On the next-to-last day of the 2015 Georgia General Assembly, legislative leaders trotted out a dramatically revised $900 million transportation-funding bill and basically rammed it through the House and Senate, brooking no objections and allowing no amendments.
Among the features of the revised House Bill 170 — features never vetted in a committee hearing, never discussed in a public setting — was a new $5-a-night “fee” on hotel and motel rooms in Georgia. The “fee” — they had to call it a fee, not a tax, although a “fee” for what is never explained — is expected to generate some $200 million a year for transportation. By creating that new revenue pool, legislative leaders were able to reduce the size of a fuel tax increase also contained in the bill.
Politically speaking, one of other attractions of the “fee” was that a lot of it would be collected from visitors to the state, who do not vote here and who presumably would have no option but to pay it. Of course, the state’s tourism, convention and hotel-motel industries were justifiably upset, in no large part because they had been blindsided by the measure.
That wasn’t by accident. HB 170 had been passed 10 days earlier in the state Senate, meaning that legislative leaders had ample time to negotiate its final form in public, through the conference-committee process. They simply had no intention of doing so, and the final legislation demonstrates the danger in that approach.
During a committee process, someone might have pointed out the inequity of attaching the same $5-per-night fee onto a $35 bill for a motel room in south Georgia and onto a $3,500-a-night suite at the Ritz Carlton in Buckhead. For the farm laborer, construction worker or transient family needing a cheap place to stay in south Georgia, that represents a 14 percent increase in the cost of the room, but only a 0.14 percent increase in the cost of the Ritz suite. If you’re going to charge hotel customers to raise money for transportation, a tax as a percentage of the room rate would have made more sense and been far more equitable.
And what about the impact on the thousands of unfortunate Georgia families who are already living on the economic edge, whose only refuge short of homelessness are the cheap motels such as those along Buford Highway or Jimmy Carter Boulevard? A $30-a-night kitchenette for a single mother and two children now becomes $35 a night; over two or three weeks, that struggling family could end up paying more than $100 in “fees” to help fund transportation. That’s an enormous, even crippling sum to people in that situation.
Of course, it’s entirely plausible that given a full chance to work its will, the Georgia Legislature still might have paid no attention to such concerns. Looking out for the little guy is not typically high on its list of priorities. Too many times, they seem to think that their proper role is to punish poverty more severely, on the notion that we’ll get less of it.
But the way the bill was handled ensured that they never had a real chance to think it over.
