I haven't seen too much response yet on the governor's plan. I am worried that he wants to put the vote off until 2012. That means more valuable time lost.
Without fanfare, without even a mention, the tea party movement scored its first major victory in Georgia last week.
And as a result, you may be sitting in traffic just a little bit longer.
For three years, metro Atlanta’s business community has been tugging, shoving, and prodding the ruling Republican elements of the state Capitol to put more money into roads and rail.
Sonny Perdue, in the last 12 months of his tenure as governor, finally hopped aboard the bandwagon last Thursday. He declared that the state’s transit bureaucracy had finally improved enough to be trusted with more money.
The governor announced $300 million in bonded spending for road and rail projects selected by the Legislature. More importantly, he endorsed a statewide referendum that would allow regions of the state to levy a 1-cent sales tax on themselves for road and rail projects.
Georgia’s economic health requires it, Perdue said.
But the timetable has been changed. During the several clashes over the issue within the Legislature, the one consistent area of agreement – among GOP lawmakers and business interests – was the need for a vote this November.
Perdue and Republican lawmakers now want the issue on a 2012 ballot – well after the governor leaves office. Perdue said the two-year delay was necessary to allow voters time to regain a sense of economic security, and to permit transportation authorities to draw up the lists of projects for voter inspection.
Yet the economy was already in the tank last year, when 2010 was an acceptable date. And as far as transportation is concerned, the state has compiled entire libraries of undone to-do lists that stretch back decades.
The only ingredient that has changed is the rise of anti-tax activists aggravated by the election of Barack Obama and his push for health care reform. They threaten to split the GOP, nationally and in Georgia.
Last April’s tea party at the state Capitol was among the largest in the country. Ever since, Republican lawmakers have been rethinking a 2010 vote on a transportation sales tax, fearful of the impact it could have in the July primaries as well as the November general election.
Mark Rountree is a GOP strategist whose has long specialized in state legislative races. His firm, Landmark Communications, will be involved in 40 or so Republican primary contests.
“If you do the math, there are thousands of people showing up at tea party rallies. When was the last time we had thousands of people show up for a transportation rally?” Rountree asked. “What’s at hand immediately is the tax issue. And people are worried about that. Obama is making it difficult for people to do tax issues all over the country.”
Especially in the race for governor, the dilemma is clear: Do nothing, and Democrats accuse you of incompetence. Put a sales tax referendum on the November ballot, and risk a serious rebellion in your own party.
“Clearly you would split the business community from the libertarian community. The party has to hold both of them together to win,” Rountree said.
The 2012 referendum date is only one part of the evasive maneuver that Republicans are constructing. For three years, it has been assumed that a ballot initiative would come in the form of a proposed amendment to the state constitution – which requires a two-thirds vote by both chambers of the Legislature.
Perdue and Republican lawmakers think they have landed on a constitutional clause that would allow the vote to be called with a simple majority vote by the House and Senate, and the signature of the governor.
“There is a long-standing provision in the Constitution that allows the Legislature to create tax districts,” said Sharon Gay, a governmental affairs specialist with McKenna, Long & Aldridge law firm, who was among the first to begin pushing the idea last year.
Simple majority votes in the Legislature would put pressure on Democrats to carry the burden. Most Republicans could then vote against the measure.
While conducted statewide, the 2012 referendum would divide Georgia into a dozen separate districts. Areas that voted against a sales tax would not be subjected to it. Metro Atlanta might be the only region to pass it.
Which leads us to what may be the greatest irony our “transportation saga,” as Perdue called it. Tea party activism, responding to a new resident of the White House, has forced Republicans to back away from an immediate solution to Georgia’s traffic problems.
The vote is now likely to be rescheduled for November, two years hence. Georgia Republicans could well be counting on a second surge of African-American voters, turning out in support of an Obama re-election bid, to help approve a transportation tax in metro Atlanta.
And solve a very large, and very Republican problem.
Given Gov. Sonny Perdue’s double-barreled transportation proposal announced Thursday, one might have expected traffic-troubled Atlantans to have honked their horns in celebration of progress on Georgia’s stubborn transportation problems.
Perdue’s plan for both state bond issuances and regional taxing districts is a potential start forward in finding some of the money needed to begin solving the challenges that a Georgia Department of Transportation report says have “clearly eroded the state’s transportation performance on measures that drive economic competitiveness.” The governor’s concept — and it’s not an entirely new one — can only become reality if the General Assembly finally acts.
Somehow, some way, the third time must be the charm on transportation for Georgia and its gridlocked capital. The need to get rolling toward mobility solutions is too important for the Legislature to let inaction rule for yet another year. If that occurs, the real “super-speeders” won’t be benefiting Georgia coffers; they’ll be the other states that are making long-term transportation investments to hasten their post-recession economic growth. For Georgia’s sake, we can’t hand them that opportunity.
Gold Dome observers were pretty optimistic at the start of the session Monday that the House, Senate and Gov. Perdue would reach agreement on a workable solution this year.
By Wednesday, though, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Jim Galloway was reporting online that the proposal to push for a statewide transportation sales tax was going nowhere this year.
Then Perdue’s idea came along. It should be a better sell to legislators who are understandably leery of being labeled tax-lovers during a red state’s election year. If all politics is truly local, then lawmakers should find a way this year to let the people decide whether fixing transportation is worth an extra penny tacked onto a dollar in purchases. Yes, it’s a new tax that voters must sign off on, but the cost of inaction is already whacking our wallets just as hard, if not harder. Motorists pay the inaction tax in wasted petrol each time their cars idle on Atlanta’s clogged highways and meandering streets that are too few and far apart to move traffic efficiently.
The three-year push for transportation funding got big-time backing Thursday, as Gov. Sonny Perdue announced his support for a referendum on a regional sales tax, and said he would also ask the Legislature to approve $300 million in borrowing for transportation projects statewide.He said he hoped future governors and Legislatures would continue to pass $300 million per year in bond funding for transportation projects, for a total of $3 billion over 10 years. The money would be paid back by general state funds, not be taken out of the transportation gas-tax budget.
Georgia's ailing transportation system could finally see some additional cash as Gov. Sonny Perdue on Thursday said he would propose $300 million in borrowing for road projects next year.The governor also said he wants Georgians to vote in 2012 on whether they want to boost the sales tax by one-cent to fund transportation projects.Under Perdue's plan — which must be approved by the state Legislature — the whole state would vote on the sales tax hike. But the votes would tallied, and the money spent, in individual regions. Some regions could approve the tax increase and would then have money to spend on local projects. Others could reject the increase and would not see any additional funding.
Georgia motorists could see a boost in transportation funding soon with Gov. Sonny Perdue's announcement Thursday that he supports adding $300 million a year over the next decade and letting voters decide by regions if they want a sales tax to supply even more money.Perdue's announcement during a press conference in his office represents his first public effort to settle a two-year dispute between the House and Senate on whether to ask votes to raise the sales tax for transportation statewide or in individual counties.
Gov. Sonny Perdue said Thursday he will recommend putting $300 million in general obligation bonds in the 2011 budget for a statewide transportation plan and will push regional planning districts with local taxing authority to fund road projects.If legislators approve Gov. Perdue's plan, 12 regional planning districts created by legislation will vote in 2012 on a 1 percent sales tax for transportation needs.
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