Metro Atlanta road builders have a lot riding on Tuesday’s transportation tax vote and have launched an all-out push to get it passed.
If it passes, leaders in the hard-hit industry estimate work that springs from the 157-project referendum will eclipse work done for the 1996 Olympics. If it fails, one of the area’s largest road builders already has warned employees of layoffs.
The head of Marietta-based C.W. Matthews Contracting, which already has lost 700 jobs in the last three years, recently warned its 1,300 workers in an in-house newsletter “to imagine how much tougher times will become if this referendum does not pass.”
“If this fails, there could be additional layoffs, more so than we’ve seen in the last several years,” President and Chief Executive Bill Hammack told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution last week. “From a company perspective, it’s really a major milestone as to what size the company will be in the future and how many jobs we will be able to provide for Georgians.”
Opponents of the transportation tax say the industry is strong-arming workers. Neill Herring of the Sierra Club called industry talk of layoffs and scrapped projects “calculated threats.”
Companies say they are only describing reality.
“There isn’t anything underhanded going on,” said David Moellering, executive director of the 300-member Georgia Highway Contractors Association, which has donated $250,000 to the pro-referendum cause.
No one disputes that road builders such as C.W. Matthews — which has donated $300,000 to the pro-referendum cause, according to Hammack — will be among the biggest beneficiaries if the referendum passes, at least in terms of direct business impact.
“They’ll get a lot more directly of the $6.14 billion of [referendum] money. That’s worth a $300,000 lottery ticket,” Herring said.
The recession and cuts in federal roads funding have hurt the road-building industry and other fields that rely heavily on transportation-related projects, economists say.
The heavy highway construction industry in Georgia has had 40 percent unemployment since 2007, Moellering noted.
“We’ve lost easily thousands of jobs during that time,” he said.
Data from the Georgia Department of Labor shows employment in the road-building sector has fallen to 19,900 jobs as of June, down from 34, 700 jobs in June 2007.
The money road builders would reap from the referendum projects would be huge compared to the money they’ve poured into the campaign, says Jeff Humphreys, director of economic forecasting at the University of Georgia.
“No other industry will benefit more from the direct spending of these tax dollars,” Humphrey said.
But convincing voters could be a hard sell, says Rajeev Dhawan, director of economic forecasting at Georgia State University.
“That’s the big trouble,” Dhawan said. “Are people in the mood to get taxed in this iffy growth environment to pay for projects that can or may improve growth in the future? There’s a question mark. It’s not a guarantee.”
“Even in good times, people have a tough time taxing themselves,” Dhawan said. “This is not a boom time.”
Meanwhile, opponents say the business community’s overall push is being construed by some workers as undue pressure.
Claire Bartlett of the Transportation Leadership Coalition, which is fighting the referendum, said the group has received about two dozen complaints from employees in different industries who feel pressured to vote for the measure but are too afraid of losing their jobs to speak up.
Complaints range from workers saying they’re getting one-sided information — usually pro — to being bombarded by emails and campaign literature to being told outright to vote for the referendum.
The head of the state AFL-CIO, which has 120,000 active members and hasn’t taken a formal position on the referendum, said he hasn’t heard of any undue pressure on workers.
“From the labor side, we’re all excited for the opportunity of jobs but there are some concerns,” state AFL-CIO President Charlie Flemming said. “Whether they’ll be good union jobs and jobs for Georgians. A lot of times, we’ve seen this state and city give the jobs to out-of-state contractors. It happens a lot. There should have been some safeguards to ensure there would be local and Georgia contractors.”
C.W. Matthews launched a voter registration drive two months ago and signed up a couple hundred people.
Birmingham-based Vulcan Materials Co., which has 626 Georgia workers and makes crushed-stone material and ready-mix concrete at 33 Georgia facilities, sports pro-TSPLOST stickers on its company vehicles. It has donated $105,000 to pro-referendum efforts. Yancey Bros, a major Caterpillar distributor in Austell, has a website devoted solely to TSPLOST and donated $250,000. Unboundary, a Midtown strategy and design firm, has hired a bus to take employees to a central voting place on election day.
“Everybody’s sort of holding their breath,” said John Heath, president of Heath & Lineback, a Marietta engineering design firm that works for the Georgia Department of Transportation and other clients. Heath said the 40-person company is waiting to decide if it will have to rely even more out-of-state work if the referendum fails.
“It’s just a question of waiting to see what happens July 31,” Heath said.
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