Today on our Editorial page, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Editorial Board has urged support of the 1-cent transportation tax referendum.
It’s an important decision for us, and one I expect you’ll want to know more about.
We’ve spent the past year or so reporting and sorting through the issue on our news pages. That’s been no small task as Atlanta faces one of the great decisions in its history. As even the most cursory examination of this region’s history reveals, emotions run high and opinions become passionate when Atlanta stands at a crossroads to consider our next turn as a community. It’s no different this time.
Everyone seems to agree that traffic is a problem. It’s what to do about it that confounds us, frustrates us and is now before us in the form of a ballot measure.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has been committed to providing information that you can use to make up your mind when you step into that voting booth Tuesday. Among our efforts:
● Truth-O-Meter investigations. We've truth-tested 20 referendum-related statements, including those from both fans and foes of the plan. It's one of the efforts we're most proud of, given the occasional propensity of both sides to exaggerate and obfuscate. Check our Politifact page at www.politifact.com/georgia/ and develop your own sense of the facts at hand.
● Dozens of stories by our expert reporters on virtually every angle of the issue. On today's front page, you can find the results of our final poll on the referendum, which shows supporters face an uphill climb. You can find all of our stories compiled at www.ajc.com/news/transportation-referendum.
● Opinions from regional and national experts and leading thinkers on transportation. We’ve also published plenty from our staff columnists. Today, we’ve added two extra pages of views pro and con in our Atlanta Forward section.
As the person responsible for the news content of our website and printed newspaper, I believe you’ll find what you need to make your decision.
Our commitment in news coverage is to report impartially and bring you all sides of a news story, regardless of any position we might take on our Editorial page. I’ll leave it to you to judge the fairness of our coverage. As for my own indicator, I’ve gotten plenty of complaints from each side claiming we’ve better represented the other, so I take some comfort in knowing that neither side feels favored. And it sure keeps my email box busy.
So why have we chosen, away from our news pages and on our Opinion pages, to take a position on the referendum?
As we have said in our Atlanta Forward approach on these pages, we’re focused on metro Atlanta’s future and issues that affect it. Education, transportation, regional economic health, community leadership and quality of life in metro Atlanta are our key topics, based on feedback from readers about what is important to them.
While we no longer urge support of candidates in partisan political races, we’ve consistently taken positions on issues that affect our region. For example, we have urged Georgia to join a three-state water treaty and recommended that the Legislature pass a bill backed by Gov. Nathan Deal to reform judicial sentencing. On a more local level, we urged the resignation of Atlanta School Superintendent Beverly Hall during the height of the cheating scandal; concluded that pensions offered by the city of Atlanta to government employees were unsustainable; and opposed secrecy on local economic development projects.
This referendum presents another example of the kind of issue that affects all of our region. Our transportation problems are not Democratic or Republican, liberal or conservative.
It comes down to our ability to decide and agree as a region on how to deal with the problem.
As metro Atlanta’s leading media voice, our Editorial Board felt compelled to avoid an ivory- tower mentality and to grapple with the same decision-making responsibility each voter faces. We’ve shared our thinking in today’s editorial, written for the board by Editorial page editor Andre Jackson. And we’ve relied on the reporting of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution to inform our opinion. We hope that you’ve relied on us, too, and that you feel well prepared for your decision, whatever it is.
Disclosure: Cox Enterprises, Inc., the parent company of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, donated $250,000 to the campaign in support of the T-SPLOST. Cox is not involved in the decisions of the AJC editorial board.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution wants to explain openly to readers what we do and why. Discuss this column and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s coverage of other areas at editor Kevin Riley’s Facebook page,
About the Author
