The endorsement announced Thursday chided the Utah Legislature for stalling county officials' efforts to have a list of projects available to voters before Nov. 7 and backed the Salt Lake County Council of Governments' role in setting spending priorities for the quarter-cent tax.

"The Sierra Club is disappointed with the Utah State Legislature's attempts to interfere by delaying the COG's priority list but remains assured that the local mayors will stand firm in their commitment to funding new transit projects," the endorsement statement says.

Marc Heileson, Sierra Club's Southwest representative, blamed slowpoke lawmakers for confusing pro-transit voters.

"When you have the mayors and [the Salt Lake County Council of Governments] do everything they can to speed up the process, then to be hit from the sideline with this delay, is causing confusion," Heileson said. "What the voters need to do is give [the mayors] a mandate and let them stare down the Legislature."

Proposition 3 grew out of a law passed during a legislative special session Sept. 19. The law says the ballot language must ask voters to approve the tax hike for "corridor preservation, congestion mitigation, or to expand capacity for a regionally significant transportation facility."

The new law requires counties that approve the tax to establish a method to rank transit and road projects for funding, subject to an up-or-down vote by the legislative Executive Appropriations Committee.

The Wasatch Front Regional Council's planners, engineers and statisticians spent hundreds of hours developing the criteria in time to have them approved during an Executive Appropriations meeting held Tuesday. That would have given county officials time to set spending priorities and inform voters before Nov. 7. But lawmakers decided not to place the matter on the committee's agenda.

Some voters are complaining that without a list of priorities, they don't know what they're buying.

"Unless I get better messages about how this money would be spent, I'm not going for it," said West Jordan resident Jay Graft.

Jennifer Scott, also of West Jordan, said she was leaning against Proposition 3 even though she is pro-transit. "When issues are very complicated, I don't have the time to go out and learn all the nuances. I trust my [elected] representatives for that," she said. "It has to be really cut and dried before you put it before the public. This thing's not ready."

But Jim Bennett, campaign coordinator for the Salt Lake Chamber-sponsored Vote for 3 campaign, said hundreds of businesses, organizations and individuals have endorsed the measure through financial contributions or active support.

Should Proposition 3 pass, he said, "all of the transit and transportation projects currently on the table for 2030 will be accelerated, and many of them will be completed by 2015 or sooner.

"We're very confident that the four light rail lines will be near the top, that commuter rail will be near the top, that the lion's share [of the tax revenues] will go to transit," Bennett said.