April 13, 2009
When our state’s legislative leaders decided to slap a utility rate increase on consumers to help Georgia Power with the future financing of a nuclear plant expansion, they rushed to get it done in a couple of weeks’ time.
But when it comes to helping those who fight Atlanta traffic to get to work every day and the communities across the state in need of better roads, a similar sense of legislative urgency was nowhere to be found. It appeared that Gov. Perdue, Lt. Gov. Cagle and Speaker Richardson either don’t know the importance of solving Georgia’s transportation problem or they don’t care.
It has now been more than two years since a Joint Senate-House Transportation Funding Study Committee was created to address why Georgia’s transportation system was failing to keep up with the needs of the state’s growing population. It was our job not only to determine the severity of the problem but also to recommend a legislative solution.
In the summer of 2007, the committee undertook this mission in a serious, bipartisan and bicameral manner. We discovered the state was facing a transportation funding shortfall of up to $8 billion to simply to keep up with our current needs over the next five years. Realistically, though, the shortfall was about $20 billion when taking the proposed and necessary improvements into account.
Certainly some innovative steps were going to be necessary. The Department of Transportation needed to be run more efficiently. Private funding incentives and toll roads were suggested as steps in the right direction. But the overriding recommendation was, and continues to be, a plan to generate considerably more revenue for transportation.
We entered the 2008 legislative session with such a plan: a special local option sales tax for transportation (T-SPLOST), to be voted on, collected and invested at the regional level. The proposal appeared to be sailing along during last year’s session toward placement on the 2008 general election ballot until the final night of the session. Because of infighting between Lt. Gov. Cagle and Speaker Richardson, the lieutenant governor failed to lead his Republican caucus, and the legislation was defeated.
The T-SPLOST plan was back on the Senate’s agenda at the beginning of this year’s session, and it passed overwhelmingly on Feb. 3. But the House of Representatives went in a different direction, insisting on a statewide sales tax increase to fund a predetermined list of highway projects, including the widening of a rural road that leads to the Reynolds Plantation golf resort, owned by a major Republican financial donor.
Senate and House conferees were never able to get close to negotiating a compromise, largely because the process got sidetracked by the insistence of the governor, lieutenant governor and speaker to pass separate legislation increasing their own power over transportation decisions. So for at least another year, Georgians will be no closer to a transportation solution, while Atlanta residents continue to sit in traffic, burning gasoline and productivity, for hours out of each day. And rural residents must endure another year of inadequate roads, further increasing the economic chasm between rural and metro regions of Georgia.
To make matters worse, the House failed to act on legislation I introduced and passed in the Senate that would have allowed MARTA to avoid drastic cutbacks in service without costing the state a dime. SB 120 simply would have relieved MARTA of the requirement to use 50 percent of its sales tax revenue on capital expenditures, authorizing the transit system to use more of the funds it has already collected to make up its operating deficit.
Incredibly, Gov. Perdue blamed MARTA for not bringing the severe need to pass SB 120 to his attention. Does the governor expect us to believe he was not aware of MARTA’s financial problems? Is he insulting our intelligence or that far out of touch? The situation was so dire that MARTA officials have said they might have to shut down one day a week. That’s the day we would see how much worse the legislature made Atlanta’s traffic situation this year
Thankfully, the Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC) stepped up to the plate and took an unprecedented step of authorizing a reallocation of their own stimulus dollars help MARTA meet their immediate needs. But the words of Tad Leithead, senior vice president of Cousins Properties, who serves on ARC, should serve as a warning to us in the legislature “MARTA affects 500,000 people in this [Atlanta] region every day. There are no road projects in our plan in which we could invest $25 million and impact so many people. We just hope the legislature understands that no one will be here to bail them out if they don’t fix MARTA’s funding situation next year.”
From all reports, the state’s business community is understandably livid. Transportation was their No. 1 issue throughout the 2009 legislative session. The supposedly “pro-business” Republican majority delivered all talk and no action for the second year in a row. Georgia’s business leaders are not buying the GOP’s half-hearted excuses that the sales tax referendum could not be voted on until 2010 anyway, so we still have next year’s session to pass the legislation.
The business leaders know that it will take a major effort for the referendum to succeed, and the rest of this year could have been devoted to raising the resources for such a campaign. Trying to raise those funds next year, in the middle of a governor’s race, U.S. Senate race and other statewide elections, will be much more difficult.
What will it take to get our legislative leaders to take the transportation problem seriously and respond as quickly as they do to, say, a rate increase request from Georgia Power? Maybe such leadership requires a new set of leaders.
District 6
P.O. Box 1781
Smyrna, GA 30081
Phone: 770.436.0699
Fax: 770.436.0699
Email: doug.stoner@senate.ga.gov
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