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Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Traffic fix? Atlanta needs a plan before any tax levy
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“My number one issue in electing somebody in metro Atlanta would be traffic,” and specifically, traffic congestion.
The speaker is state Sen. Jeff Mullis of Chickamauga, one of the movers and shakers, with state Rep. Vance Smith Jr. of Pine Mountain, in the failed effort to speed up action on solving the state’s transportation woes. The joint study committee that Mullis and Smith chaired looked specifically at funding, though new funding is an answer that comes after Georgians know what the money is buying.
At the top of the list, for metro Atlanta anyway, should be congestion relief, a priority Mullis acknowledges. “If you’re sitting in traffic in Atlanta, you’ve got to think it’s the top priority.”
The General Assembly session ended without Mullis or a “Get Georgia Moving” coalition of 50 local government associations, contractors, environmental activists and chambers of commerce getting their wish. A proposed constitutional amendment that represented their solution —- a 1 percent regional sales tax on motor fuels dedicated to “transportation purposes” —- fell three votes shy in the state Senate.
The entire episode, start to finish, is an example of what happens when the body politic perceives a leadership void.
Before fixing on a solution that involves asking voters to approve a 1 cent sales tax increase, the state should have a comprehensive statewide transportation plan. Then we could debate whether it achieved the purpose of reducing traffic congestion in metro Atlanta, how it addressed other needs, like, for example, giving motorists a way to get across North Georgia, what it would cost and how the pieces would be financed. And we’d know whether the tax should be a penny or 10 and what role tolls would play in providing gridlock relief to metro Atlanta.
We don’t.
That void created by Gov. Sonny Perdue’s approach to developing a statewide plan prompted groups that included the Georgia Chamber of Commerce, the Association of County Commissioners of Georgia, C.W. Matthews Contracting Co. Inc., the Sierra Club, the Southern Environmental Law Center and dozens of others to draft their own proposal for the regional sales tax. It prompted the House and Senate, too, to launch the effort by Mullis and Smith to —- in the phrase of House Speaker Glenn Richardson —- “do something.”
The risk in convening 50 organizations and interest groups is that they spend imaginary money extracted from somebody else to fund each other’s dreams.
And the “do something” may actually preclude efforts later to do something statewide that involves the same penny of taxing capacity.
And yet that’s what happens in a political void.
Somebody and some solution fills it.
The proposed amendment never got perfected. It represented some principles that stuck in the craw of key legislators, including allowing a neighboring county’s voters to raise your taxes. It created a dedicated tax that the state would collect and hand over to regional authorities to be spent for “transportation purposes.”
The proposed amendment question was so vague and inviting that it could have been written for a traveling medicine show. “Shall the Constitution of Georgia be amended so as to allow that all revenue currently collected from motor fuel taxes be designated to fund transportation and to provide for communities and regions to solve their transportation problems through a referendum?”
The Legislature backed into policy decisions that should be more fully considered on their own merit, not just as agreements necessary to get to the 1 cent sales tax. Dedicating a tax and writing into the constitution that the pass-along funds “shall not be subject to budgetary reduction” is a significant step in delegating power to a regional government that is one step removed from voters.
Metro Atlantans desperately need congestion relief —- and the state desperately needs to come up with a comprehensive plan to deliver it.
The state now has eight months to deliver it —- or risk a void.
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