I like the fact that the Southern Crescent counties of Douglas, Carroll, Coweta, Fayette, Clayton and Henry have a gross regional product of $23.6 billion.
But I also have to face the realities of the future.
The region has sustained a wild spike in land use and very little in the way of transportation planning to support growth. The days of stuffing the government coffers with “growth cash” while not having the foresight or willingness to keep pace with expensive transportation infrastructure are just about over.
I can only pray the south metro counties are paying attention and will not repeat Atlanta’s historically poor choices.
Fayette County has succeeded, in large part, by not mimicking the traditional pattern of growth outpacing infrastructure. I believe this method could be the key to the Southside’s future success.
One key problem for our future is the $3.2 billion in mass transit projects in the Transportation Investment Act, or TIA. As our metro population has grown during the past 20 years, transit ridership has declined. More commuters telecommute than ride transit.
It’s illogical to conclude that taking an enormously subsidized transit system — also approaching $3 billion in red ink for operations and maintenance, and which 95 percent of commuters don’t use — and making it bigger will solve anything.
I have to agree with state Rep. Ed Setzler, R-Acworth, who says the TIA will do very little to relieve traffic congestion. The TIA turned into a special-interest wish list. This poorly constructed plan, with no financial accountability, represents an immense risk to the future economy of metro Atlanta. Every dollar spent bailing out a mode of transportation that commuters choose not to use is a dollar that could have promoted private enterprise and generated tax revenue for viable solutions.
The TIA will impede economic growth. First, half the funding will go to a mode of transportation that will not relieve traffic congestion. Our traffic is a significant impediment to our economy and the only reason the TIA was created.
Secondly, in order to pay the exorbitant costs of the future operations and maintenance of expanded mass transit, there will have to be a permanent regional sales tax. Such a permanent tax, providing little in economic production, will bleed our region of billions of dollars of funding that would otherwise fund the purchase of goods and services in the private sector, which is what creates sustainable jobs.
We cannot afford MARTA now. Our state and regional leaders refuse to tell our citizens how we are going to pay the exorbitant operations and maintenance of an expanded system.
Spending half of the TIA funding on transit has so weakened the public fight against traffic congestion that local leaders like Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed have begun spinning the promotion of the referendum as something akin to a jobs program.
The transit projects being only half-funded in the TIA leads to a “too big to fail” scenario where we will have to approve another 10 years of regional transit funding just to complete them.
Throwing our future away on multi-billion dollar transit projects with a poor ridership record, forsaking more important solutions, will be a detriment to the Southern Crescent and the region as a whole.
Traffic congestion has gone down each year for the past five years. Now would be a perfect time to formulate a plan that actually made sense.
Steve Brown is a Fayette County commissioner.
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