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The Georgia Senate overwhelmingly passed a resolution Wednesday that would allow voters to approve new transportation funding.

Senate Resolution 845 http://www.legis.ga.gov/legis/2007_08/sum/sr845.htm, sponsored by Senate Transportation Committee Chairman Jeff Mullis (R-Chickamauga), would allow voters in counties to group together and pass regional one-cent sales taxes for transportation. Eighty percent of the funds would be spent on projects in the voters' region, and the rest could be spent anywhere in the state. Of the money that goes outside the region, half would be spent on mass transit.

"We're making history, we're doing something that hasn't been done for 30 or 40 years —and that's improve transportation in Georgia," Mullis said. "It's an all inclusive bill."

The bill passed 51 to 4. Mullis said he wasn't surprised it had garnered so much support.

"Everyone is tired of sitting in traffic," he said, after the vote.

Some counties, like Cobb County, already fund transportation projects with special local sales taxes, but funding advocates say that's not nearly enough. Many of the projects that metro Atlanta boosters say the region needs to lift it out of the congestion crisis are too big for any one city or county to fund them, and the state has been either unwilling or unable to make them happen. Studies show that under the current statewide gas tax system, a large portion of metro Atlanta's taxes are siphoned off to projects in other parts of the state.

The Senate resolution's backers, including Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle, have described SR 845 as a first step. They are waiting for the House to pass its own transportation funding legislation so the two can negotiate a compromise. The House legislation would allow voters to levy a one-cent sales tax statewide, but it mandates that the state spend most of the money collected in a district on projects that are within that district.

So far, a couple of differences between the House and Senate legislation concern who picks the projects, and how much money the measures would bring in. The House measures would give the state, not the county or region, final say on what projects to fund from the money, a notion that concerns some metro Atlanta passenger rail advocates. The Senate's resolution would allow the voters in the county or region to vote on the project list. And unless every county in the state opted into the Senate's regional tax idea, overall it would bring in less money than the House version, which would be collected statewide.

Both propose constitutional amendments and voter referendums. Gov. Sonny Perdue has said he is reluctant to support any new transportation taxes.

Transportation funding currently comes mostly from the gas tax, and the state gas tax is collected in two parts. The first part is collected in cents per gallon, not cents per dollar, so it doesn't rise with inflation, but lawmakers have to vote to raise it. They've left it alone at 7.5 cents per gallon since 1971. An additional gas tax is collected at about 4 cents per dollar, only 3 cents of which go to transportation.

Staff writer Andrea Jones contributed to this report.