From the Marietta Daily Journal
by Katy Ruth Camp
Cobb County citizens may pay more for transportation projects after 2012, like it or not.
That’s because under a provision in the Regional Transportation Tax bill – also known as House Bill 277 – that was signed into law last year, counties will be forced to pay a larger share of state road projects if the penny-on-the-dollar sales tax is rejected either at the roundtable level or by a majority of voters at the ballot box.
HB 277 created regional taxing districts to fund transportation, and Cobb is part of the 10-county metro-Atlanta region. A 21-member “Regional Roundtable” is to draft a list of projects to be financed by a special purpose local option sales tax that, if voters agree, would be collected region-wide for 10 years.
The goal is for the roundtable members – Cobb’s representatives on it are county Chairman Tim Lee and Kennesaw Mayor Mark Matthews – to approve a project list that will then go to a public referendum in August 2012.
An overall majority of voters in the region would then decide whether to pay the sales tax. So even if voters in a particular county reject the tax, if their neighboring counties all approve it, then everybody in the region pays it.
The Atlanta Regional Commission estimates the tax would generate $7 billion to $8 billion over the 10-year span.
But in what appears to be a no-win situation for anti-tax activists, counties will have to pay a greater share of state “local maintenance and improvement” road grants if the roundtable can’t agree on a project list, or if the TSPLOST is rejected at the ballot box.
If the roundtable fails to agree on a project list and does not put the TSPLOST to a public vote at all, counties will have to pay 50 percent of the cost of state road projects. They now pay 10 percent, with the state kicking in the balance.
And if voters reject the special sales tax in 2012, counties will have to kick in 30 percent toward state road projects.
Should voters approve the tax, local matches will stay at 10 percent.
Georgia DOT Planning Director Todd Long, who is overseeing operations of HB 277, downplayed the impact of the added costs, saying that Cobb “only received about $3.7 million in fiscal 2011” and so at most, even a 50 percent match would cost the county and its cities about $1.8 million.
But Cobb DOT Director Faye DiMassimo said that could be significant for the county.
Cobb County, minus its six cities, is expected to receive around $2.9 million, DiMassimo said.
“It could have a huge impact,” DiMassimo said. “But the significance will depend on a lot of factors coming up. If voters don’t approve Cobb’s SPLOST in March, and revenues for the county’s budget don’t come back up, it would be very significant. If both of those things do happen, then the impact wouldn’t be as much. But every dollar is important to us, and certainly if we have the choice of paying $290,000 and $1.5 million, I would rather stay at the 10 percent.”
State Rep. Earl Ehrhart (R-Powder Springs) said the bill’s forced increase on counties is a “serious hammer.”
“It seems like the same old stereotype – we hold the financial strings to be able to push you into doing something you may not want to do. And how do you campaign on a threat? People don’t react well to that. I read the bill and I knew it was in there, but we were also in a tough spot, because we have to have transportation relief and this was the only alternative we were given.”
Unfortunately, he said, he doesn’t see the law being revised in the General Assembly session, which begins tomorrow.
“It overwhelmingly passed and it was pushed so hard as it was. So what we have is probably what’s going to stay,” he said. “But the more I find out about this bill, the more that could really become scary for us.”
Ehrhart said his main problem is that the focus of the tax has shifted into rail options – including bringing MARTA to Cobb – rather than interstate expansion, which he said was the original thrust of the bill. Ehrhart served on the legislature’s Metro Atlanta Rapid Transit Oversight Committee from 2007 to 2009 and said bringing MARTA to Cobb would be a “disaster.”
“If that came to Cobb – which they’ve been pushing for for years and years – we would end up being on the hook and become a huge donor for their shortcomings,” Ehrhart said.
There are good parts of the bill, he said, such as getting people to plan regionally and really finding good solutions to traffic issues, “because metro Atlanta is a nightmare during rush hour and something has to be done. So I hope those initiatives prevail. But if I had to do it over again, I would have pushed to make the bill better, like making sure there was an opt-out provision in case a county ends up with a list of projects nobody in the county wants.”
This article originally ran in the MDJ online on January 9, 2011. To visit the Marietta Daily Journal online, click here.
