Upcoming meetings of the Joint Study Committee on Critical Transportation Infrastructure Funding. (Times are still to be determined).
September 2: Tifton
September 3: Macon
September 30: Augusta
October 1: Savannah
October 28: Rome
October 29: Blue Ridge
For more information or to watch a live broadcast of the meeting, visit www.house.ga.gov/Committees/en-US/JointCriticalTransInfraFunding.aspx
COLUMBUS — The city of Columbus will soon expand its popular RiverWalk along the Chattahoochee, tunnel under a rail line that has cut off part of the town for years, and add more hours for bus service.
Those improvements arise from the regional 1-cent sales tax voters approved in 2012 — the same referendum that went down in flames in the Atlanta region.
The penny taxis expected to raise nearly $300 million over 10 years in the 16-county River Valley region. The money will be used to complete eight projects in the city alone — projects that otherwise wouldn’t have been possible for decades, city leaders say.
As Georgia lawmakers wrangle with a $74 billion gap for transportation funding statewide over the next 20 years, they are looking to the success of the transportation sales tax in the state’s second-largest city as one possible solution.
State Transportation Board member Sam Wellborn, whose district includes Columbus, said he’s a tax-averse Republican. But he nonetheless recommended a statewide gas tax hike and applauded the regional transportation sales tax before a group of state legislators and business leaders last week.
“Columbus gets about $200,000 a month in what I call free money that we never had before,” Wellborn told them. “I refer to it as manna from heaven.”
The Joint Study Committee on Critical Transportation Infrastructure Funding is trying to find a long-term solution for Georgia’s chronically underfunded transportation system. They visited Columbus Monday as their second stop on an eight-city listening tour.
The squeeze, the juice
Members of the committee also questioned local officials on how the sales tax, known as the Transportation Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax or TSPLOST, is working.
The River Valley area was one of three regions in the state that passed the TSPLOST. The referendum failed in nine other regions.
Mayor Teresa Tomlinson said TSPLOST was hotly debated in Columbus, in part because much of the money raised within the city will be used elsewhere in the 16-county area.
“But in the end, the voters wanted the investment now and they are seeing that pay off,” Tomlinson said. “It may not be an ideal system in every voter’s mind, but the juice is worth the squeeze.”
The tax has only been collected since Jan. 1, 2013. Yet city officials said they are already seeing benefits. They have used some of the tax money to repair bridges and have started preliminary work on several projects on the city’s to-do list.
Reviving the TSPLOST in other regions is still a possibility that would require no action from the committee, according to its co-chair Rep. Jay Roberts, R-Ocilla, because the enabling legislation is still on the books.
Roberts said it is “one tool in the tool chest.” The committee could also consider legislation to enable two or more counties — rather than the large multi-county regions created under the TSPLOST law — to band together to pass a transportation sales tax for selected projects. Or legislators could pass a law enabling counties to impose a transportation sales tax of less than one cent on the dollar (the law currently provides for a full penny only, not a fraction of a cent).
Roberts still hopes to find a reliable statewide revenue generator. That could involve a gasoline sales tax increase; some sort of user fee for drivers that includes fees on alternative vehicles; or recapturing 1 percent of motor fuel tax money that currently goes into the general fund (about $182 million a year). He believes the state Department of Transportation needs between $750 million and $1 billion more a year for Georgia to grow and stay competitive.
‘I say watch them grow’
The 2012 TSPLOST failed in nine of 12 regions of the state despite strong backing from the business community and most of the state’s leading politicians. The tax would have raised about $7.2 billion for metro Atlanta’s transportation needs.
Opponents of the plan — the odd bedfellows of the NAACP, Sierra Club and Tea Party — criticized the makeup of the counties in each region, the project list and the process by which the projects were chosen.
Debbie Dooley, who led part of the opposition to the T-SPLOST as national coordinator of the Tea Party Patriots, said the group would oppose TSPLOST again if it involved the same regional makeup. But she would be in favor of allowing a few counties to join together to pass a transportation tax for local priorities.
“We believe it should be up to the counties to decide who they want to partner with for their transportation projects and be allowed to levy taxes, even a fourth of a percent of a tax,” Dooley said.
Gov. Nathan Deal has said the three regions that passed the TSPLOST — the Augusta area, Columbus and the Dublin, Jesup and Vidalia area in east central Georgia — made the smart choice.
The River Valley district has budgeted $381 million for 23 projects based on the sales tax revenue. The Augusta area has budgeted $539 million for 84 projects. The Dublin/Jesup/Vidalia region has budgeted $256 million for 764 projects.
“I say watch them grow, ” Deal said in 2012.
His November opponent, Jason Carter, reiterated his interest in reviving the transportation sales tax after a speech to Gwinnett County business leaders on Tuesday.
“We have to revisit a TSPLOST of some kind, and we have to revisit it in a way that would change the political environment,” Carter said. “Folks just don’t trust the political environment.”
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