Last year, Georgia could afford to resurface just 2.2 percent of its highways, state Transportation Commissioner Keith Golden told a legislative committee Tuesday.
“And if we continue to resurface our roads once every 50 years … well, you’re not going to like driving on those roads,” Golden warned.
The reasons for that shortfall are obvious:
— Georgia, with the nation’s 10th-largest highway system, now ranks 50th in per capita state and local spending on highways. We spent $296 a person in 2011, according to Census data compiled by the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute. The national average was $491. In short, we are spending 60 cents for every state and local dollar being spent in other states. That is unsustainable.
— Rather than raise adequate revenue to fund its transportation needs, “fiscally conservative” Georgia has tried to compensate through borrowing. With our transportation budget now deeply in debt, that gig is pretty much up. Debt payments now consume more than three times as much of our transportation dollar as in South Carolina, and more than four times as much as in North Carolina.
— For all of our politicians’ bravado about wanting independence from the federal government, their refusal to generate adequate state revenue has made Georgia more reliant on federal transportation money than most other states. According to Golden, 55 percent of the state’s transportation spending comes courtesy of Washington; only 45 percent is generated here in Georgia.
Tuesday’s meeting at the state Capitol was the first of eight hearings scheduled around the state by the Joint Study Committee on Critical Transportation Infrastructure Funding, created by the Legislature last spring to try to address the funding issue. In opening the hearing, House Transportation Chairman Jay Roberts stressed to the audience that “nothing’s off the table” and all ideas will be considered.
Of course, some ideas will be easier to implement than others. For example, legislators already seem to like proposals that would give counties the authority to join forces in proposing sales-tax increases to fund multi-county transportation projects. They also may change state law to give local governments the flexibility to propose sales tax increases of less than a penny.
To legislators, those proposals have the added appeal of being risk-free politically. Their passage would allow state leaders to claim to have done something about transportation, while making local officials bear the responsibility for actually proposing tax hikes. Those proposals do have value, but in the end they represent small-scale, boutique solutions to boutique challenges. They don’t address the glaring statewide need.
Part of that larger solution already exists. The state already imposes a 4 percent sales tax on motor fuel, but only three of those pennies go toward transportation; the fourth goes into the general fund. Reallocating that fourth penny to transportation would mean an additional $185 million a year for the DOT. Given the size of the problem, even that wouldn’t be enough, and legislators already have other uses for that money. But it would be an important start.
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