, what happens, I will tell you, having said in this meetings, is the the because they're the the the a lot of these decisions are made by other seniors. They're like, that's not enough people, that's a waste of our time, right? So you have you can't just be someone living where you want to live and expect someone to drive you around, even as a senior. And they're there, those are sometimes tough conversations, but they're all made locally. Now we're gonna spend $550,000 or $57 million here's across the entire Wayne County. Right. Across all of Wayne County. So Northville might get $10,000.

SPEAKER_00 25:13

And actually, there's no guarantee that that's money's gonna even stay in Wayne County. It all goes into one big pot.

SPEAKER_01 25:19

Well, I say, I bet you a lot of people don't realize that.

SPEAKER_00 25:21

Right. Yeah, that's I mean, where it's gonna be $570 million is how much we're gonna pay in, but where's it gonna go? We don't know. Yeah. It goes into smart budget, which is tri-county.

SPEAKER_01 25:33

Right.

SPEAKER_00 25:33

Right.

SPEAKER_01 25:34

Now we were talking a little bit about the ballot language that you know you were wanting to bring up, Patty and Matt. You know, one of the things I had seen was the lawsuit over transparency and obviously the bot language, you know, and the case was dismissed. You know, what was what was the argument you were trying to tell people? Because I know sometimes they'll dismiss it even though it's a completely valid argument. Oh actually, a lot of the time.

SPEAKER_00 25:57

Yeah, we think it was valid. Go ahead.

SPEAKER_03 26:00

Myself and outside council both did. Well, so the issue was with there were a couple of them. First of all, we tried very hard to find out when the next Wayne County transit of our have our voices be heard. And we we asked them specifically when is the next meeting. They said no documents responsive to that request. That was on March the 5th. On March the 19th, they held the meeting. That's a violation of the law. Whether the judge agrees with me or not, that's a violation of the law. The the the at that meeting, they approved ballot language that they had cut and pasted from the uh the Oakland County, which is different than Oak Wayne County Transit Authority, the Oakland County ballot language. And what we said was the state law requires a couple things. First of all, the language has to be not prejudicial. You may not prejudice the voter either in favor or in opposition to the question. The second thing, it has to be clear. It's got got it got to be clear. So the two problems that we raised with the judge were when you say, for example, the money is going for seniors, veterans, and the disabled, and we just talked about how seniors get less than 1%. Veterans and disabled, there's nothing. There's literally no, there's no line item, it's zero. You're just saying because a veteran could take a bus and we give a discount in fares from one dollar to 50 cents for veterans, it could be used for veterans. And the argument we made in court was if the ballot language said to take nuns to church, well, nuns could conceivably take the bus to church, but we can't use that as ballot language. This is a relatively new role for this judge. The previous judge that did um this issue, these issues are retired a couple of years ago, again, Judge Kenny, who was pretty straight laced. This person, this probably was an issue of first impression for her. And it was backs against the wall because they had delayed, delayed, delayed. And she, if she had found for us, the ballot would ballot measure would not have been on there. The other question that Patty had made the August ballot. The other issue legally that that Patty alluded to that was important was this is a new tax for over one million people in Wayne County, including all 650,000 residents of Detroit. Okay. When they look at the ballot language, they're going to see the word replacement. This is a replacement of an expiring millage. Okay, if the three of us are sitting around at a bar table and I knock your drink over, Joe, and I'll say, I'll replace it. That means I'm giving you something that you already had. It doesn't mean I'm buying Patty a drink, even though she wasn't drinking, and then buying one for myself, too. That is not how the word replace is used in the English language. And the judge looked at that and said, Well, they did say it was new, and that's okay. Like issue a first impression for the judge, fine. We just want to let everybody know that for one million residents of Wayne County, it is a new tax. And in particular, for any of your listeners who happen or viewers or listeners that happen to be in the city of Detroit, for the city of Detroit, it is a unique double tax because they're already taxed for D DOT. Now they're going to be taxed again for Smart. Now, SMART says we're going to give the money to D DOT. That I will be back in front of you in is it 10? I think it's 10 or 11 days. Because I asked that question. Where's your written agreement between the Wayne County Transit Authority and D D DOT that says you're giving the money to them? Now I have one. I well, we'll see what they have to say. They have another 10 days to respond to my my FOIA request. But I'll tell you what happens if they don't. We're gonna be all over everywhere. Because then that's very typical in in county. They'll make a promise. You're like, okay, well, when you say you've agreed, that's in the form of an agreement. That's something in writing.

unknown 30:05

Right.

SPEAKER_03 30:05

And normally an agreement of a body is approved at the meeting of the body, right? Your school district agreed to hire a new superintendent. When do you do that? You did that three weeks ago at your last school board meeting.

SPEAKER_02 30:15

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 30:16

This is we'll see, because we didn't see it. So I'm very curious to see what they I'm sure what I'm sure what I'm gonna get is it'll be ten thousand dollars to get an answer to your question, and then we'll I don't know, we'll be back in court again.

SPEAKER_00 30:28

Yeah, they've been delaying and delay, delay, delay.

SPEAKER_03 30:31

But the point for your listeners is you'll see the ballot language, it's gonna say seniors.

SPEAKER_00 30:36

Yeah, right. I mean, I mean if I'm gonna read it, I have it right in front of me.

SPEAKER_01 30:40

Yeah, I was actually getting ready to say I was gonna be, you know, what what is what specific you know, phrasing or words in that ballot language do voters really need to slow down and pay attention to?

SPEAKER_00 30:51

Sure. Okay, a proposal to authorize the Wayne County Transit Authority to levy a millage for the purpose of funding public transportation services in Wayne County, including operating, maintaining, improving, and expanding transit services, creating an expanding service connecting local communities, expanding transportation services for seniors, veterans, peoples with disabilities, and the general public to access health care, education, and other daily needs. Again, prejudicial. The millage would be levied at a maximum rate of 0.9831 MLs for a period of 10 years, beginning 2026 tax year levy, ending in 2035. And this is this millage would replace an expiring millage levied by the Wayne County Transit Authority, supporting the Suburban Mobility Authority or for Regional Transportation, also known as SMART. Now they say if this new millage is approved and levied, revenue will be distributed to Wayne County, SMART, DDOT, and other community and regional transit providers. It is estimated 57 points in the first year. So, yeah, so the key words are, you know, it's seniors, veterans, you know, expanding transportation services for seniors, veterans, people, and the general public to access healthcare, education, and other daily needs. What if I want to access it is for something that's not on their list? Can I still use it? I mean, what is that? Why are you listing that?

SPEAKER_03 32:28

Yeah, the key thought is those are all lies.

SPEAKER_00 32:30

Yeah, those are all just those are typical like tug at the heart strings kind of stuff. Then the third paragraph, the millage would replace an expiring millage. If I pull out my tax bill right now, there is no expiring millage for smart. Same in Northville, same in Flat Rock, same in Rockwood, same in the city of Detroit, Canton, Sumter, Van Buren, Bellville, Gros Seal, Brownstown Township, Huron Township.

SPEAKER_03 33:02

Yeah, they're the it's not true. It's just not true.

SPEAKER_00 33:06

And I think the no what I want to get away with it, the judge let them get away with that wording. Wow.

SPEAKER_03 33:12

Yeah, the the the key that I want people to to focus on is the $57 million. Because they've heard it's $57 million. And I the the the thing I want people to have in their heads is it's fifty-seven million dollars a year for a bus that is 3.88 riders on it. The bus is empty. I I can't wait to I'm I'm I'm we're trying to see the next place Warren Evans is going to show up. Because one of our one of our people saw him and sort of raised this and he goes, Wow, I don't agree with that number. And he and he or it was actually with uh Asad Turfee, who is his right-hand man, and uh and he cites something that I also know is untrue. It's like he doesn't even know the math of his own thing. And uh there are a couple other interesting points that we found just on the numbers wise. And then Patty can talk about the the lines. The the numbers like so I'm just I I used to sit on my school board, I've looked at financial statements, I do this professionally as well. What's the pension hole? Well, in the last, in the last audited financial, which was June of 2024, their 25s aren't ready yet. Actually, there was June of 24, I think was published in 25. So they're like a year, whatever. Uh, the pension hole was $72 million. $72 million unfunded pension. We're on the hook for. That's a lot of money. That's a lot of money. Now they claim they've knocked it down to 20 million. I haven't seen the final report. So I always tell people it's somewhere between 20 and 72. The other one that's fascinating is and this was brought to me by a local Lavonite, and he said, Man, how much is how much are they paying in lawsuits every year? Right. So I said, Oh, that's a fascinating. So apparently uh Mike Morse, right? It's so bad that he has like a drop down. Who are we suing? Bus accident, smart, right? So smart, like many other transit authorities, is self-insured. They don't have third-party insurance that covers them. Oh they may have some reinsurance, but they they effectively pay for almost all of it themselves. Well, last year they spent over $10 million on liabilities like that. Legal liabilities.

SPEAKER_01 35:34

Good lord.

SPEAKER_03 35:35

$10 million a year for buses that have only 3.88 riders on this, right? The fare revenue from those buses is $5 million a year. You're spending more to pay legal bills than you are twice as much as you're getting in fair revenue. This is a jobs program. Okay. This is a program to employ people to get on a bus and drive it to and fro, day after day after day, empty. And because uh what I what the question that we get asked a lot is well, what about like microtransit and this and that, whatever? Well, like that's all a different ball of wax, right? They which they have in some locations, but interestingly become more popular over time, but it's just not. So what we have in our heads is and then like we were talking earlier, it's buses that have 3.80 people on it and watch. What do you see? The bus is covered over, it's tinted windows, it's wrapped. And when the sunlight shines through, you know what you see? Nobody, nobody on it. This whole journey for us, we didn't come looking for a fight. We're we you we're not people that are out there screaming, busy says it very poignantly. Her mom and dad needed a bus to get where they were going. But you know where the bus was? It was in a convenient location in a dense urban area, and they used it. There are people who need it. Detroit is a different animal. Detroit has a lot more the riders per bus that Smart has. Okay. Wow. But the other one we found that was fascinating is we were looking at what happened in 2022 in Oakland County. Now, at the time, but this is prior to 20, the right to opt out. Okay, and Oakland County, many, many did from a charity. Okay. And there's a that's a that's still so so we we know that Oakland County tried to get around this by putting making the millage be a county millage, not a transit millage. So there would be no opt-out, but they were still working sort of hand in glove with uh with smart. So Patty, why don't you tell them about the maps? The maps are almost the best because it's another great visual.

SPEAKER_00 37:56

Yeah, so in 2022, just like put out a report and said, you know, these are all the new lines, you know, that we're going to were going to headlines showing going to downtown Oxford, Great Lakes Crossing, Pine Knob, I mean, all these, you know, wonderful places, West, you know, out in the lakes area, different things like that. And most of them have not materialized four years later.

SPEAKER_03 38:24

Yeah, we we had a we had a volunteer who who nerd kind of nerded it up a little bit, I guess all the best way to describe it.

SPEAKER_00 38:30

Yeah. So it's on our graphic where it shows like what they were peddling and what came to fruition. And we call that the broken promises because that's all it was. So we were at a meeting here in Plymouth Township on transit, and they formed this thing, this Western Wayne County Transit Consortium thing, thinking they would actually have some sway. So they're like, oh, well, if we partner with Smart and we tell them what the community wants, we'll get it, you know, typical pie in the sky kind of thoughts. And uh so they did a survey and all this stuff, and they had the most wanted routes were the airport and downtown. And so this woman who was the planner for Canton Township was leading this consortium. She went and she was talking about this in the meeting and in front of everyone said, We took all this results to Assad Turfee and Smart. And they said, No, it's too far. You're not gonna have bus lines to the airport. So I mean they flat out, I mean, that they he flat out said it, it's not gonna happen. And then Ann Arbor, you know, that's a different county, that's Washtenaw County, so it doesn't cross over there, so it's not gonna take people to Ann Arbor and to go downtown Detroit. I mean, it's gonna take you two hours, probably. Who knows, right? So there's something else, and I'm forgetting it. Maybe you know, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 39:59

It was it was a it was a remarkable discussion.

SPEAKER_00 40:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 40:04

Because they went in blue than red. Again, well, this is not a right-left issue, but they are, and and they would make suggestions, and they were good suggestions, and they made a lot of sense. Like, shouldn't we have I mean, if you had something that would pick you up and take you to the airport, would you ride it? Well, maybe hired for this purpose. We're told no. We we we found it fascinating because the other thing is called the Wing County Transit Evaluation. It's the report. So we're flipping through the report, and we get to this end of it, and there's a timeline.

SPEAKER_02 40:37

Timeline.

unknown 40:38

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 40:38

Wait a minute, what? And and we look at it, we're like, some of these lines are not scheduled to start until 2029. Oh Lord. So they're rolling.

SPEAKER_00 40:50

The first line?

SPEAKER_03 40:52

Yeah, yeah. No, there's some that they're like, we're expanding this, whatever. But the um the the there some of them were as late as 2029. And the the best part was they had they uh they tried to say, Well, this wasn't us talking. And we have a video. The internet is forever, it's beautiful. We have a video of one of these people in 2022, in October, with the map telling, oh, look at this, it's gonna be great. You can take a bus to Great Lakes Crossing, you could take a bus to Oxford, you can go through the Western Lakes region, it's gonna go down Orchard Lake Road and all the shopping and blah, blah, blah, blah. All of them don't exist four years later. They've got a neck, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 41:42

And the lady that Canton lady was saying, you know, well, it's just it's just a start. Well, how long does it take to buy a bus and hire a bus driver? Yeah, like it's just typical government just bloat and inefficiency and waste. I don't know.

SPEAKER_03 42:00

Here is the other best part. Why does it take so long to do it? Well, yeah, you gotta buy a bus. Yeah, you gotta buy a bus. It doesn't take four years to buy a bus. Thought to myself, what about the building the stations? No, no, no, that's done by your local government.

SPEAKER_00 42:14

Oh, yeah, they don't pay for that. They don't even pay for that. So our local communities have to pay for bus stops if we get a bus stop. And then you look at the plans and you just have to laugh because over near us, they have the bus route, like Matt said, going through downtown Northville, little Northville, it's not very big. The school buses struggle to make the turn, right?

SPEAKER_03 42:36

I can tell you a school bus does not make that turn because we specifically know it cannot make that turn.

SPEAKER_00 42:42

Yeah. And then then through, you know, downtown Plymouth, they have the buses going on Hines Drive, which routinely is closed for flooding.

SPEAKER_01 42:51

Right. I remember that. Yeah. They lived over there.

SPEAKER_00 42:54

Yeah. And so they have bus line going on Gros Seal. Really? The bus is gonna go over the bridge to Gros Seal. Is that what's gonna happen? Or are the people of Gros Seal just gonna have to pay this tax forever and not have bus or anything?

SPEAKER_01 43:08

That'll be what happens. I mean, that that bridge for the the well, I guess I lived on the free bridge. That's what I like to call it.

SPEAKER_00 43:15

Because it's anything but that thing goes down like constantly because it's so old and well, there's they had something on the ballot, I think, in 24 about their bridge because they they need to rebuild it or something.

SPEAKER_03 43:27

Yeah, so anyway, bus wouldn't make it far. Bus wouldn't make it far. It's it's it's a it's a blatant lie, and everyone can see it. It is simply trying to pass a test.

SPEAKER_00 43:36

Money grab.

SPEAKER_03 43:37

Yeah. So I I attended the Lavonia City Council, and there's a video, I wouldn't say viral. I don't know what that means, but it's got a couple hundred thousand views, and it's got a lot of comments, and there's a range of them, and there, there's sort of crazy pro, crazy anti, and then the sort of but most of the middle of the road are like This is not the time to throw more money at an inefficient government program. And we get asked often a lot, well, how would you fix it? And the answer is the same. We don't there's no motivation for this organization to fix it when all they have to do is go to the taxpayer and twist their arm and take more money. That's why government's inefficient. You do that in a business, and we run a subsidy, was you were losing 97 cents on every dollar of fare, you'd be out of business in a second. How much there are two other numbers I want to share with your audience, which are great. The average fare under in a nickel, $1.5, okay, $105. If the system were unsubsidized, okay, if fares paid for the system, what would that fare have to be? Well, the subsidy is $97. Think about that revenue and sorry, the expenditures. And revenue expenditures are the same. They spend every dollar they get, they save no dollars. So you take the expenditures for smart systems and you divide by passenger miles, okay? Of $3.70 per mile. So for an average, let's say, let's take a light driver, let's say it's a senior driver and they drive 10,000 miles a year.

unknown 45:23

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 45:23

It costs Smart $37,000 to move miles. Would it be more every year?

SPEAKER_01 45:32

It's a new power every year.

SPEAKER_03 45:37

Yeah, exactly. And so it's costing them for that light person $3,000 plus a month. And we hear, oh, we can't. There is this fantasy. And I think a lot of people, right, left, center, especially people who are working, who balance budgets, who have their checkbooks, they that they are being disabused of the notion that the government can spend whatever it wants and it doesn't count. That's not true. I we have had this, I have this running thing going that every time I see online somebody talk about free school lunches, I say, where does the money come from for the free lunches? Dot dot dot. Comes from you. It's not free if I take the money out of your pocket. It's not a dollar five bus fare and it's cheaper. So sayeth, right? It's not that way because the money's coming from you. So the the the best one we just had was so we've had this oil oil thing and with the Middle East, gas prices have gone up. This is the perfect example of why public transit is necessary because gas prices are so high. And I said, Yeah, wow. What do what do buses run on? Diesel. Diesel? The one that's on the sign that says six dollars a gallon? That one that's more expensive than unleaded.

SPEAKER_01 47:13

Good lord. I mean, these these are bad figures. These are really yeah. I mean, you know, I had read some, but I guess I just until you hear it like this, it just doesn't hit until you hear it pretty like you guys do a great job presenting it, by the way. I mean, it just doesn't hit until somebody hears it in that, you know, like it's like you read a speech from Ronald Reagan, right? You know it's gonna be inspiring, just how he is, right? But then when you hear it, it's a lot different. You know, it it comes out and you know, it's one thing to see 570 million, it's another thing to see you two talk about the 570 million and why that's a problem.

SPEAKER_00 47:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 47:56

I mean, you know, and and that's so important. So, so important. You know, when we're looking at this, what are like the out of all this, right? Because people are gonna get, as it gets closer, the ones that do see it are gonna get bombarded. What are the top three receipts, you know, per se, you know, proof, you know, going to your website? Like, where can they find some of this information to really push back or if they want, feel informed?

SPEAKER_03 48:20

All of this information is available on our website. We kept all of it. I I got we got receipts as far uh as far as and days long. And the the the you know, sometimes you ask yourself, like, do I have it right? Am I really right? And then you put we we our sort of testing point was we started putting this out and they started changing the subject. So when we talked about the like this great one, so when we talked about the location of the bus lines, and I spoke about it, and Lavonia is very uh uh attuned to this because the reason why they opted out is because the bus lines weren't where they were told they would be, right? Instead of the the original bus line, instead of it going sort of east and west, it went like north and south, and they're like, that's not where we want it. And smart said, you know, whatever, just like they told us. Talk about the uh what was I just saying there? I put it on Facebook and I said, Hey, this is there it is. And Dave Woodward, who's the chair of the Oakland County Board of the Commission, he's the highest ranking person other than the executive, right? He said, This is all lies. And I said, Hey, thanks for joining my my post here. Could you please take a look at this map and tell me where I'm lying? And he said, Wow, you see, what you don't understand is that and he gives some politics speak, and then I sort of call him again. And his last one was, Well, we gave them other things. Wait, what? What's other things?

SPEAKER_01 49:51

Like, what does that mean?

SPEAKER_03 49:52

Like, what? And and and the answer is it wasn't a lie. So we we we we listened to Asad Turfee and he said, I disagree with your math. Okay, look, man, I I have two 18-year-olds. Uh, they just graduated high school. Math does not lend itself to a lot of like disagreement. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 50:17

Like when people say, My truth, my truth, my math. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_03 50:21

So if the number's not 3.88, tell me what it is. And I can tell you, it's it I know I'm right.

SPEAKER_01 50:27

Because even at even at a four, that's not many people on it. One of them big old buses.

SPEAKER_00 50:32

And the bottom line is you know what, they can say whatever, oh, it's not true, it's not true. You know how I know it's true? Because I have two eyes. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 50:40

Right, yes.

SPEAKER_00 50:40

And when the sun hits just right, I can see through your blacked-out attempt to hide the emptiness inside the bus. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 50:50

It's and and and maybe, maybe in some parts of the world. Yeah, in some parts of the world, this is okay. Okay. In some parts of the United States, this is okay. And when I say that, I mean taking money from taxpayers, funding some empty government thing that accomplishes nothing for nobody. Yeah, uh okay, it happens some places, but not now. And not to not to places that they're talking about downriver is a lot of working class communities. Right? There's a lot of people in a lot of our communities that they they're making decisions of what they can and cannot afford on a daily basis. And to just walk in and say, well, it's only a couple hundred dollars for you for this, what are you doing? It's a lot of money. It's a lot of money. And and and people are making decisions and scrimping. And here's a government program where they're not even attempting to make it efficient. One of the comments I found that was fascinating was that's not a flaw, or uh, that's not a bug. That's a feature. A feature? What feature of your program is an empty vehicle going up and down a street? Right. That don't make any sense. They have that in Europe. We're not Europe. You're in Michigan, you're not in Europe, you're not in a c you're not in a city that was built in.

SPEAKER_01 52:12

I've had that argument with people, not like argument, but like they'll be like, oh, well, not that I'm endorsing a big government program. But when you go to Europe, their government programs, they keep the streets clean, they keep the cities organized. They actually, to a degree, work to a degree, but their governments function a lot different than ours does. And it's it's a tad bit. They they look at things, and I'm not like necessarily arguing for what they do, but you know, like when I've been overseas, I've gone, okay, you know, we it feels like we pay as much taxes as these people, you know, maybe not directly like they do, but through, you know, every you know, you owe you you take your breath. It's like his hand out for a nickel. Work. Whereas here a lot on the state side, you know, like a lot of our lot of our infrastructure just doesn't work, even though we spend an insane amount of money on it.

SPEAKER_00 53:03

Look, I guess they want to make that be the answer for everything. I mean, they're doing it with education, I mean, everything. They just keep throwing more and more money at things, but not really fixing it. And the bottom line is the taxpayer deserves better, and the users of the system deserve better. Yes.

SPEAKER_03 53:21

And it and and like we said, there's no incentive to do better when that's not the metric they're looking at. Does anyone in every any government system say, well, you know what I want to do today? I want to cut costs and I want to become more efficient. Never, never. And and the the the the the and and it when the government is involved, that draws over. We're having we obviously construction is a big thing. So in our area, there's some construction going on, and nearby, there's construction that is being paid for privately by a developer who's building kind of a shopping center on a corner, and he is pouring a new curb cut. His curb cut was built in a matter and completed in a matter of days. Half a mile away, there's work going on that's still going on. Faster he gets that done, the faster the workers are off the job, the cheaper it gets, the more money he saves, the faster the shopping center opens, faster he gets money in his pocket. If the smart bus goes down Ford Road and it has two people in it or four people in it, or whatever it has, does anyone care? So their strategy is to, and I've heard this, and we we kind of say to ourselves, what what kind of person believes this? There are empty buses, therefore, if we add more buses, the buses that were previously empty will be more full. Wow. That makes sense to the government.

SPEAKER_00 55:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 55:03

The government. I have a government agency and it does nothing. So how I'm gonna have that government agency do more is I'm gonna create another government agency. It defies logic, it makes no sense, it doesn't work for all kinds of reasons. Tell everyone that you know it's a $570 million tax for buses that have 3.88 riders on it.

SPEAKER_01 55:25

Yeah, and I'll I'll make sure that I put everybody to be able to see here at the bottom of the screen, it'll be in the description show notes, all that good schnazz. But not not smartwaying.org. You know, that has a lot of information. I've got it pulled up here, and uh, you know, people you can find almost everything you can really need about this, really need to know about this, I should say. And I and obviously throughout the show, I'll pop up, you know, the graphics and stuff so everybody can see them as we're talking about some of the issues. You know, what's you know, for a final question from from a statement from both of you, what's like the one thing that when you think about this, it just goes bam, that's not obvious to people.

SPEAKER_00 56:03

I think that there's probably a couple of them, but I mean that it's not like the other one. Okay, well, I'm just gonna say, I mean, it's not obvious that maybe if people know if they're already paying this tax or not, and that it's gonna be a new tax for them, as well as, sorry, I'm gonna say too, that this is just Wayne County. And they're, you know, and the whole budget is just even more bloated than $570 million. I think those are the the two.

unknown 56:32

Right.

SPEAKER_03 56:34

I would say what is not what is not obvious to people, in my opinion, is the fact that this system is grossly underutilized, grossly oversubsidized, and that the and the the story that they will be told has been told before and has been a lie before. That's important. That's real, that was really a f one of the more fascinating things. This is not, we didn't say 1922, we said 2022. They told the world this is what was gonna happen, and four years later, they hadn't delivered most of it. And when when people when it's not just they're gonna take your money, people have different positions on that, right? On how much they want to fund this. Local funding generally is preferable, right? Because you can at least see what that they've done it. But imagine paying for a parks millage, going into your city and seeing dilapidated parks and nothing is new. You say, wait a minute, I just gave you a bunch of money. They said, Oh, no, no, that it's it's a long time to get this working. Well, what did you do with the money, the four years of the money you collected? Right? What happened to that? And and they've repeated themselves here. You know, $570 million for empty buses is a lot of dough. Tabit. Like tab it.

SPEAKER_01 58:00

That's that's a wow. Well, you know, Matt and Patty, I really appreciate you guys coming on and taking the time to inform everybody, you know, and uh that that's that's very, very key real quick.

SPEAKER_00 58:10

So absent uh voting starts Thursday, June 25th, 10 days from today. Absented ballots will be at uh arriving. So um people start voting in 10 days and vote no, everybody. Vote no. The other lie is that if this doesn't pass, that the system is gonna completely go away. Asad Turfey's running around town saying that too. No, jeez. No, it's not because this is only like one portion of the money. So, you know, they have all I mean, hey, they wanted to put it up for a vote. We'll see what happens. And it it but they still have Wayne County's port uh Oakland and Macomb County's portion. They still have their all this, their federal, their grants, their state tax, all this kind of stuff. So that is not true. He's trying to scare people that you know the buses are just all of a sudden gonna abandon in place and they're just you know, that's it. No more buses. That's not true. Not true, not happening.

SPEAKER_01 59:10

Jeez. Well, ever everybody, I thank you for tuning in. You know, Patty and Matt, again, I really appreciate you guys coming on, taking time to inform everybody.

SPEAKER_03 59:18

Thank you. Appreciate your time. Thanks for having us. Thanks for watching.

SPEAKER_01 59:20

You're welcome.