Sunday, January 17, 2010

Tea parties and the fight over roads and rail

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.

Posted via email from Jim Nichols for GA State House

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