Let’s balance the budget by raising taxes on working people!
Here’s another story to remind us how far the political/media culture of Georgia has fallen. In Wednesday’s AJC, political columnist Jim Galloway lionizes Republican state Rep. Chuck Sims for bucking his party’s anti-tax fundamentalism.
The most interesting point made by Galloway is how much rural areas rely on government jobs. UGA sociologist Doug Bachtel told him in a fifth of the jobs in Coffee County, where Sims lives, are in the public sector. And the portion is higher in other rural counties. In other words, for all their pull-yourself-by-the-bootstraps, cut-the-pork talk, rural Georgia politicians — and their constituents — feed at the trough more than the typical Atlantan.
So when the going gets tough, Sims — the “conservative” — turns out to be all for big government: He doesn’t want to see all those jobs cut to make up for the state’s $1-billion-plus budget shortfall. What’s his solution? Eliminate the sales tax on groceries! Read more
SaportaReport: Time for Chambers to move on
Maria Saporta of SaportaReport speaks with authority when she says that Rep. Jill Chambers (R-Dunwoody), who chairs the Georgia legislature’s MARTA Oversight Committee (MARTOC), and the rest of the naysayers need to move on now that the state has given MARTA a clean fiscal bill of health.
Below is a short excerpt, but please read the full column here.
From SaportaReport:
“This audit review should be enough to silence Chambers once and for all. She has made MARTA and the state jump through time-consuming hoops on her witch hunt for evil and wrongdoing.
“And now it’s time for her to stop.”
(end)
I will reiterate that I don’t think everything MARTA does is great. For example, I still want to know why there isn’t a bus that goes all the way up Boulevard and Monroe!
But using the transit service as one’s own punching bag is wrong. What are we doing to do, stop the trains, pull up the tracks, bulldoze the stations?
I don’t think so, so let’s work on building on the transit system we have.
More on LaHood’s visit
Filed under: ARTS & EVENTS, POLITICS, SMART GROWTH
U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood visited Atlanta today for two reasons.
First, he spoke at the Atlanta Regional Commission’s Fifty Forward Transportation Forum. Secondly, he gave MARTA $10.8 million to install solar panels at a bus maintenance depot.
But in the process of doing these two things, LaHood inadvertently gave a forum to residents’ frustration with area transit and the transportation officials who decide if we have transit and where.
As I mentioned in my previous posts, LaHood fielded questions from the audience at the ARC event, including one from a gentleman who hopes someone in Washington can intervene on our behalf with the Georgia Legislature, to convince the folks under the Gold Dome that we need more money for transit.
I mean, isn’t that a bit like you making a complaint about the teacher when the principal happens to stick his/her head in your classroom?
One could certainly argue that if Georgia paid some attention to transit, no one would need to tattle to the DOT secretary!
Later when someone asked when the “high-speed rail” conversation would be coming to Atlanta, LaHood responded, “It’ll come to Atlanta if Georgia gets its act together.”
It’ll come to Atlanta if Georgia gets its act together.
Read more
DOT Sec’y Ray LaHood answers some questions
U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood was in Atlanta this morning for a few reasons, including bringing $10.8 million to MARTA so it can install solar panels at its Laredo Bus Maintenance Facility in Decatur.
More about that later, because as often is the case, the ancillary events can be newsier than the main event.
LaHood fielded questions from the audience, including one from Kevin Hughley, who’s with a Brookhaven-Chamblee neighborhood association.
Hughley wanted to point out that MARTA is one of the few transit systems in the U.S. that does not receive state funding.
And further Hughley wanted to know if Sec. LaHood and Sen. Johnny Isakson could possibly influence the Georgia legislature to either provide more funding to MARTA, or remove the restriction that strictly splits the sales tax funds into two camps — operational and capital expenses.
And LaHood, who had been a legislator, sidestepped the question ever so gently by saying he was not in the habit of making laws in Georgia, and that he would leave that to Gov. Sonny Perdue.
But he could allow that it’s “counterproductive” to have funds on hand to BUY buses but no funds on hand to PAY the bus drivers.
Alright, we’re getting somewhere.
In a state as transit-allergic as Georgia is, that’s actually a step forward!
Except, he really just bounced it back to Georgia officials, didn’t he? And those officials have proven time and time again that they are not interested in transit.
So did we really get anywhere? I mean, we got solar panels. But we still haven’t fixed the finance mechanism for MARTA, or indeed the mindset that MARTA and other transit is for other people.
I’ll have more to report later on LaHood’s visit.
“MARTA doesn’t go anywhere”
When I returned from vacation on Monday, one of the first things I read was a Creative Loafing story that said this was the week MARTA would enact the service cuts it had approved.
Thinking about the routes that would be cut, and the routes that would not be added, I was reminded of something you hear all the time: MARTA doesn’t go anywhere.
Someone said it a month ago when I posted coverage of the agency’s public meetings, which were held to discuss the service cuts.
Whenever I hear that remark, I always think of the small city in eastern Pennsylvania that I left last year to move back to Atlanta: Allentown, Pa. You probably know it from the Billy Joel song.
It’s a city whose heyday is behind it. Many people have fled the city for the prosperous suburbs, and the city’s stately rowhomes, which would sell for $500,000 or more if you moved them to Brooklyn, are largely the province of lower-income families.
And you know what some people say? Some people say Allentown sucks.
As if Allentown were a person who just decided one day that he didn’t give a crap anymore.
As if Allentown were some mean, old guy who did whatever he could to thwart prosperity, activity, flourishing businesses and hip watering holes — in short, an enemy to urban happiness.
I always thought it was gutless that people said Allentown sucked because really, the truth is, we the city’s residents sucked.
Read more
Trauma care crashes again
From GONSO’s Jason Kiely:
The other day my fourth-grader glanced up from one of her trivia books to announce that a leech – a blood-sucking leech – has 32 brains. In a moment that revealed how low my personal standards have sunk, I replied, “Hmmm … Now I don’t feel so bad.”
She got it immediately, as witnessed by her eye-rolling and reluctance to return my high-five. But I thought I made a valid point: Compare what a leech has accomplished with 32 brains versus what I have done with just one. I feel better about myself already.
It’s a shame that Georgia’s elected legislative body, which has 236 brains, can’t feel better about some of its accomplishments.
Take our still non-existent statewide trauma care network. Year after year, our elected officials, who talk a good game about supporting health care and emergency medicine and saving lives, simply have not put all those brains together to figure out a way to permanently fund a trauma system.
This year was no different. In fact, it turned out worse than last year, when the legislators ponied up almost $59 million to keep a handful of trauma centers open. In the closing week of the 2009 session, they squeaked through the Super Speeder law, which will provide about $23 million for the Georgia Trauma Trust Fund in 2010. Unfortunately, running an organized network of trauma specialists and facilities needs about 100 million bucks a year.
Bottom line: We’re going backward, in more ways than one.
At this rate, Georgia will not have a statewide trauma system. Ever. Put another way, let’s just say that if you live or travel south of Macon or west of Savannah, where trauma centers are few and far between, make sure your affairs are in order. More than 5,000 Georgians die of traumatic injury every year. Advocates of a trauma system claim it would save about 700 lives a year, even with moderate success.
In the meantime, people are dying in the streets. And worse, they are dying in emergency rooms, where Georgians often erroneously believe that all trauma care is equal and you will get the maximum care possible. Not so. A fully equipped and staffed state-designated trauma center – of which Georgia has 15 and needs about 30 – is far more likely to save your life than a general ER, which number 137 at acute care hospitals throughout the state. Fewer than a third of trauma victims are treated at a trauma center in Georgia.
Read the rest of this story at GONSO.
Georgia biz leaders upset with state lawmakers
From GONSO’s Jeanne Bonnor:
Disappointment
It’s a word business leaders typically avoid, largely because its use acknowledges that something did not go right.
But in near universal consensus, business leaders across Georgia continue to express bewilderment and, yes, disappointment that state legislators were unable to pass a law that would increase funding for transportation before the legislative session ended April 3.
While transportation was the top priority for business leaders, many also say the legislature failed to act on a host of other pressing issues during this year’s 40-day General Assembly session.
“I guess disappointment seems to be the word that’s used the most and I think it’s the most appropriate one,” said Doug Hertz, president of United Distributors in Smyrna and a key figure in the Get Georgia Moving coalition, which aims to reduce congestion around the state.
Demming Bass, with the Gwinnett Chamber of Commerce, echoed his statement.
“I don’t know how you can continue to disappoint people,” Bass said of the Assembly’s failure to approve a new funding mechanism for transportation. “It was all politics.”
Business leaders, many of whom took the unusual step of supporting a sales tax to fund improvements to roads, bridges and transit, minced no words when they announced in January that transportation was their No. 1 priority for this year’s legislative session. Many vowed comprehensive transportation reform would not fail again, as it had in 2008 when a bill died on the floor of the Senate a little before midnight on the last day of the legislative session.
Instead, the two houses of the General Assembly were unable to reach a compromise on two competing transportation bills, and now, even 10 days after the session ended, the business community is not mincing words about how they feel about this year’s legislative gridlock. And it’s not all about transportation.
“I think everyone was shocked by what an unproductive session it was,” said Renay Blumenthal, the senior vice president of public policy at the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce.
In an op-ed in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution last week, John Rice, vice chairman of GE, whose Energy unit is based in Cobb County, expressed frustration that a “well-written, badly needed bill” aimed at reforming school board governance got caught up in “horse-trading politics at its worst. … How long will we let bad politics and self-serving politicians get in the way of good policies?”
What’s driving much of the business community’s rancor is a core belief that economic development is, as Hertz said, the “lifeblood” for increasing state revenue for services, creating jobs and building more dynamic communities.
To ensure continued economic growth, business leaders say the state needs to reduce congestion around Georgia, a move that would require a new source of revenue.
The need to devote more money to solve transportation woes is so acute that leaders from Walton, Barrow and other counties far outside of central Atlanta said they would support more funding for MARTA, the city’s mass transit system, according to Sam Olens, chairman of the Atlanta Regional Commission. After the Legislature declined to provide more funding to MARTA, the ARC offered money to help the transit system close a funding gap created by falling sales tax revenue.
“The single biggest impediment to economic development is transportation,” said Hertz, whose distribution company employs 1,200 people at sites in Atlanta, Savannah, Albany and other cities in Georgia.
Other issues, including a bill to outlaw embryonic stem cell research, also provoked ire in the business community, for much the same reason: prohibiting such work would deter companies from moving to Georgia. Indeed, the bill to limit scientific inquiry in the state, which did not move beyond the Senate, was seen in the business community as an embarrassment coming, as it did, two months before Atlanta will play host to an international biotech conference where state officials hope to recruit companies to Georgia.
“They didn’t have to pass that,” said Bass of the Gwinnett Chamber.
It’s unclear what the business community’s next step will be; most of the issues will have to wait for the next legislative session, which begins in January. Hertz said Get Georgia Moving may have made a mistake by not endorsing one plan over the other, and he thinks that next year the key to winning the bill’s passage may be support for a plan that authorizes regional taxes for regional projects, rather than a statewide tax.
In the meantime, some economic leaders already have plans to engage in some much-needed “damage control.”
“We are going to have to explain it to prospects,” said Blumenthal, with the Metro Atlanta Chamber. “A lot of prospects know we have traffic, and many cities have traffic. The difference is in Atlanta we are perceived as [not] doing anything about it. We don’t even have a plan.”
Jeanne Bonner is the senior business writer at Georgia Online News Service.
Stimulus equals sprawl
The wish list of stimulus-funded road and bridge projects that Gov. Sonny Perdue just submitted to the feds is at best a mixed bag when it comes to smart growth.
Check it out. Suburban counties — including Bartow ($22.5 million), Cherokee ($34.2 million), Gwinnett ($70.6 million) and Henry ($34.4) — would get the biggest share of the Phase I stimulus money, much of it going to sprawl-inducing projects like the widening of Eagle’s Landing Parkway in Henry County. In other words: welfare for developers.
Another big portion goes to politically influential parts of rural Georgia: A whopping $48 million would pay for a bypass around Gordon, Ga., in Wilkinson County. It’s part of the Fall Freeway, a “developmental highway” long-backed by Middle Georgia business interests and politicians. Developmental highways are, by definition, roads that are not needed, because their purpose is to spur sprawling development not to meet a transportation need; they’ve played havoc with the rural economy by diverting traffic from quaint downtowns to the outskirts, where land speculators long ago snapped up land to convert into Hardee’s, Wal-Marts, Speedways and other signature landmarks of smalltown sprawl.
What would go to the urban core of metro Atlanta? There are some pretty good pedestrian and bike enhancements ($750,000 for the very cool South River Trail in South DeKalb, for example, as well as a healthy $10 million to make downtown and Midtown more bike-and-foot friendly). And $17.5 million would be spent to repair the Mitchell Street bridge over the railroad gulch downtown.
All in all, however, this is barely better than the usual approach that the state has taken toward transportation: While some money goes to urban areas (where there’s already development and where the amount of density might allow people to drive less) , most of it’s being directed toward priming the pump for more sprawl or simply being thrown away on wasteful projects in rural no-growth areas.
But hey, that’s par for the course in a state where the Legislature just failed to take a simple, no-cost step to improve MARTA’s funding formula and failed for a second-straight year to approve a method of funding transportation improvements. Part of the reason the projects are so heavily weighted toward rural and suburban roads is because the state DOT doesn’t plan for nearly as extensively for transit, because there’s no ready funding mechanism to pay for commuter rail, streetcars and other projects that are needed to help people get around thye inner metro area.
The feds must still approve the project list.
Gold Dome terrorism
From John Sugg and GONSO:
A time trip I like to take about once a year spirits me back to Sept. 19-20, 1863, at a spot along the Tennessee-Georgia border where soldiers did what soldiers do. And that includes dying – 3,969 of them – and being maimed, blinded, shattered and a variety of other almost-but-not-quite-lethal events we describe as wounding – another 24,430.
It was called the Battle of Chickamauga, and if you go to the visitor center at the battlefield, you’ll be captured, as I am on my annual treks, by the photographs of common men in rough blue and gray uniforms. Many of the warriors were mere boys. This is not the fancy dress Civil War portrayed by Hollywood.
Among the larger photos is one of Col. Cyrus Sugg of the Confederate Army’s 50th Tennessee Infantry, who commanded Gregg’s Brigade after Brig. Gen. John Gregg was shot in the neck. One of the plaques scattered around the battlefield even notes where “Sugg took command,” a phrase that appeals to me.
Unfortunately, Col. Sugg rated a calculation in one or both of the numbers above. He was wounded at Chickamauga, and then taken to a field hospital in Marietta, where he expired.
Cyrus Sugg was a relative, and one of many Suggs who fought in the Civil War, so this is personal for me, folks. John H. Sugg, another Tennessean, was a Confederate soldier who ended up as a Yankee prisoner of war. Then there was Joseph Sugg, who kept dodging service in one or the other of the competing armies in Missouri until captured by federal troops who made him join their band. There was even a Rebel steamboat named the Tom Sugg, which was captured by Union soldiers in Arkansas’ Little Red River.
And, there are many African-Americans with the surname Sugg or Suggs, who likely are descended from slaves owned by my ancestors who originally settled in South Carolina. I’ve even attended a family reunion of one branch of the black Sugg family.
So, all things considered, I get this Southern heritage thing. But if I ever in some eternity get to ask Col. Cyrus Sugg a question, it would be: “Suh, jes’ what were y’all thinkin’?”
And if I ever get a chance to ask the Georgia General Assembly, en masse, a question on the subject of history, it would be: “Gentlemen and ladies, if I may use those terms in their loosest application, what the hell were you thinking when you failed to pass urgent transportation funding but did find time to pass a silly law that would have the effect of elevating the fables of Gone With the Wind to sanctified history?”
Which is exactly what a bill that passed by overwhelming majorities in both houses (AKA asylums) of the General Assembly did. The law denoting April as Confederate Heritage and History Month will undoubtedly by signed by Gov. Sonny “Unreconstructed” Perdue.
Let’s consider for a minute exactly what Georgia will be commemorating. A bunch of brigands, in order to preserve their own aristocratic way of life, connived and committed acts of mass terrorism to undermine and overthrow the U.S. government. If there had been a Pentagon in the 1860s, they surely would have bombed it.
They pursued their criminal conspiracy by convincing the most uneducated and unsophisticated citizens that the nation they thought they were part of really wasn’t their nation, but that a mythological fairyland of cavaliers and damsels was their homeland. The treasonous leaders of this conspiracy, especially the military el jefes led by a turncoat named Robert E. Lee, violated their sacred oaths, including those made to God. They claimed to be honorable, but where the hell is honor in betraying one’s country and vows?
The plebeians were largely duped into joining the 19th Century’s version of Al Qaeda, but the law allows little room for those who are determinedly stupid. Just as many uneducated Muslims are conned by “leaders” into committing vile and unforgivable acts of terrorism, so too were the farmboys of the South deceived into believing in a “cause” that never really existed.
That’s not quite the magnolia and Scarlett O’Hara version of Confederate history that the legislators envision. Without regard to the implications, their proposed law calls on all Georgians “to honor, observe, and celebrate the Confederate States of America, its history, those who served in its armed forces and government, and … the cause which they held so dear from its founding on February 4, 1861, in Montgomery, Alabama, until the Confederate ship CSS Shenandoah sailed into Liverpool Harbor and surrendered to British authorities on November 6, 1865.”
Indeed, it’s worth noting that they did not pass a law endorsing the rich, fruitful “Southern history,” only that part of the South’s past as it relates to a band of usurpers, terrorists and traitors. But, of course, defining it as “Confederate” history means it’s white history. Blacks, as we know from the Holy Gospel of Margaret Mitchell, had only supporting roles, mostly to be whipped or be treated with about the same paternalism as one shows to a good dog.
In part, this Confederate history law is a mean-spirited swipe at the idea of black history months. The legislation would equate the fantasy of a noble “lost cause” with the actual reality of the African-American narrative, a story that has been suppressed, often viciously so, by the South’s Jim Crow mentality. Put another way, to follow the Georgia legislature’s logic, the Aryan myth of Nazi Germany would be just as valid as the true history of the Holocaust.
Since this is Georgia, everything is about race. The Republican (AKA Neo-Confederate) dominated legislature didn’t pass transportation funding or other critical legislation because the rural good ol’ boys were playing racial politics, at least in part. They don’t want to be perceived as doing something that would help all of those blacks, interloping white Yankees, gays and other minorities in Atlanta.
The Confederate history law is more of the same mindset. Indeed, its Senate sponsor, John Bulloch, hails from that part of the state 200 miles south and 200 years in the past from metropolitan Atlanta. It’s a part of the state where more than a few folks have folded sheets and hoods in their attics. I’m sure Bulloch has no intention of teaching about the legacy of Confederate Lt. Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Ku Klux Klan, and the 5,000 or so incidents of terrorist lynchings by fans of Confederate history. That would be simply inconvenient and uncomfortable.
Racism has been a sure road to power for some Republicans. When former state Rep. Sue Burmeister (R-Augusta) introduced a requirement for photo voter registration in 2005, U.S. Justice Department lawyers reported that she said, “If there are fewer black voters because of this bill, it will only be because there is less opportunity for fraud,” and “when black voters … are not paid to vote they do not go to the polls.”
Sadly for the GOP, being beholden to the “Old South” is about as viable a long-term political strategy as Germans who still believe a fellow named Adolf had some great ideas for running the world. Aunt Pittypat bemoaned: “Oh, dear. Yankees in Georgia. How did they ever get in?” Bad news for Pittypat (and Georgia legislators):
A lot of Yankees and a lot of Southerners (like me) who won’t tolerate racial politics and who most definitely don’t believe in honoring terrorists, whether named Osama bin Laden or Jefferson Davis, now live in Georgia.
State Rep. Tyrone Brooks (D-Atlanta) chided his colleagues on the Confederate history month law – but his comments are equally applicable to much of what goes on at the Gold Dome. “These Southern states really still have not come back into the Union,” Brooks told the Los Angeles Times. “That is why it’s been so difficult over the years to get the states to recognize that flying the Confederate emblem on the flag, holding reenactments and pushing these calendar events as a matter of law is a reflection . . . of their Confederate mentality. … The Confederacy lost, and the majority of the American people will not accept these ideas about a renegade group of folks who decided they would overthrow the U.S. government.”
Put another way: Do un-American acts have a shelf-life? If certain acts were un-American less than 50 years ago, weren’t they un-American 150 years ago? If so, who would expect us to honor those acts today? Are these people terrorist sympathizers? Are they un-American?
John F. Sugg is executive editor of the Georgia Online News Service. [full bio]
Special session for MARTA?
From Atlanta Progressive News:
State and local lawmakers joined with activist groups Wednesday in urging Gov. Sonny Perdue to call a special session of the Georgia General Assembly to deal with transportation funding issues.
“Come September, it’s going to be a regional walk to work day,” Benita West, president of Amalgamated Transit Union, Local 732, said during a press conference at the Five Points Metro Atlanta Regional Transit Authority (MARTA) station.
West was one of many Wednesday to pile blame on state leaders for failing to take necessary action on transportation during the General Assembly session, which ended April 3.
Not only did legislation to create a new transit funding mechanism fail, lawmakers also left MARTA in a financial crisis.
Read more here.
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