Hard reality must somehow whip soothing fantasy if Georgia desires to remain the economic juggernaut of the Southeast. That’s the realistic way to view Georgia’s current transportation/mobility/congestion mess born of underinvestment.
If we can’t accept this tough truth pretty darned quick, then all that we and our forebears have labored toward to make Georgia prosper will slowly begin to come unhinged. We can hang it up, in other words.
That cannot happen. Not in a state and capital region that have been so intentional about rising to peaks most other places could not begin to envision, let alone claw their way toward.
Is this a harsh summation of where things now rest? Yes. Is it unrealistic? We don’t think so.
Not in a still-new year when the locked-arm ranks of state GOP leadership have been consistent in warning that leaving our transportation malady to somehow heal itself — do nothing, in other words — will yield only painful returns. It’s beyond startling to hear politicians of late tout their conservative bones in one sentence and, in the next, urge the need for additional money to attack our mobility nightmares.
They’re absolutely right. Yet talk is cheap. Action costs money. That stinging reality can be addressed by communicating the truth constantly and clearly that doing nothing will cost a lot more.
The conversations won’t be easy, even if it seems like they should be. But legislators must be steely-spined enough to initiate them.
Like the proverbial word to the wise, lawmakers’ recent admissions should be sufficient alone to shock naysayers and skeptics into recognizing the immensity of the problem that has long been before us.
Yet, many Georgians don’t now accept the precariousness of our current perch. A statewide poll this month by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution confirms this. When asked “how important is improving transportation in Georgia,” 58 percent of 905 respondents ranked it as the “most” or “very” important issue here. When asked about support of a higher fuel tax to pay for such work, a mirror-image 59 percent were opposed to it. Barely a third of those surveyed, 36 percent, would “support” a higher gas tax.
That’s pretty amazing. And it calls to mind comic strip character Pogo’s famous quote: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
Such grassroots digging-in of heels suggests a trait that seems uncharacteristic of Georgians – seeking a free lunch. We like to think the gridlocked people of this state know better than that.
Such an attitude head-butts current governmental reality. The most conservative of think tanks and right-aisle lawmakers around have been plainly saying for years that the current politics-as-entertainment crowd in Washington can’t be counted on to come anywhere near appropriating sufficient taxpayer dollars to begin making a meaningful difference in repairing decades of transportation starvation in Georgia and elsewhere.
Last month’s final report of the Georgia Joint Study Committee on Critical Transportation Infrastructure Funding puts this crisis charitably: “…Congress has demonstrated an increased reluctance to deal with significant infrastructure funding issues in a responsible, forward looking manner. Recently, federal action on infrastructure authorization and funding issues has taken place in short spurts … . This leaves state and local transportation agencies in dire need of stability and predictability.”
We’re largely on our own, in other words. Which makes the need for action this year all the more urgent. Understanding all this should precede action steps, however.
Our politicians can’t resist yelling from the rooftops that Georgia’s the best state in the nation in which to do business. They’re less likely to note that we’re a whipsawed caboose when it comes to transportation spending. To be precise, we’re number 49 among the states. We’ve brought up the rattling rear of this slow train for far too long.
Gov. Nathan Deal sketched out the challenge in frank terms during last week’s State of the State address, saying: “We must maintain and improve our roads and bridges; we must provide congestion relief; and we must prepare for more freight and more businesses. We can debate how much it will cost to do something; but let us not forget how much it will cost to do nothing.”
The joint committee was equally blunt: “In order to remain nationally and globally competitive, and to meet these challenges, Georgia must take immediate and significant steps to increase its investment in transportation infrastructure.”
The alternative is pretty clear – and pretty grim.
Step 1 should have been for the study group to lay out options and then recommend a defined path forward. That didn’t happen, likely because lawmakers were unwilling to assemble that much political dynamite in one place. Which is a pity.
Instead, the committee offered up data, a buffet-style selection of options and delicate warnings of what will happen if we choose the route of inaction and delay.
Which means that leaders must now swallow hard and make the fast, hard decisions and explain them to the public all along the way.
For this burden really is a shared one, divided among the citizenry and their government. It’s a yoke that our necks can no longer avoid.
Without doubt, there is tough debate, painful realizations and hard work ahead in envisioning – and enacting – a way to pay overdue IOU’s for needed transportation work.
Yes, different regions suffer different problems. We also believe all Georgians know that we can’t continue down this same road much longer.
So let 2015 be the year we get moving in a different direction – one that will help make Georgia the prosperity magnet we all know it can be.
