It was sometimes rowdy, sometimes fractious, but in the end leaders of communities throughout Metro Atlanta did something they've never done before. They agreed on a regional transportation plan.

Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed called it a trying process – attempting to whittle away $300-million from a region-wide transportation wish list that included projects ranging from the Beltline to the Northwest Corridor Rail project along US 41.

“Although a couple of times, we walked up to the edge in terms of offending one another,” Reed said after the meeting of the Transportation Roundtable Executive Board, “at the end of the day, we thought better of that.”

The executive board eventually proposed cutting $80 million from Georgia Regional Transportation Authority funding, cutting more than $58 million from the Beltline project and cutting smaller projects like two segments of the Fayetteville bypass, totaling $1.8 million.

Now comes the hard part. Members of the entire Regional Transportation Roundtable have to sell their list of road and rail projects to the public in a series of meetings before a November vote on a ten-year penny sales tax to pay for it all. Dekalb County Executive Burrell Ellis says that's where he expects the most -- and the most vocal -- opposition.