The yeas have it.

The city's sixth special-purpose sales tax package, a $184.72 million list of projects, was overwhelmingly approved Tuesday. With all but provisional ballots in, yes votes accounted for 70 percent (6,772), nos only 30 percent (2,891).

"I can't help but be very pleased with the margin of victory," Mayor Deke Copenhaver said. "It shows that the citizens got beyond the politics. We, as a government, need to get beyond the politics as well."

Turnout was only 8.71 percent, well below the 10 percent to 12 percent Richmond County Board of Elections Executive Director Lynn Bailey had predicted.

Tuesday's numbers were the second-lowest in Augusta's seven SPLOST referendums, surpassing only the 9,021 voters who turned out in March 1991. The approval margin was the second-highest ever, topped only by 81.3 percent in September 1995.

SPLOST supporters said Tuesday that they were counting on the low turnout -- anticipated because it was a single-issue, spring election -- to work in their favor.

"We really expected those that were passionate about it to get out and vote," said real estate broker Janie Peel, a "yes to SPLOST" campaign organizer. "And those that weren't didn't take the time."

Butch Gallop, a consultant for sales tax projects manager Heery International Inc., who worked with Ms. Peel on the campaign, said the group canvassed neighborhoods, made hundreds of phone calls, met with neighborhood associations, campaigned at First Friday and held town hall meetings.

Their challenges, he said, included making people understand that the downtown trade, exhibit and event center -- a SPLOST V project that ignited into controversy in the lead-up to the vote -- wasn't part of SPLOST VI, and the proposed downtown baseball stadium wasn't either.

"The team that was put together -- Brenda Durant, Janie Peel and Tricia Hughes -- put something together to really educate the community," Mr. Gallop said. "The naysayers always have something negative to say, but they didn't know why they were negative. All they kept talking about was pork-barrel projects."

Rocky Eades, chairman of the Libertarian Party of the CSRA, which campaigned against SPLOST VI, said it's a shame that about 7,000 people have made a decision for another 145,000 or so people of voting age in Augusta.

"I think probably there's a lot of voter disgust," Mr. Eades said of the low turnout. "I think that's a reflection of a pretty much national phenomenon. People are just fed up with bad government, and they don't know how to respond to bad government, because voting doesn't seem to work.

"Now it's just a matter of, how do we begin to mobilize those 145,000 people?"

Of the 74 reporting precincts, SPLOST VI lost in one -- precinct 502 at Trinity Christian Methodist Episcopal Church -- where the vote was 5-4 against it.

The vote was tied in two precincts -- 704 at First Baptist Church of Augusta, where the vote was 8-8, and 308 at Augusta State University athletic complex, where the vote was 10-10. In one precinct, Jamestown Community Center, no one voted.

Tuesday's vote approves $124 million in infrastructure improvements, including $35.7 million for roadway and drainage improvements and $8.6 million for traffic engineering.

Also on the list were $17 million for fleet replacement, $10.9 million for parks and recreation, $5.7 million for Hephzibah and Blythe, $5.3 million toward Miller Theatre restoration and $2.5 million for Paine College's Health Education Activities Learning Complex.

"I think the people really understand and know that infrastructure is the key," said Commissioner Calvin Holland, whose district will get, among other things, $3.5 million for a lake at Regency Mall, part of a plan to spur revitalization in the area.

City Administrator Fred Russell, who put the package together under the commission's direction, said the fact that it's 67 percent infrastructure likely outweighed any reservations voters might have had about individual projects.

Collections of the 1-cent tax -- the seventh penny of sales taxes on purchases and services -- will begin the day after SPLOST V collections end, which is expected to happen on Sept. 30, 2010.