What’s gotten into Sonny?
Gov. Sonny Perdue seems to be cramming for his finals.
“Too little, too late” never seemed more apt.
After doing not much more than grumbling about metro Atlanta’s growth problems for seven years, Sonny Perdue finally is pushing lawmakers to pass water conservation and transportation funding bills. Not only that, last week he proposed converting four statewide elected offices into appointed positions — a bold idea that any good government type should be celebrating.
The perplexing thing is that Perdue’s doing all this in his eighth and final year as governor, when his influence is surely too low to bend the Legislature to his will. He won’t have any way to followup to ensure that his ideas are implemented effectively, either. Read more
Lake Lanier water going, going …
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is moving forward with work on its court-ordered plan to deny metro Atlanta water from Lake Lanier, even as Gov. Perdue’s Water Task Force met at the Governor’s Mansion today to come up with alternatives to Lanier’s water.
Georgia Public Broadcasting reports that the Corps “has started to rewrite the manual it uses to control water flows in the Chattahoochee river basin.” A federal judge ruled earlier this year that the Army had never actually been authorized to allow the Atlanta region to use Lanier’s water and must come up with a plan to send the lake’s water downstream as soon as 2012.
Perdue appointed the 80-member task force to come up with a contingency plan in case the state can’t work out a deal with Alabama and Florida to get a share of the water. Environmentalists fear that the business-dominated panel will emphasize the construction of costly reservoirs,
Read the rest of this post at MyGreenATL.
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.
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.
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.
Gold Dome powerball
From Tom Baxter and GONSO:
The 39th day of this year’s legislative session — the one that was the setup for today’s final, frenzied effort — was one of those that the denizens of the Golden Dome will be talking about for months, or maybe years.
For someone who doesn’t work in the sausage factory of government, however, it isn’t obvious what made the day so significant. It was more about the machinery, really, than the sausage.
The dramatic high point of this penultimate legislative day came on a Wednesday afternoon vote on SB 200, the organizational chunk of the giant transportation package making its way through the process like a baby goat passing through the digestive track of a python.
In a break with precedence, if not strictly the rules, House Speaker Glenn Richardson kept the voting machine on at least four minutes while lieutenants worked the floor and flipped five votes which had at first been cast against the measure. Richardson cast the deciding vote for passage, 91-84.
Hallway denizens, young and old, shook their heads in wonder, and asked aloud if anyone could remember such a thing. Which no one could, although Tom Murphy, in his record tenure as speaker, might have done something similar at least once.
To outsiders, it must seem that the real significance of all this legislative drama is that Richardson, Gov. Sonny Perdue and Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle are at last coalescing around a compromise state transportation strategy. Immediately after the House vote, the Senate named its conferees for the negotiations over the spending side of the package, and things on the surface at least seemed to be proceeding clickety-clack.
But it might not mean that at all. Wednesday’s vote could be the harbinger of some grand compromise to be delivered up today, or the setup for another train wreck tonight. (That’s if you consider leaving the DOT board as is to be a train wreck. Some don’t.) This could be Richardson getting on board with the governor and lieutenant governor, or he could be as one lobbyist put it, “using the House as a fiddle to play Casey with.”
For the rest of this story click here.
Time to raise the gas tax
Gasoline prices may seem to be bouncing around a bit but overall they have dropped like a rock. What a great time to raise the national gasoline tax. Or for that matter to raise Georgia’s gas tax.
Georgia’s average price for a gallon of regular unleaded is down to $1.81 a gallon. That mark stands about 13 cents lower than the national price. The AAA Fuel Gauge Report reports Savannah with the highest metro area price–$1.83. Augusta has the lowest metro average of $1.73. Georgians last year at this time were paying an average $3.19 a gallon.
The national average for regular unleaded is down to $1.95 a gallon, down from $3.21 a year ago.
Don’t expect Sonny to do this. But imagine a long-term tax policy at either the state or federal level: Every time the average price of gasoline drops 10 cents a gallon, two pennies in tax are added. When the price goes up, the tax stays, and two more cents are added the next time the average price drops. The idea would be to increase the gas tax gradually so that people would have an incentive to get around with less driving without giving a massive whack to the economy.
Yeah, I realize that more taxes aren’t what people need right now (Believe me: I know. I’m unemployed). But what if the gas tax hike was accompanied by a cut in income taxes at the lower end of the economic ladder — say, an increase in the maximum amount of income that can be earned without any income tax?
Other people, including this noble congressman from Connecticut, support the even better idea of a carbon tax. But that has as much of a chance of passing as does national holiday honoring the captain of the Exxon Valdez. Raising the gas tax is virtually the third rail in red state politics, but in Congress it actually could be approved as part of a national strategy on global warming.
From stimulus to tax cuts
Leave it to Georgia politicians to turn the federal stimulus money into a less stimulative tax cut, weighted heavily at upper end of the income ladder.
As James Salzer reports at AJC.com, Gov. Sonny Perdue hopes to close about $1.1 billion of a $1.65 billion budget shortfall for the fiscal year begins July 1 with federal stimulus money. But, in a roundabout way, more than $400 million won’t be used to restore cuts in programs.
The governor [said] stimulus money was indirectly helping the state pay for homeowner tax relief grants that Georgians received last fall.
Without $428 million in funding, counties would have had to send homeowners bills asking for the grant money, about $200 to $300 per home, back.
The homeowner tax relief grants actually will be paid, as planned, in the current fiscal year’s budget. But that doesn’t mean that Perdue couldn’t have shifted priorities.
The bottom line is that he’s giving a grant to taxpayers for homeowners a higher priority than a more strategic use of the money, such as preventing additional cuts in schools, colleges and Medicaid. Those programs would help the state’s economy in the short run by spurring direct, immediate spending (as opposed to tax credits, which in many cases will go into savings and investments), and in the long run by creating a healthier, more skilled workforce.
Of course, that would fly in the face of Georgia’s tax-cuts-can-only-be-good-and-government-spending-can-only-be-bad political philososphy. So legislators are certain to agree with the governor.
Perdue’s gotta be kidding
My unemployment benefits — along with those of hundreds of thousands of Georgia’s unemployed workers — are among those that may be cut because of Republican petulance.
The AJC reports that Gov. Sonny Perdue is among the GOP governors who claim to be caught “in a philosophical bind” over accepting money from the stimulus package. Perdue, among others, is perfectly happy to accept the part that builds roads and bails the state out of its Medicaid mess.
But the unemployment portion of the stimulus might actually cause the state to ensure that it’s unemployment insurance program is decent. Here’s a bit of advice for governors whose “philosophical binds” caus them to do something decent for their constituents: Get a new philosophy!
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