MARTA won’t be getting a huge infusion of cash after an effort to increase its sales tax rate failed Thursday in the House, but don’t think supporters will walk away empty-handed.
Scholarships for minority engineering students, more money for African-Americans and other minority road contractors and a firmer pledge by the state Department of Transportation to help steer more business toward minority-owned firms were among the concessions won by Senate Democrats at the Capitol this week on transportation, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has learned.
The state is also working to break up its bigger road contracts — which often go to the relatively few companies big enough to handle them — into smaller pieces to make more minority-owned companies eligible for them, according to sources with direct knowledge of the discussions who were not authorized to talk on the record.
The deal marks the first time the state Transportation Department has committed to taking substantive steps toward helping so-called “disadvantaged” businesses — and is a step beyond the usual studies done every three years by the state to account for its dealings with minority businesses as required by federal officials.
It presents a concrete effort by the state to find ways to assist minority contractors with credit and bonding issues, something that often keeps them from bidding on projects.
And it’s the reason why many Democrats tempered their disappointment Thursday in losing a part of the deal, as Republicans killed an additional proposal to allow counties to increase their MARTA tax rate just days after Senate Democrats fought to get it passed.
Both chambers then approved what one GOP lawmaker called a "stripped" House Bill 213, essentially changing it back to its original version and sending it to Gov. Nathan Deal's desk.
“Going through the legislative process, you know some things are not going to make it,” said Senate Minority Leader Steve Henson, D-Tucker. “Overall, I think people tried to operate in a good faith way. Certainly you’ve got 236 members of the Legislature and various people on the governor’s staff and there may always be a misstep here and there. But we choose to try to be optimistic and willing to still work with people in good faith.”
HB 213 is still a victory for MARTA, which for decades has sought relief from the requirement that it spend 50 percent of its revenue on capital projects and 50 percent on maintenance. But Tuesday night it appeared it would be so much more.
Then, Senate Democrats successfully amended the bill to allow Clayton, DeKalb and Fulton counties to ask voters to increase the MARTA sales tax from 1 percent to 1.5 percent. It was seen as a key piece of a deal that led Democrats to support House Bill 170, the massive transportation funding bill now on Deal's desk.
But all that changed Thursday when HB 213 returned to the House.
"A change of this magnitude to existing law should be reviewed in the interim and be reviewed within the context of House Bill 170 and within context of potential expansion of transit infrastructure and assure there's appropriate oversight," Speaker Pro Tem Jan Jones, R-Milton, said in proposing the amendment.
Both House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams, D-Atlanta, and Rep. Calvin Smyre, D-Columbus, the most senior member of the House, spoke in favor of the amendment.
“The language that will be voted upon in the amendment and the underlying bill will provide MARTA the relief they’ve sought for several years, allow us the opportunity to continue the expansion conversations we all agree we need to have,” Abrams said.
Senate Democrats had negotiated the deal for the sales tax as part of their negotiations over the big transportation bill, which they helped pass late Tuesday night. Senate Democrats had the negotiating power: Their caucus voted against an earlier version of that big bill, but their votes were needed to pass a later version agreed to by House and Senate negotiators.
The minority-contractor issue was a big deal: Democrats have complained that less than 3 percent of GDOT contracts go to African-American firms. That’s a sore point for a party with heavy black support that was now being asked to back legislation to raise up to $1 billion a year, mostly for road projects.
On the MARTA bill, they thought they had a firm deal until Thursday morning, when it became clear things had begun to unravel.
The sales tax came into play as an additional way to win financial backing for transit improvements in metro Atlanta. MARTA is projected to receive about $400 million in the coming fiscal year from the existing 1 percent sales tax in MARTA’s jurisdictions — so passage of an additional half percent would have brought in an additional $200 million more a year in sales tax receipts.
That’s far more than MARTA stands to gain from a one-time allocation of $75 million worth of bonding that was included in the coming year’s budget, for which 128 transit providers across the state will have to compete.
Abrams said the bill came back from the Senate with a technical mistake and, had the House fixed it and sent it back to the Senate it was unlikely to pass. It barely passed Tuesday.
The 50-50 portion, she said, is a “good first step.” If they had tried to keep the 1.5 percent portion in, she said, “we would have lost everything.”
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