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Atlanta Forward/ Another View: 'Nightmarish' transportation tax plan will failBy The Rome News-Tribune


8:06 p.m. Friday, April 30, 2010

The best that can be said about the state’s new transportation tax proposal, already approved by a General Assembly that vowed no new taxes, is that it is better than doing nothing. Were it not, of course, that it attempts to do something worse in the process.

One supposes the excuse for ignoring the no-tax rhetoric is that the legislators won’t have done it. As it requires approval of the voters — at gunpoint, if one reads the fine print — the citizens will have done this to themselves. The politicians can plead innocence, of a sort.

The long and complicated 29-page measure was adopted by legislators that for the most part had not read the last-minute arrival and certainly not thought it through. Apparently the arm-twisting of Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed, a former senator and Democrat, had much to do with not more of a fight being put up about it.

That’s fitting, in that the Atlanta metro is where traffic is the No. 1 issue and the money needs the greatest. This oddball “regional” sales tax, whereby the state is carved into 12 districts, each of which must separately approve their own tax and projects in 2012, certainly should start getting something done on that turf. It is estimated that in the core 10-county “Atlanta” district crammed with people, the added penny would bring in perhaps $750 million a year.

Given the way Atlantans gripe about their gridlock, there should be no difficulty getting this passed there. As for Atlantans finally paying for their own road projects all by themselves, instead of asking the other half of the state’s residents to chip in: Hurrah! About time!

However, one might add, much of the reason it has come to this is that the Department of Transportation can’t afford to do all the work Atlanta needs any longer because it is flat busted from past commitments and continuing bond payments.

After that Atlanta bailout is cheered, the rest of this mishmash of disjointed and conflicting ideas — kind of reminds us of a state version of health care reform actually — is nightmarish.

It is also typical of what governments wind up doing when trying to plaster over past bad policies instead of just going back to the root cause and fixing it.

Simply put, Georgia can’t afford the road work it needs because of its absurdly low 7.5 cent-per-gallon motor fuel tax, which must be given to the DOT, paired with something not many other states do: Collect sales tax on every pump dollar spent, which doesn’t necessarily go to the DOT depending on what the politicians want.

How much simpler it would be to simply triple the motor fuel tax and let the DOT, which actually knows something about both highways and state needs, continue its past good works instead of handing this all over to politicians to carve up on a regional basis. Worse, now local politicians (county and city) also get a hand in this, or think they do but actually don’t, as the governor’s office will hold veto powers as to what projects actually get on the ballot.

As for switching from a user tax — motorists pay for the roads — to a sales tax on everything for building highways and bridges, that flies like a lead balloon. An extra penny of every dollar spent on underwear and computer gadgets — and groceries! — will go for asphalt even though a pretty good case can be made that schools and public safety could use such an infusion a lot more.

Much of the rest of this new scheme can be treated like most of the state’s bad legislative mistakes: Just grin and bear it and wait for it to fall apart of its own accord. As the saying goes, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

And so, it seems, are state highways.