2009 Legislature will be least productive

The 2009 General Assembly will adjourn as the least productive in living memory. At a critical point in state history, legislators will leave town having accomplished nothing of importance, particularly on transportation. In fact, on the few important issues the Legislature has tried to address, it has made things worse, not better.

At Georgia Power’s bidding, for example, it passed legislation giving the utility the right to start charging Georgians almost immediately for nuclear plants that the utility will complete at some unknown point in the future, at some unknown cost to the public. Asked to choose between the pleadings of corporate lobbyists and the best interests of Georgians, the Legislature sided with lobbyists.

That same dynamic has played out on taxes. State revenues have collapsed, forcing legislators to cut not fat but meat and bone from the budget. More than 25,000 state employees are taking forced furloughs, and teacher furloughs are a probability as well. House Speaker Glenn Richardson warned last week that a special session is likely later in the year to cut the budget still deeper.

Meanwhile, the House passes tax breaks —- one for corporations, another sought by the home-building industry —- that will cost the state an estimated $750 million over the next few years.

The House has also passed a bill that abolishes the “birthday tax” charged to register motor vehicles, a tax collected annually on the vehicle owner’s date of birth. To replace that lost revenue, they propose a sales tax that would be imposed at the time a vehicle is purchased.

However, for the first time, that 7 percent sales tax would be imposed on casual sales of used cars, a market dominated by Georgia’s working and middle class now struggling to stay afloat. Meanwhile, that sales tax would be capped at $2,000 per vehicle, in effect exempting much of the value of luxury vehicles from taxation. The sales price of a car above $28,571 would not be taxable, a devious little shift of the tax burden away from the affluent onto the working and middle classes.

They call this reform.

Short of a miracle, however, there will be no effective reform of the state Department of Transportation. Nor will the Legislature approve a mechanism to generate badly needed revenue to meet transportation needs.

The DOT is a deeply troubled agency. Few outside the DOT question that assertion. However, the main cause of those troubles is the deeply politicized, unprofessional way in which it makes transportation decisions.

Ideally, the DOT board would approach its job as a good school board does. It would set policy and standards, hire professional personnel and leadership, and hold those personnel accountable. It would let transportation professionals design and build the state’s transportation system.

But it operates nothing like that. Instead, the 13 DOT board members act like the previous school board in Clayton County, the one that cost the school district its national accreditation. They meddle where they have no business meddling. They propose and champion individual projects, as if they themselves were transportation planners.

It is a culture and operating style out of the early and mid-20th century, when Georgia was largely a rural state and local officials and legislators would come hat in hand to Atlanta begging for somebody to pave their dirt roads. It is designed as, and runs as, a patronage shop.

Gov. Sonny Perdue, Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle and Speaker Richardson have proposed to strip the DOT board of its duties, putting control of billions of dollars instead in a group those three officials appoint and control. Not surprisingly, legislators see that not as an effort to take patronage out of transportation but as a cynical bid to shift control of that patronage.

The fact that the “reform” package was concocted in secret negotiations among Perdue, Cagle and Richardson does nothing to ease that concern, nor should it.

Conceivably, the reform plan could be salvaged with provisions insulating the newly created transportation agency from meddling by politicians, including the governor. Instead, legislators are moving in the opposite direction, demanding that they, too, get to have a direct say in transportation money.

That too they call reform.

jbookman@ajc.com