Fayette County is home to 106,000 folks.  DeKalb County is nearly 7 times that size and Fulton is nearly 10 times larger.  That said, how important is this?

[Fayette] county’s green landscape — offering a feeling of seclusion — has helped make Fayette the birthplace of opposition to paying an extra penny in sales tax for transportation improvements both in and out of the county. The 10-county region will vote in 2012 on whether to tax itself for such projects.

It’s a sentiment so strong that it recently helped unseat a County Commission chairman. And though Fayette is on the lower end of the region’s spectrum when it comes to sales tax revenue and number of voters, it could have extra influence in whether the referendum passes.

Harold Bost, who heads the county’s Issues Tea Party, is organizing opposition to the penny tax across the metro area.

Show me huge opposition turnouts at Bost’s events in Gwinnett and Cobb and then maybe I’ll start getting concerned.

After thinking about it for a moment, this anti-transit comment in Ariel Hart’s morning article on Gwinnett and Cobb’s new, seemingly more snugly attitude towards mass transit, might actually be a positive indicator for pro-mass transit supporters.

Harold Bost, co-founder of the Fayette County Issues Tea Party, is taking the lead coordinating tea party groups to oppose the referendum.

He says the burden of another tax is only one reason he opposes it; he also opposes mass transit because of the people it would bring into the suburbs.

“Criminals catch that kind of transportation into our county,” Bost said, “and I’m not going to support anything that works toward increasing our crime either.”

One quote doesn’t a rule make.  However, the fact that the old standby “criminals take mass-transit” opposition line came from Fayette – and not Gwinnett – is inline with other recent observations that Cobb and Gwinnett’s population growth has taken the mass-transit conversation in those counties from “why?” to “how?”.  And that’s certainly a good sign for transit-friendly Fulton and DeKalb going into a 12-county referendum in 2012.