Suburban whacko alert!
BikePortland reports that an anti-tax group in the little city of Damascus, just 20 miles SE of Portland, introduced a local ballot measure to ban public transit.
To "insure that the City of Damascus is open as much as possible to the free flow of vehicular traffic and citizen travel within the city" Measure 3-350 would ban the city from providing "monopoly status" to public transit providers and also ban any public light rail in the city.
Maybe the backers have been subscribing to Crime Rail news?
The group pushing the measure, Ask Damascus, is a back-to-the-Constitution collection of folks whose logo managed to combine an eagle, an American flag, the Oregon flag, a photo from a public meeting and, yes, a man in a suit protesting property law.
- Eagles don't take light rail, bitches!
So, yeah, they're whackjobs. But, as BikePortland's Jonathan Maus points out, they can be effective whackjobs. Two years ago they successfully passed a ballot measure referring all new local tax increases to a citywide vote. Passing the absurd anti-transit measure, according to Maus's interview with the Damascus city manager, could take just 800 or 900 votes.
Damascus city hall is in a strip mall. Its post office is in a coffee shop, also in a strip mall. When you have that kind of urban planning, I can see how many people would not recognize the value of public transit.
