No more low-turnout SPLOST votes

This is one of those rare times when too many things are happening, locally and beyond, for me to devote a full column to each one. So I’m taking a page from my predecessor, Jim Wooten, and touching briefly today on several of them:

• Just 1 in 14 registered voters in Gwinnett bothered to cast a ballot Tuesday on a five-year, $1 billion sales-tax extension. To their north, 1 in 11 Hall County voters weighed in on a similar measure. Politicians often portray these SPLOSTs as popular with voters, but we really wouldn't know, given local governments' proclivity for scheduling them in off-year elections. If local pols are so confident of the taxes' popularity, they shouldn't object to a requirement that they appear on ballots only in November elections when there's a presidential or gubernatorial race.
• News that Atlanta's pro sports teams lead their respective leagues normally would be a source of pride. But the owners of the Braves and Falcons and ex-owners of the Hawks instead ought to be ashamed that they're No. 1 in taking taxpayer dollars to showcase Georgia National Guardsmen in acts of "paid patriotism," as detailed in a recent U.S. Senate report. Of course, if these billionaires had any shame in the first place, they wouldn't also be taking hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to build the stadiums where their millionaire employees play their games. As if we needed another example that professional sports teams are among the worst when it comes to crony capitalism.
• Congratulations to the city of Atlanta for winning a court battle to keep its 2011 pension reform in place. Mayor Kasim Reed is right: The changes are vital to maintaining the city's financial health. Now maybe Reed and the police union that sued to overturn the reform can focus on reining in the wave of crime that has residents across the city up in arms.
• If your complaint about a proposed quarter of a billion dollars in new state funding for k-12 education is that it closes the door on a further half-billion dollars that we don't spend now, didn't spend before, and weren't going to spend in the future, you may have lost touch with reality.
• In the next-to-last election of Barack Obama's presidency, Democrats lost another governor's mansion (Kentucky, the 12th since 2009) and still more state-legislature seats (over 900 and counting in the Obama era), to go along with the flip of 13 seats in the U.S. Senate and 69 in the House to the GOP. These are the kinds of elections that build a party's bench for years to come: It's no accident that five of the top 10 Republican presidential candidates won their current positions since Obama's first inauguration. Nor is it a mystery why Democrats unsatisfied with another Hillary Clinton run have had to turn to a 74-year-old socialist who's been in Congress a quarter-century.
• It may be the bad fortune of Georgia head football coach Mark Richt to have a down season in a year when folks are tired of the "status quo" "establishment" and want to give fresh-faced "outsiders" a shot at running things. If Richt has mixed feelings about his future, he might place a call to John Boehner, who by the end of his time as speaker of the House seemed perfectly at peace with giving someone else a shot at leading his people to the promised land.