Gov. Nathan Deal on Tuesday announced a $10 billion transportation plan bolstered by money from the new transportation tax that could transform metro Atlanta.
The transportation investment plan includes and 18-month project list to resurface thousands of miles of roads and rebuild hundreds of crumbling bridges that will cost $2.2 billion.
A longer-range decade-long plan has far greater ambitions. It includes express lanes on the top end of I-285 and Ga. 400, interchange reconstruction at the traffic-choked intersection of I-285 and I-20 and additional lanes on I-85 north of Atlanta and I-16 in Savannah. It also would include truck-only lanes along I-75 from Macon into Henry County.
“We are about to embark on a 10-year journey into Georgia’s future,” said Deal.
The new transportation initiative is part transparency effort, part political defense strategy for lawmakers who could be threatened with primaries for voting for the package of fees and taxes that raises nearly $1 billion each year for infrastructure improvements.
The details, laid out in this state transportation department website, highlights hundreds of road projects, interchange overhauls, rail updates and freight improvements.
“We promised the people of the state of Georgia that we would show them results,” said Deal. “And that is what we’re doing today.”
DOT Commissioner Russell McMurry said the state will leverage private finance with public funding, like “getting a mortgage to buy a house.”
“It will be transformational for Georgia in the short term and the long term,” said McMurry.
Anti-tax advocates, tea party members and fiscal conservatives have lobbed unrelenting attacks at supporters of the plan, which Republican state Sen. Bill Heath called “the largest tax increase in Georgia’s history.” Anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist recently put House Speaker David Ralston on his year-end “naughty” list for his role in pushing the tax hike.
Democrats, too, have raised questions about the plan. State Sen. Vincent Fort, D-Atlanta, questioned the lack of transit funding in the long-term transportation plan.
“There’s no transit in it. Investing in infrastructure is very important. But a part of that infrastructure investment has to be transit,” said state Sen. Vincent Fort, an Atlanta Democrat who called last year’s commitment for $100 million in transit funding a “pittance.”
“This obsession with asphalt has got us into a crisis,” he added. “You just can’t build yourself out of a traffic problem.”
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