Tea party, Sierra Club build unlikely bridge

the spring, said the director of the Georgia chapter of the Sierra Club.

“Right around Earth Day,” Kiernan said, using a marker that probably never occurred to her partner, Debbie Dooley, a founder of the Atlanta Tea Party Patriots.

At table that day, the two women from opposite ends of the political spectrum quickly discovered they had something in common. “Conservatives and Republicans are not the only voters that distrust their elected officials. There is a lot of distrust among Democrats as well,” Dooley said.

If the transportation sales tax in metro Atlanta scrapes through on Tuesday, the partnership between Gov. Nathan Deal and Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed, and their last-minute efforts, will get much of the credit.

If the measure fails, victors raising their hands will range from Senate Majori- ty Leader Chip Rogers, a Republican from Woodstock, to John Evans, the DeKalb County NAACP president who confronted Reed last week — however ineptly.

But the crux of this disparate opposition has been the partnership between the Sierra Club, one of the few environmental groups to stand against the sales tax referendum, and a tea party movement unafraid of forming temporary friendships.

Differences were supposed to make even a short-term alliance ineffective. The Sierra Club opposes the T-SPLOST because its $6.2 billion spending package doesn’t include enough rail. Tea partyists have denounced the same package for including too much emphasis on rail.

But suspicion of cronyism and back-room deals has served as an effective, non-