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In the interest of fairness, I will concede you one point: I do have a very strong and very personal bias against Metrorail. That said, I have always been open about that bias and nobody can legitimately accuse me of trying to disguise it. I also maintain my dislike for Metrorail on a sound and first hand basis that I have similarly articulated. In other words, I take the position I do for several reasons and because those reasons cut to the core of our system of government and my basic rights as a citizen, I tend to take my position against Metrorail very seriously and argue it passionately. Again in fairness, I feel compelled to summarize those reasons for you and any other person who may read them.

As you well know, the very basis of our government is an exercise of consent by the governed. This is the principle from which our government professes to obtain its legitimacy and the basis upon which policy is said to be made. I object to Metrorail so fervently because it has been crammed down our throats without consent in virtually every single step of the process by which it has been adopted. Metro has taken its desired policy of light rail and raped the populace of Houston to achieve those desires. The incidents are many:

About six years ago, give or take a few, Metro started toying with the Metrorail idea for Houston. As any major public policy and taxpayer investment of that scope should necessitate, it was desired at the time that Metrorail be put to a popular referendum. The need for a referendum is heightened by the fact that Metro at its very core is an undemocratic and extremely autocratic agency - that is to say it governs on the whims of one man and one man alone, the mayor of Houston. Under current statutes Metro maintains jurisdiction (and taxing authority) over virtually all of Harris County including over a million residents in unincorporated regions, yet the City of Houston has a monopoly on EVERYTHING that Metro does. They have an unbreakable majority of votes on the board and they use them to get their way. Those votes are all controlled by mayoral appointment, so the only people who can even legitimately claim to have electoral representation on the Metro board must do so indirectly through their ability to elect a mayor. Everybody outside of Houston-proper gets the shaft. By giving the mayor of Houston a monopoly control over the board, those residents - again over a million people - are completely written out of the process. Their few voices on the board are a permanent and powerless minority with no ability to ever set the agency's agenda on anything. As a result the ONLY way that the fundamentally autocratic Metro agency could ever claim political legitimacy by consent of the governed is to hold a referendum on their rail projects.

Well, 6 or 7 years ago we tried to get them to do that with Metrorail. Tom DeLay imposed federal provisions that pledged to fund Metrorail IF voters approved it but also blocked federal funding if voters did not or were not given that opportunity. Metro, or more specifically the mayor of Houston who controls Metro, decided back then that he did not want the voters to have a choice. So Metro started building Phase I by circumventing DeLay's provisions - they dipped into revenue reserves to build a small startup line and in doing so got the proverbial foot in the door without any form of public vote or public display consent period.

As one might expect, several of us didn't take too kindly to that maneuver. OUR taxes were at stake and would be funding the thing in perpetuity. OUR roads and OUR public treasury would be used to implement it. So a group of city of Houston voters (which I was at the time - I have since relocated back to the suburbs in unincorporated Harris County) got together and drafted a petition under the city charter's provisions to force a referendum. In short order that petition reached the signatures needed and was presented to city hall and a lawsuit was filed to make the mayor of Houston comply with the petitions and put the measure on the ballot. Two separate state district judges issued injunctions against Metro at the time to halt their construction until the lawsuit was settled - a perfectly standard move. Metro, seeing its autocracy threatened by this move, jumped in and threw every legal manuever in the book to circumvent the judges. The case dragged out a while until they eventually got the injunctions removed in an appellate court and began building again, still without consent.

That took us to round 2 of the referendum battles. Since they refused to recognize a simple citizen referendum petition we decided to amend the city charter itself, also by petition. I went out and collected signatures along with hundreds of others and in short order we got it on the ballot for 2001 - a charter amendment that again halted Metrorail Phase I (main street) construction until a public referendum was held. Again seeing its autocracy threatened, Metro resorted to undemocratic maneuvering to plow ahead unimpeded. Knowing our charter amendment had a strong chance of passing, the Mayor of Houston and Metroturned to political trickery to defeat it. They drafted up a competing charter referendum with near-identical language to our own except for one thing: it lacked an enforcement clause against Phase I of Metrorail. Mayor Brown stuck his charter amendment on the ballot for one purpose only: to confuse voters about our amendment. This also involved pushing our amendment from the "proposition 1" slot to "proposition 3" (proposition 1 then became Brown's competing amendment that was overtly intended to confuse). Election day came and sure enough - confuse it did! Brown's toothless amendment easily passed while ours narrowly lost 53 to 47% and Metrorail continued.

The next election was in 2003 - the recent bond election in which STV, Siemens, and all the other Metrorail contractors made ethically conflicted high dollar contributions to Art Schechter and Ed Wulfe's Metrorail PAC. As you know, it passed on the narrowest of margins - a margin that is attributable to (a) millions in taxdollars being illegally spent by Metro on political advocacy TV ads and (b) hundreds of thousands of ethically conflicted cash from Metrorail contractors used by the PAC to fund mailouts, campaign literature, signs, and the sort. This victory was also achieved by political trickery. Knowing that Metrorail Phase I wouldn't open until 2004, they pressed ahead with the expansion referendum in 2003 before anybody had a chance to try out Phase I and learn how poorly designed and inefficient it is.

The trickery continued as they also intentionally chose an election date that they knew would correspond with the City of Houston elections at a time when there were no simultaneous elections on the ballot in unincorporated Harris County. This is an old trick from segregationist days that they used to employ to keep the blacks from voting, only Metro used it in reverse. It preys upon voter turnout in the desired constituency in order to defeat the position favored by the other constituency. They used to do it in segregated areas by holding elections on days when the white political subdivisions, cities, school boards etc. were voting and the black ones were not. Metro did it when Houston proper - which tends to be more liberal - was voting and when unincorporated Harris County was not. The results were just what they expected - voter turnout in Houston was twice that in unincorporated Harris County because Houston proper had a mayor's race and a dozen other propositions to vote on while Harris County had only one - the metrorail bond. Also note that in the case of election date manipulation of this sort that I am NOT trying to argue that this was done illegally - only immorally and in an intentionally undemocratic fashion designed to diminish the political clout of unincorporated Harris County.

Illegal activity occurred elsewhere in that election and unfortunately I was a victim of it. By then I had moved to unincorporated Harris County, but I was also going to be out of state on election day and had to cast my ballot by mail. As I have indicated previously on this thread, I never got that opportunity. Despite filling out all the proper paperwork and taking extra steps to ensure my ballot would be delivered (i.e. calling to check up on my form being processed, calling to confirm that my ballot was mailed), I was defrauded of my vote and disenfranched from participating in the bond due to ballot theft at the Post Office. By the time this was discovered it was too late for them to mail me a new ballot so I did not get to cast my vote. Considering that Harris County usually mails tens of thousands of ballots by mail in any given election, there is little doubt that others were victimized by this same crime.