Washington’s misplaced priorities are biting Georgia where the sun does shine: on the coast, where Savannah’s harbor would remain un-deepened for yet another year if the latest Obama budget were to become law.
The president’s 2015 budget was expected to include money — finally — to deepen the harbor by 5 feet so that larger cargo ships coming via the Panama Canal will be able to dock in Savannah. But instead of a down payment toward an eventual federal contribution of $400 million for the project, Georgians got excuses.
Everyone thought Congress had — finally — cleared the way in January to pay for the project’s construction. Everyone, it seems, but the Obama administration, which now says a different bill must be passed out of a House-Senate conference committee first.
Republicans in Georgia, not surprisingly, suspected partisanship on the administration’s part. More surprising was that Georgia Democrats apparently agree with them.
Typical was this comment made to the AJC by state Sen. Jason Carter as he filed paperwork Wednesday to be the Democratic challenger to Gov. Nathan Deal:
“[T]he way I look at it is you have a governor [Deal] who has played Washington politics at every opportunity, and tried to put a stick in the eye of the [Obama] administration. And that type of attitude doesn’t help us move forward as a state.”
While Deal certainly has opposed the president’s efforts regarding Obamacare, he has been widely hailed for taking a bipartisan and cooperative approach to the Savannah harbor expansion.
A December 2012 article in The Economist, “The dealmakers,” cited the efforts to win federal funding for the port project as but one example of how Deal and Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed are showing “what successful bipartisanship looks like in action.” (The subhead of that article read: “Washingtonians, please take note.”)
And the port specifically has made for a common cause of congressional Democrats (Rep. John Barrow) and Republicans (Rep. Jack Kingston and both of Georgia’s senators), as well as interests in metro Atlanta and on the coast.
Washington politics indeed appears to be at play here, but it’s coming from Washington. As the Deal-Reed alliance shows, disagreement on some issues doesn’t have to preclude cooperation on others.
What’s more, contributing to infrastructure that fosters interstate commerce, as Savannah’s port does, is widely accepted as a legitimate function of the federal government. It’s much more widely accepted than, say, using Washington’s regulatory power to bring the health-insurance industry to heel.
Georgia’s leaders weren’t expecting the 2015 budget to include the entire $400 million in federal funds they seek to complement the $260 million-plus the state has pledged to the project. But let’s put in perspective what $400 million would have looked like in the context of Obama’s $3.9 trillion budget request for fiscal 2015.
It would be less than half of 1 percent of the spending increase the president seeks in 2015, compared to what federal budget crunchers already expected to spend in the next fiscal year.
It would be about one-third of 1 percent of the new money Obama proposed for investments, including infrastructure, during the remainder of his term. It would be a fraction of what the president wants to spend on creating a nationwide, universal preschool program, something even fiscally conservative Georgia already manages to provide on its own.
And, had Obama simply tacked $400 million for Savannah onto his budget without offsetting the money with spending cuts or tax increases, it would have raised the 2015 budget deficit by less than one-tenth of 1 percent.
So, it does seem likely the Savannah snub has more to do with political concerns than budgetary ones.
Given the bipartisanship which has spurred this effort from Georgia, that’s a shame. It’s another reason Washington’s polarized actions should come with a disclaimer: Don’t try this at home.
