Transportation bill makes debut

By Ariel Hart

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The big transportation bill proposed by Gov. Sonny Perdue could end up raising more than $700 million a year for metro Atlanta projects if the Legislature and metro voters approve it. But even if the new sales tax never comes to pass, millions more in transportation dollars could end up staying in the Atlanta area.

That possibility -- as well as concerns that it wouldn’t work that way -- were among the issues legislators raised Wednesday at the bill’s first public hearing, in front of a standing-room-only audience at the Capitol.

Rep. Jim Cole (R-Forsyth), who introduced the bill and is a floor leader for Perdue, said he thought the debut went well. “There were a lot of questions, but they weren’t questions you can’t solve,” he said.

The main point of the legislation (HB 1218) is to offer voters in each region of the state a chance to approve or reject a 1-cent sales tax for a list of transportation projects in their region. It divides the state into 12 regions, among them a 10-county Atlanta region.

Smaller items in the bill raised questions Wednesday. One would put the State Road and Tollway Authority, which Perdue heads as chairman, in charge of managing and executing the projects. Perdue's transportation policy adviser, Jannine Miller, told the legislators that the SRTA would direct other agencies to do the actual building and that it would have no discretion on what gets built -- just when. If the SRTA determines that a project is not ready to go forward, "they would have the ability to say, ‘We will have to skip over that one for now and get back to it,' " Miller said.

One part of the bill that has gained little attention so far concerns the way transportation dollars that the state already has are distributed across the state.

For more than a decade, Georgia has required a large part of its transportation money to be divided equally between congressional districts. That is supposed to ensure that each area gets its fair share. But congressional districts can be drawn in a way that makes it is easy to take money that might go to an area that generates a lot of tax revenue and spend it far away.

Rep. Kevin Levitas (D-Atlanta) pointed out that system had allowed millions of tax dollars raised in Atlanta to be spent in other parts of the state. "We've been in a losing position for years in the metro region," he said.

The bill would change that system, allocating money to special regional districts that are more cohesive, while still taking population size into account.

Even so, Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Cassville) said he wasn’t sure that dividing money among regions is a great idea, especially when the state is trying to get statewide projects done.

There is at least one issue not up for negotiation, Cole said.

When it comes to approving the new regional sales tax, no county could decide to opt out of its region and out of the region's tax referendum. "That's a nonstarter issue for [Perdue]," Cole said.

Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle has strongly supported the opt-out provision in the past, but he doesn't seem set to fight over it to the death with Perdue now.

"Our first priority is to pass a transportation bill," Cagle spokeswoman Jaillene Hunter said, "and as this bill moves through the process, we are working to not draw a hard line in the sand on any one issue."