Congratulations are in order … I guess.
With some $900 million in additional and much-needed annual tax revenue, the transportation funding bill passed by the General Assembly late Tuesday night does represent progress. In conjunction with other legislation, it also offers at least the hope of additional funding options for transit in the not too distant future. In fact, it’s fair to say that House Bill 170 is probably the most far-sighted, responsible transportation funding bill that the Georgia Legislature is capable of adopting.
But if that sounds like faint praise, it is. We’re caught in a situation in which the best that our legislators can do is not nearly good enough. But hey, don’t take my word for it. Take the word of legislators themselves.
Before the 2015 General Assembly even began, a joint study committee created and led by legislators released a report on the inadequacy of Georgia’s transportation funding and on the consequences of years or even decades of malign neglect. As the report pointed out, we’re a transportation-dependent state that ranks 49th in the country in per capita spending on transportation, and we’re paying the price for that underinvestment in jobs, economic growth and quality of life.
The report also established clear signposts of what we needed to do to address the problem. For example, the study committee concluded that “to merely preserve the current transportation system, namely the maintenance of roads and bridges at acceptable levels, the state has a funding gap of $1 billion to $1.5 billion annually.”
To do more than the bare minimum, to actually begin addressing the backlog in transportation by “boosting regional mobility, increasing interstate highway capacity, expanding transit availability, improving intermodal options, and building new interchanges,” the committee found that the state would need $2.1 to $2.9 billion in additional annual revenue.
Judging by those standards, the $900 million raised by HB 170 means the General Assembly failed to accomplish even its most minimal goal of maintaining the current transportation system at acceptable levels. And what can we expect as the consequences of that failure?
Again, let’s turn to the legislators’ own report:
“Without significantly increasing transportation spending to the levels identified above, Georgia’s existing transportation networks will deteriorate, the needs identified in the (state transportation plan) will go unmet, and Georgia’s longstanding position as a leader in transportation infrastructure and economic growth will erode.”
So that’s where we now stand: The best that we could manage still falls short of even maintaining the status quo. Even worse, with this week’s vote the political courage needed to contemplate raising revenue has been completely exhausted, and it’s extremely unlikely that leaders of this state will revisit the question for a long time to come. As Gov. Nathan Deal said afterward, “This was the one bite at the apple.”
This was the one chance the state had to really make a difference on behalf of future generations of Georgians, just as previous generations had sacrificed to build the transportation network that we now rely upon. We have made too little of that chance.
