Changing the Face

When citizens vote to increase their own taxes, that's news. Yet in this year's elections, a remarkable number of voters did approve civic projects that will cost hundreds of millions and change the face of the nation.

By an overwhelming 5-to-1 margin, St. Louis passed a $95 million bond issue to control pollution of the Mississippi River. Currently, 72 sewers in the St. Louis area pour 300 million gallons of raw sewage into the river every day. After years of talk, nearly every important civic organization in the city joined the drive to clean up the Mississippi; 104,000 public-school children carried home pamphlets explaining the bond issue. When completed in 1967, the new system will funnel wastes through a vast labyrinth of pipes into two sewage-disposal plants.

Land & Water. Cincinnati, which has long fretted about its blighted waterfront district along the Ohio River only a few blocks from downtown, approved a $16,600,000 bond issue to clean up 128.5 acres of dank and decaying buildings. In their place will go a convention hall, five 30-story luxury apartment buildings, a park, a pool, a marina and motel-boatel catering both to passing motorists and yachtsmen.

In Los Angeles County, voters passed a $17 million bond issue to build facilities "for the detention, training or custodial placement of juveniles." After turning down a school bond proposal last year, Cleveland calmly reversed itself and approved, by better than 2 to 1, a ten-year, $50 million building program. Explained George Theobald, assistant superintendent of Cleveland elementary schools: "I think the constant dinning in newspapers and magazines on problems of American education and our self-criticism are beginning to pay off. People are realizing more and more that we're in a struggle for survival."

Transit Gloria. Perhaps the boldest civic-works program on any ballot confronted the voters in three San Francisco Bay area counties. For years, San Francisco has been choking on traffic, despite a growing number of bridges and freeways. Forty-eight lanes of freeways now wind around the city, and 32 more are in the works. But city planners estimated that an additional 40 would be necessary to handle the region's projected population jump from 2,500,000 to 4,000,000 in the next decade.

Instead of programming even more freeways and bridges, city engineers drew up imaginative plans for a rapid-transit system that would include the shuttling of trains from Oakland to San Francisco through a six-mile tube under the bay. Now it takes a commuter an hour to drive the 20 miles from Orinda to the downtown area; the transit system would whisk him there in 18 minutes aboard swift, silent trains that would run every 90 seconds during rush hours. The 26-mile trip between San Francisco and southern Alameda County now takes 1 1/2 hours by car in heavy traffic; by train, it would take 31 minutes.

By tapping existing financing systems, the planners figured they could scrape together $204 million for the project. But they still needed a bond issue of a whopping $792 million. That broke down to a $27-a-year tax increase for the "median" householder in the region, whether or not he used the system. Making matters even tougher was a state requirement that the proposed bond issue be passed by 60% or more of the voters. By 61.1% of the total vote of 714,425, citizens of the three counties agreed to shell out the necessary money to build the first major rapid-transit program in the U.S. since Cleveland's in 1955-

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