Georgia state Rep. Vance Smith (R-Pine Mountain) sat in his office early Saturday morning just after midnight, speaking softly, sounding nearly stunned.

The measure to which Smith had devoted a year of his legislative life, a resolution for a state constitutional amendment that would allow regions to vote themselves a one-cent sales tax to pay for transportation projects, had just failed in the Senate by three votes — with four minutes left in the 2008 legislative session.

"Every time we went over there, they wanted another change," Smith said, referring to the state Senate. "I'm pretty shocked they couldn't pass a bill that was pretty much structured like they wanted."

Smith and other members of a conference committee working out the difference between House and Senate versions of Senate Resolution 845 spent the day Friday flying back and forth between the chambers to huddle on the latest compromise.

In the end, they had a lot of votes, including Republican votes.

The proposed constitutional amendment, which required a two-thirds majority, got 35 of the 38 votes they needed in the 56-member Senate.

What they didn't have was the Senate leadership.

Majority Leader Tommie Williams of Lyons, President Pro Tempore Eric Johnson of Savannah and Majority Whip Mitch Seabaugh of Sharpsburg were among the 18 senators who voted late Friday against the resolution, which had passed the House minutes earlier.

Williams said Saturday that he was not involved in the negotiations and that it came to the floor so late he never got a chance to read it and wasn't sure what was in it.

"I supported the [preliminary version of the] bill that came out of the Senate and wanted to support the bill last night," Williams said. "But you've got to know what the bill says if you're going to take your vote home and explain it to the people."

"I think we just needed to get that out on the floor about an hour earlier," said Sen. Dan Moody, who voted for the resolution.

Williams said it is important to keep working on the proposal. But even if he had time to read the measure, he would have had problems with it. For instance, he said he does not like leaving it up to county commissions, rather than voters, to decide whether to opt out of the region’s tax vote. He also does not like it that a county would be in the tax region if it did not take affirmative steps to opt out. The compromise amendment would have done both.

"As long as we have a bill or a constitutional amendment that will allow each individual county to opt in, we'll be fine with it," Williams said. "We also had to weigh the fact there was not a tax cut."

House-Senate politics had nothing to do with it, he said. "We were reluctant to put a tax hike, even if the people would vote it themselves, on the ballot when we had no tax cut to offer the people."

Advocates were bitterly disappointed, and some of them spent Saturday morning looking at the list of metro Atlanta senators who voted against it.

AirTran CEO Joe Leonard, an official of the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce and co-chairman of a coalition advocating transportation funding, said Saturday afternoon that he did not know why it failed.

Leonard said: "We certainly are not walking away from this, and, if anyone thinks that the Get Georgia Moving Coalition is going to sit on the sidelines and start wringing our hands, that is not the case. The new campaign started this morning."

Like Smith, Senate Transportation Committee Chairman Jeff Mullis (R-Chickamauga), who led the support in his chamber, was quick to praise the coalition and the legislators who had worked with him and Smith to advance the proposal.

But asked just after the vote why it failed, Mullis did not hold back. He said the tax cut that never arrived seemed to have swayed his colleagues.

"It was politics tonight," he said, standing at the back of the chamber. "The policy lost; the politics won,"

The session ticked down its remaining seconds to midnight, the lieutenant governor pronounced the Senate adjourned, and the members cheered and threw the pink and white papers from their desks in the air, as Mullis looked on, stone-faced.