Georgia leaves more transit money idle

By Ariel Hart

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

At least $2.4 million that Congress awarded to transit projects in Georgia has gone unspent so long that it has expired, according to a report by a Washington, D.C.-based foundation.

Of that money, $980,000 was intended for part of the Beltline. Another $381,000 was for a new passenger terminal in downtown Atlanta that has been on the books for more than a decade. The rest was destined for projects in Moultrie, Columbus, Sylvester and Albany. The money will now be allocated to different U.S. projects through competition, said Lisa Chiu, who wrote about the earmarks for the Sunlight Foundation.

A spokesman for the Beltline, Ethan Davidson, said the Beltline never went through the application process to get the money, because federal regulations did not permit such grants to be used for projects in such early stages as the Beltline was.

Regarding the passenger terminal, a spokesman for the state Department of Transportation, David Spear, said DOT simply didn't have a project in development at that time.

"That’s totally on the department, regrettably," he said.

However, Spear said that has changed. The $381,000 was the first of four years of earmarks totaling $1.7 million. The second one is already in use and the other two will be soon, he said.

A spokeswoman for the Sunlight Foundation, Gabriela Schneider, said the foundation had no opinion on earmarks, but with $120 million expiring nationwide, "I think the conclusion is, this process isn’t working."

The foundation's main goal is to help the public know how their money is spent and who is involved in that process. It wasn't easy, said Schneider. The foundation had to file multiple requests using federal law to get the information and the Federal Transit Administration forwarded it in paper rather than computer form, making it difficult to search. Indeed, for this article the FTA refused to allow anyone, not even a spokesman, to speak on the record.

The FTA confirmed that the money had been re-allocated.

Earlier this year, Georgia lost out on a major federal grant for high-speed rail, unlike neighbors North Carolina and Florida, which won hundreds of millions of dollars. The difference, said U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, was that Georgia won't invest its own money to help make the programs happen.

Georgia Department of Transportation officials pointed out that Georgia won $750,000 for high speed rail planning studies and convened a multi-state meeting in Georgia to discuss the program.

The Legislature this year voted to allow regions like metro Atlanta to enact their own tax to fund transportation projects.