WASHINGTON -- Gov. Nathan Deal and Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed said Wednesday that they made progress in trying to persuade federal officials to help fund the deepening of the Port of Savannah, but they admitted progress does not equal dollars.
But short of securing the nearly $600 million it could cost to deepen the Savannah harbor, the bipartisan duo said they accomplished something else that had previously cost Georgia federal help.
"We’re turning around the notion that Georgia wasn’t working in partnership to deal with its transportation challenges," Reed, a Democrat, said with the Republican Deal by his side in a hallway of a Capitol Hill office building.
The pair flew into this city for a series of meetings on education and transportation, but it was the latter that dominated the discussions. Georgia, and specifically metro Atlanta, have "billions" in transportation needs, Reed said, and have had difficulties landing federal dollars to help ease gridlock that chokes the region.
After a lunchtime meeting with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to discuss the state's efforts on the federal Race to the Top program, the pair had two afternoon sessions that could have been contentious.
A midafternoon meeting with U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood -- who famously once said that Georgia needed to get its act together on transportation -- was followed by a session with most of the state's congressional delegation.
And if there was any question as to who was heading the team, Reed cleared that up, too.
"We sent a clear message that the governor is leading the effort and I’m working in partnership with him," said Reed, whom Deal invited to join him on the trip.
Georgia's record with the federal government on transportation has not been stellar under President Barack Obama, and Reed's efforts to get the president to meet with him and Deal on this trip were unsuccessful. The state says it will cost almost $600 million to dredge the Savannah port to a depth necessary to handle a larger class of cargo ship expected to begin passing through the Panama Canal in 2014. An Army Corps of Engineers study said the port could be deepened from 42 to 48 feet with minimal environmental impact.
Obama's fiscal 2012 budget proposal included $600,000 in "pre-construction" money for deepening the harbor. State officials say they need $105 million in federal assistance this year to compete with other Atlantic ports. Deal secured $32 million in state money for the project.
Much is at stake. State economic development officials estimate that Georgia's ports account for 7 percent of the state's total gross product and $2.6 billion in state and local taxes.
The 13-member congressional delegation -- eight Republicans and five Democrats -- has been unsuccessful, or unwilling at a time when asking for more federal spending is anathema to many voters, in landing a bigger federal commitment. Deal and Reed said they believe that will change.
"One of the priorities of both the president and the Congress as a whole is to improve the job opportunities for citizens of the country and of our state," Deal said. "We see the Port of Savannah as one of those job-creation activities."
As for the congressional delegation, Deal said, "we got fairly unanimous support saying they understood the importance of the project."
That goodwill extended to LaHood, Deal and Reed said. It wasn't always so. During a 2009 visit to Atlanta, LaHood warned the state that it could miss out on federal money for transportation unless "Georgia gets its act together."
Reed met with LaHood not long after that, and the mayor ventured to D.C. on his own weeks later as Obama, for whom Reed was a major backer, moved his transportation priorities into mass transit and rail. The Obama administration has committed $8 billion toward high-speed rail, but Georgia has yet to see more than a few scraps.
But Wednesday, Deal said, LaHood "was very pleased with the fact that both the mayor and I were here together and he had already heard good reports about us working on projects cooperatively."
Deal said he and Reed talked to LaHood about the state's efforts to form public-private partnerships for major transportation projects, including a plan to transform downtown Atlanta's "Gulch" into a transit hub.
"We have billions of dollars of transportation needs," Reed said. "We can’t get it done if they have the notion Georgia doesn’t have its act together. We do have our act together. We showed them that."
Deal and Reed's work together is getting noticed back home as well.
“The fact that the two of them have a great working relationship is for the betterment of the state and the whole metro area," Sam Williams, president of the Metro Atlanta Chamber, told a meeting of reporters and editors Wednesday at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Williams said Deal and Reed were the driving forces behind the decision by automaker Porsche to move its North American headquarters and an office currently in Chicago to a former Ford plant site near Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.
"That deal was going somewhere else until the two of them actually got to text messaging back and forth about how to make that deal work," he said. "And we anticipate that on other things that are out there in the pipeline on companies we can’t talk about.”
Earlier Wednesday, Deal and Reed met with Duncan, the education secretary, and learned that the next round of federal Race to the Top dollars will focus on pre-k. Deal and Reed hope to bring some of that money back to Georgia.
The Department of Education awarded Georgia $400 million in the last round of Race to the Top, and both men see great possibilities for pre-k help from the feds.
Reed said Duncan seemed pleased with the progress the state was making with its first allocation. The mayor said he also briefed Duncan on the Atlanta Public Schools cheating scandal and the system's threatened loss of accreditation.
"Obviously, he cares about it and has been focused on it," Reed said.
Staff writer Susan Abramson contributed to this article.
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