Home > Thinking Right > Archives > 2009 > February > 20
Friday, February 20, 2009
Transportation issues should drive 2010 race
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Education governors? Dime a dozen in Georgia.
Transportation governors?
By that you mean, of course, Mr. Jim Gillis, the former Treutlen County commissioner and state legislator who served as director of the state Highway Department from 1948 to 1955 and again from 1959 to 1970. His power to disburse roads and jobs, the currency of Georgia politics, made him a one-man State Transportation Plan.
That was not all bad. Since a state in the mud needed paved roads everywhere, and since power shifted around rural Georgia, the state got built-out with relatively little waste. It was, for a time, the alignment of need and power to build a first-class network of well-maintained roads across Georgia.
Governors have for decades sought the power that Jim Gillis had.
Gov. Sonny Perdue, with the cooperation of Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle and House Speaker Glenn Richardson, may be on the verge of succeeding. “We need to abandon the scattered approach that spreads resources too thin, and instead focus on projects that actually move the needle on congestion, job creation and take full advantage of the investments we have made in our ports, rail lines and airports,” Perdue says.
Their proposal would fold the State Road and Tollway Authority and the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority into a new State Transportation Authority that would develop a state plan that would be approved by the General Assembly. The new proposal would effectively gut the state Department of Transportation’s board and diminish the department, while increasing a governor’s direct power. The changes Perdue, Cagle and Richardson are proposing wouldn’t have any real impact before Perdue’s term ends. While the proposal has not yet been introduced, it may not be an improvement over the present or past approach to solving transportation woes.
Admittedly it was a legislative majority that’s now history, but when the Legislature last intervened to pick projects two decades ago it was to set in law a requirement that Georgia build a 2,400-mile network of four-lane roads, called “developmental highways.” The cost was initially projected at $2.5 billion, a sum that later doubled. The 17 specifically named projects were intended to promote economic development.
No. 17 on that list was a never-built project called the Outer Perimeter, a loop about 20 miles beyond I-285 around Atlanta.
Whether the state intended to build the loop in whole or part, acting on the route was the state’s most urgent transportation need — urgent because rapid development in metro Atlanta was soon to make land expensive and sprouting subdivisions were to make four-lanes politically unpopular.
In fact, that’s what happened. One of the first decisions Perdue made, one he will someday regret, is that he gave in to neighborhood politics and abandoned the northern arc, which would have provided both congestion relief and economic development opportunities across North Georgia.
The point is that when the Legislature last wrote some version of a state transportation spending plan into law, it was parochial.
A draft list of priorities is contained in a bill that passed the House Transportation Committee Thursday. An accompanying resolution would raise the state sales tax by a penny, with the proceeds to be spent on transportation projects. It’s a wish list, with set priorities, that could not possibly be implemented with available or anticipated money. It conveys a lot of information and, really, nothing.
It’s not a statewide transportation plan that would tell us what new revenue buys — or which projects are to be tolled. The fear here is that metro Atlantans will get toll roads while their sales tax dollars go to projects that have not been subjected to honest cost-benefit analysis, based on actual, measured congestion relief, with all proposed projects competing against each other.
This is heresy nowadays, but the DOT has never been the real problem and isn’t now.
It’s that we’ve not had visionary leadership on transportation. Maybe that’s because governors couldn’t enforce their will. Maybe it’s because education reform had more appeal to voters. As long as governors throw money at education and rearrange the desks, they’re never in danger of failing. It’s different on transportation. Children may not know they’re getting a bad education, but the parents know when they’re stuck in traffic.
The top issue in the 2010 governor’s race should be transportation. What are we buying and what are we getting?
Permalink | Comments (65) | Post your comment | Categories: Column
