Georgia transit ‘reform’: If it’s broke, make it worse

You’d think that at some point, metro Atlanta legislators would summon the courage to protect their constituents’ best interests.

Strangely, that point never arrives. It’s like a shimmering mirage that you see as you drive down the highway on a summer day. Just as you think you’re drawing nearer, it vanishes, only to reappear somewhere in the distance.

JAY BOOKMAN
MY OPINION

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Nowhere is that more frustrating than in transportation. Traffic congestion threatens the region’s economy, and it threatens the quality of life that has drawn so many here. It is a longstanding problem that the state has done almost nothing to address for more than a decade. And legislators from the metro area have allowed that negligence to continue.

Why? The problem has been two-fold: Governance and finance.

The core of the governance problem lies with the Department of Transportation. Rather than allocate money to projects that would best ease the flow of traffic or goods, the DOT has appropriated it on the basis of political influence. In fact, the agency has been so reluctant to say no that by late 2007, the DOT listed more than 9,000 projects as approved. This, in an agency that let 270 contracts a year.

In a system in which money flows toward political power, metro Atlanta loses out. Why? Because rural areas elect legislators who will actually fight for them.

If transportation funds were instead allocated on the basis of data, need and transportation impact, metro Atlanta would fare much better. This is where the need is greatest; this is where the impact would be most noticeable. But that’s not how things work.

State leaders are now trying to muscle through a “reform” of the system. But rather than make our transportation planning more professional and data-driven, the goal is to make it even it more political. For example, it is supposedly “reform” to give the Legislature the power to spend up to 20 percent of transportation money on projects it gets to approve. Now, how many professional transportation planners sit in the General Assembly? Do you think that money will be allocated to where it would do the most good for Georgia, or to where it would do the most good for powerful legislators?

Finance, the second obstacle to addressing our traffic problem, is an easy problem to explain: Georgia has long had one of the lowest gas taxes in the country; Georgia has also been one of the nation’s fastest growing states. That combination — fast growth with insufficient resources to handle it — has produced gridlock. And rural legislators have refused to consider raising the gas tax to generate the revenue needed to break that impasse.

A year ago, the state House of Representatives did champion a regional approach to transportation funding. That plan would have given metro Atlanta voters the right to tax themselves for transportation, and to spend that money on projects selected to produce the most transportation benefit. But when the Senate balked at the last minute, the proposal died.

This year, the Senate has reversed itself, championing a regional approach similar to what it rejected in 2008. But this time the House is balking, instead proposing a statewide plan that would ask voters across Georgia to approve a one-cent sales tax for transportation.

Unfortunately, the odds of voters statewide approving a transportation tax are considerably lower than the odds of metro Atlanta voters approving such an increase. And with a statewide tax, metro Atlanta would continue to pay the bulk of the money while getting less than its share in return.

The House version also contains a list of projects that would supposedly be funded by the statewide tax, including many in metro Atlanta. Unfortunately, the revenue the tax would raise could not possibly fund that list. The House has reproduced the very problem it condemns at the DOT, and for the same reason: It is dangling transportation money as a political goody, not as a resource to be wisely allocated.

That list also contains projects requested by heavy political donors, projects that even the DOT rejected as wasteful. No one will explain why those projects were included; nobody will reveal who was in the room when the decision was made.

This is “reform,” Georgia style.