Blame a faded old road map. Georgia’s been down this rutted two-lane before, on a slow, rough ride toward places that go-getters and doers already know to avoid. The first fork on this blacktop is called Decline. The next turnoff’s marked Mediocrity. Rattling along all the way to the end hits that clearing known as Barely Hanging On.
Those are the possible outcomes this week as the Georgia Legislature lurches into 11th-hour, closed-door negotiations to reach a deal that puts some level of additional money toward the state’s longsuffering transportation networks.
Under the rosiest present scenario, we’ll end up with just enough money to keep us successfully patching potholes awhile longer. This will inappropriately be called Victory, and hailed as if the problem of transportation underinvestment is decisively settled for a good long while to come. Don’t believe it.
The other options are worse. Unbelievably, they would offer up even fewer investment dollars. This starve-Georgia strategy will keep us well behind where we need to be in maintaining competitive transportation infrastructure. Our state, its people and commerce will suffer as a result. If that prospect dismays, frightens, or disgusts, it should.
On a faraway parking deck, as of now, is the necessity of adequately expanding capacity of our mobility systems. It’s a formula for failure via willful neglect.
Cooked down, it amounts to No New Taxes = No New/Improved Roads. Or other transportation systems, for that matter. If that’s overstated, it’s not by much. Think about that during a peak-hour commute in metro Atlanta. The visual should be terrifying for a state and capital that continue to grow, stuffing more people, cargo and lifestyle needs onto already overstuffed roads.
Georgia can, should, and must, do better – before the Legislature adjourns this week. At gnawed-bone minimum, that means finding enough new tax revenue to reach the $1 billion annually that is the stripped-bare concrete floor needed to keep Georgia basically in neutral.
That’s not an ideal place to lodge, but we would do far worse by offering up only some lesser fraction of that $1 billion.
Amazingly, that’s still quite possible. Being tried and found sadly wanting in this manner is even preferable in some political circles. It should be anathema among those who want to see Georgia continue to hit stretch goals in creating jobs and prosperity. We can no longer have it both ways. The time to drive up and choose – progress or its antitheses – is now.
All of which puts the Georgia General Assembly in a tough spot. One that will affect this state’s trajectory for decades to come. Legacies good and sad are built around such moments.
Will lawmakers cling to their trusty political default of choosing short-term cheapness, even as that runs up a more-costly tab in longer-term economic damage and real-money costs? Save $1 in the left hand, and unproductively count away multiples of that with the other. That’s the true price of congestion and transportation -system inadequacy that can be concealed no longer. Call it the deceptive, short-sighted, feel-good option.
We retain hope that state political leaders will muscle up the courage to do the right and necessary thing for Georgia. In so doing, they would admirably live up to their rhetoric from the start of this year’s legislative session. Gov. Nathan Deal and legislative leaders proclaimed then that 2015 should be the year Georgia finally begins to fix the transportation woes that bleed off growth, prosperity and quality of life which would otherwise be ours to claim.
To his credit, Deal let it be known last week that he would call the General Assembly back into special session if they fumbled once more on transportation. Good for him. It would be shameful if that becomes necessary. The governor should make good his threat if it does.
Until the Legislature is Sine Die’d into recess later this week, lawmakers can still step up on the big task clouding our future.
Really, none other than narrow-thinking political dogmatists can argue that doing nothing is adequate and appropriate. Their threadbare canards are about as pitiful an action plan for economic progress as there is.
Ask “No Tax Hike” critics to name any business that succeeds by stubbornly ignoring market changes, poorly serving customers, shunning innovation and mulishly refusing to invest toward updating inefficient systems and processes. Don’t be surprised if silence is the response. That’s an answer in itself.
Legislators know the right call. Their own Joint Study Committee on Critical Transportation Infrastructure Funding last December detailed a “growing crisis with regard to funding the construction, repair and maintenance of its (Georgia’s) transportation infrastructure.”
Such language should scare them – and all Georgians.
Georgia’s future is walking the line this week. Lawmakers must choose: rhetoric or results.
