Transportation funding still an explosive issue

The most telling moment of the 2009 session of the Legislature came late Friday, during a fifth round of House-Senate negotiations over a sales tax that would sink more cash into the roads you drive and the rails you’d like to ride.

The meeting had devolved into a spiral familiar to anyone who has ever worked the flush handle on a toilet.

The only surprise was the reaction of many lobbyists —- an audience paid to be friendly and inoffensive, men and women reimbursed for chuckling at every bon mot that spills from the lips of a state lawmaker.

These hired diplomats walked out in frustration.

For yet another year, the Legislature has quit the city without addressing the dismal state of transportation funding in metro Atlanta and the state.

Warnings from MARTA that it might be forced to curtail service were blithely ignored. To those who argued that traffic congestion was the No. 1 killer of job growth in the state, the General Assembly responded with tax cuts.

Lawmakers’ highest transportation achievement was a measure to insert a “director of planning” into the state Department of Transportation, who would report neither to the DOT board nor its commissioner, but to Sonny Perdue. The director of planning would be placed in charge of all DOT policy decisions and budgeting. Wags at the Capitol dubbed it the “governor’s snitch” bill.

With the Legislature gone, we now begin the 2010 race for governor. It is tempting to predict that an angry tide of commuters will rise up and commit revolution. But in Georgia, the politics of transportation have always been more complicated than that.

Both Democrats and Republicans find themselves at least partially gagged.

Republican strategists admit that inertia on transportation indeed raises the issue of competency. When they came to power, Perdue and GOP lawmakers promised efficiency and attention to economic development. Neither has been on display when it comes to roads and rail.

Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle, as a central figure in the Capitol, is the gubernatorial candidate most directly affected by the debacle. He speaks at the Atlanta Press Club today.

Since a transportation sales tax measure failed in his chamber last year, Cagle has sought to prove himself no obstacle to progress. In that, the lieutenant governor may have succeeded —- this session, business leaders fingered the House and the governor.

But Cagle has little to show for two years of work on the issue. And his chief rivals, who include Secretary of State Karen Handel and state Insurance Commissioner John Oxendine, will still be able to quarterback from the sidelines when the issue returns next year.

Yet Handel and Oxendine, too, are condemned to ambiguity by the transportation debate.

Decades of underinvestment in roads and rail must be reversed, everyone agrees. Yet no candidate wants to dwell on the words “tax” and “increase” in a Republican primary.

Democrats no doubt see an opening in GOP failure to address the way people and goods move in Georgia. Conversations with strategists suggest that an attempted comeback by Gov. Roy Barnes was made more likely by last week’s events.

Other candidates, including House Minority Leader DuBose Porter of Dublin, appear eager to latch onto the issue.

But again, any Democrat who talks transportation must work the edges. Numbering the jobs lost to traffic congestion, questioning Republican will to tackle the problem —- this is all fair game.

As with Republicans, more candid discussions of a solution remain off-limits. It’s not just the tax issue.

Those spiraling House-Senate conferences on the sales tax for transportation made clear that the politics of transportation is a mirror image of the politics of Georgia. It is a contest of geography, magnified by race.

A dollar spent on roads in the big city is a dollar unspent in the small town. At bottom, the sales tax for transportation foundered over where those billions of dollars would be sent, whether to metro Atlanta or rural Georgia.

And that’s the same fault line that cracked the Democratic Party seven years ago.

jgalloway@ajc.com