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Sunday, March 9, 2008
Refocusing the Legislature on a sales tax for traffic congestion
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The remainder of this session of the Legislature will be steeped in philosophy. Specifically, 236 state lawmakers will ponder over which is the greater evil — traffic congestion, or a tax to cure it.
Last week, before the dust had settled on the collapsed tax reform effort pushed by House Speaker Glenn Richardson, the top layer of Georgia’s business class assembled at the State Capitol to back a budding compromise that could ultimately inject billions of dollars into traffic relief.
Details are scarce, but the measure — built around a penny sales tax — would be revolutionary on two counts.
First is the lack of active involvement by the governor’s office. House and Senate lawmakers were there, but Sonny Perdue was noticeably absent from the Thursday photo op with business leaders.
“He’s been kept well informed. We’ve not had anybody tell us ‘Don’t do it,’ so we’re moving ahead,” said Vance Smith, chairman of the House transportation committee.
The transportation deal will be cast in the form of a proposed constitutional amendment, which will require a two-thirds vote in the House and Senate — but no approval by the governor before it is placed on the November ballot. It’s possible that Perdue will be on a trade mission to China when the final details are hammered out late this month.
Secondly, the measure would put the formation of transportation policy and a great deal of cash — as much as $1.3 billion a year, though probably much less — in the hands of regional bureaucracies rather than state government. For those areas that could afford it, spending could go toward rail — whether for passengers or freight.
Voters would be asked to approve the concept in November. Only if that measure passed would voters be approached again, in specific regions, to approve a transportation tax of up to a penny on the dollar.
How those regional votes are tallied — whether county-by-county or as a whole — is at the crux of current negotiations.
Though no one is saying so publicly, this sales tax proposal is aimed primarily at one geographic area. In the 10 counties of the Atlanta Regional Commission, a one-penny tax would raise $632 million a year, according to the calculations of the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce.
But beyond metro Atlanta, the cash a sales tax could raise may not be incentive enough for counties to band together and divvy the proceeds.
Even so, this is an election year. And House Republican leaders expect Grover Norquist, the anti-tax guru of Washington, to condemn this invitation for voters to tax themselves.
Norquist could pry away the Republican right wing, and make Democrats even more essential to the end result. Look for the minority party to demand a deal sweetener. They want a one-cent sales tax on motor fuel, already in place and worth about $160 million a year, to be re-directed from the state’s general fund toward road projects for those parts of rural Georgia where a sales tax does no good.
Despite an anti-tax debate likely to split Republicans, those pushing the sales tax have reasons for optimism.
Since last September, Richardson, the House speaker, has expressed impatience at the lack of action on transportation — and has promised that something will pass the Legislature this session.
With his tax plan in tatters, keeping that vow now takes on more importance.
The transportation committee chairmen leading this effort — Smith in the House and Jeff Mullis of Chickamauga in the Senate — are among many Republicans who think that traffic congestion is the one cause for which taxpayers would be willing to shell out a little extra.
It’s the one issue, say both, that passes the government-gun-to-the-head rule so often cited by anti-tax enthusiasts.
State Sen. Doug Stoner, a Democrat from Smyrna, is likely to be one of the six lawmakers involved in the final deal-cutting. He put it this way:
“We can’t go back to voters in the fall and say, ‘I’m sorry, there’s nothing we can do. We’ve decided you’ve got to sit in traffic.’”
But Stoner predicted Democrats will back the end result. “If this fails, it will be because the majority party couldn’t get its act together,” he said.
