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Monday, July 23, 2007
Georgia should redeem itself; roll out new Northern Arc
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The most joyous news of the past week was not that dogfighting had rescued the U.S. Senate from the embarrassment of its Iraqi slumber party stunt, giving full throat to West Virginia’s Robert Byrd, who orated for 25 minutes on its obvious evils — dogfighting, not Iraq.
No, it was not the diversion that uplifted the spirits and reinvigorated sagging optimism that public policy-makers will improve the quality of our lives.
The joyous news was that the state Department of Transportation is within two or three months of identifying an east-west transportation corridor across North Georgia. To “have to go to the south [and cross 1-285] to have to get back to the north” is “ridiculous,” said DOT Board Member Sam M. Wellborn of Columbus, speaking an undeniable truth.
A link between I-75 and I-85 across North Georgia is the state’s most important congestion-relief, economic development and quality-of-life opportunity. The failure to construct the 59-mile Northern Arc is one of the legacy failings of state leadership, including most recently Gov. Sonny Perdue, who took an ill-considered position opposing it during the 2002 gubernatorial campaign. But he was merely continuing an old Georgia leadership tradition.
More than two decades ago the good ol’ boys in the General Assembly, realizing that the day would soon come when political power shifted in response to metro Atlanta’s population explosion, developed a priority-funding list for a statewide four-lane highway network, called “developmental highways.”
Originally developed by the DOT as part of a campaign to boost the gas tax, it put into law a priority list for a $4.5 billion 2,700-mile network of four-lane highways to bring new industry and prosperity to Georgia.
The very last project on the list was the Outer Perimeter, a 200-mile loop some 15-20 miles outside I-285. As Georgians should now recognize, it was one of the old guard’s monumental mistakes. While taxpayers built four-lanes across parts of rural Georgia that are under-utilized to this day, land in metro Atlanta became prohibitively expensive.
Meanwhile, environmental and other anti-highway groups, such as the Sierra Club and Georgia Conservancy, mounted opposition. The Outer Perimeter was killed, except for the Northern Arc, which would link manufacturers and communities in fast-growing Northwest Georgia to I-85 and join the Carolinas-Alabama auto and supplier network to I-75. Most important, it would have kept cars and trucks off congested portions of I-285. Estimates were that by 2035, the Northern Arc would carry 70,000 to 100,000 vehicles a day.
Former Gov. Roy Barnes was close to pulling the trigger on the Northern Arc. But politics once again intervened.
By 2002, newcomers who had settled the fast-developing neighborhoods across the Northern Arc route — newcomers who vote Republican — were actively opposing construction. All three Republican candidates for governor — Perdue, former School Superintendent Linda Schrenko and former Cobb County Commission Chairman Bill Byrne — opposed the Northern Arc.
So its history has been first that anti-metro Atlanta prejudice kept it from being built, then environmental, anti-highway and no-growth forces kept it at bay, and finally Republican politics intervened. In each case, it was the wrong outcome for Georgia.
The Northern Arc idea being discussed now is a toll road, a public-private initiative that would rely on the private sector to finance construction. “We don’t have the money to build an east-west connector,” said board Chairman Mike Evans of Cumming, who regards the project as a “perfect” candidate for private-sector involvement.
Georgia has wasted decades and millions of dollars in pushing back an essential transportation project. Leadership has been parochial and short-sighted.
Georgia should have built the Outer Perimeter. It most certainly should build an I-75/I-85 connector across North Georgia.
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On public nudity and college rankings
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s this-and-that Monday:
• The president of Macon’s Wesleyan College, Ruth Knox, says she’ll no longer will participate in the peer assessment portion of U.S. News & World Report’s college rankings. “It’s hardly scientific, and the general public should be fully aware of the methodology behind the rankings,” she says. “I, like most college presidents, simply do not have enough information on any of the 200-plus colleges that I’m asked to judge.” The methodology asks top college officials to rate other schools, with 1 being marginal and 5 distinguished. If they don’t know enough to have an opinion, they can declare that. The assessment counts for 25 percent of how a college is rated. Wesleyan will continue to provide other information requested for the magazine’s annual rankings.
Knox touches on one of my pet peeves — and that’s the assessments of judicial candidates done just before elections by the bar association. Lawyers who couldn’t possibily have first-hand knowledge of the judges they’re assessing issue reports that, with rare exceptions, support the incumbents. Lawyers in that instance are not providing any useful information to voters; they’re acting as an incumbent-protection interest group.
• Apology Window Open. Law enforcement authorities were accused by civil rights groups of targeting South Asians who ran convenience stores in Northwest Georgia in a two-year undercover operation against merchants selling drugs and other products they knew were being used to make methamphetamine. After 49 arrests of owners and clerks, all but five of them South Asians, the number of meth labs discovered dropped from 299 to 72 in the next 16 months. The sting ends with two convictions and 32 guilty pleas. Charges against 17 were dismissed, 14 because more culpable relatives pleaded guilty.
• All government actions send signals and encourage some kind of behavior, while discouraging others. In the aftermath of the national debate on illegal immigration, a wave of immigrants are making the choice to become citizens. More than 110,000 per month applied from March through May, reports the AJC’s Mary Lou Pickel, up from about 72,000 per month during the same period last year. Moral of the story: When the nation gets serious about illegals, individuals uncertain about the future of immigration policies are induced to make choices, in this case to become citizens. This is, incidentally, one reason rounding up 12 million was never in the cards. Once a nation’s policies are known, fixed and enforced, illegals react by either making themselves legal or by going home.
• New Haven, Conn., on Tuesday becomes the first city in the nation to offer illegal immigrants local identification cards that will allow them to open bank accounts and to access city services, such as libraries. A city that makes itself appealing to illegals or to the homeless or to any other group, either by not enforcing laws or by providing services that allow them to live worry-free, will get them. Anybody ever wonder why the Five Points area in downtown Atlanta is covered with vagrants? It’s comfortable and easy being a bum there.
• Oh yes, in addition to deadbeat parents who don’t pay child support and contractors who rip-off taxpayers during tragedies, add another group of bad guys the law should pursue to the ends of the earth: government officials who victimize people over whom they have authority. That’d be the Fulton County erosion inspector guilty of demanding bribes from developers. And it could be the Smyrna jailer charged with pocketing $600 in bond money.
• Quote: “Vermont doesn’t need to conform to the rest of society’s uptight rules,” said a 19-year-old, objecting to a decision by the Brattleboro town council to ban nudity in some parts of town. They were reacting to a 68-year-old Arizona man who strolled naked through downtown. When my band of right-wingers take over, our uptight rules will declare that only babies are allowed to stroll naked in public. The fine will increase with age.
