At last week’s AJC-moderated transportation tax forum, imported hired gun Christopher Leinberger and Fayette County Commissioner Steve Brown couldn’t have been farther apart on the issue.
Brown agrees that traffic is a problem and it’ll take tax dollars to help solve it, as well as our #1 regional issue: water.
Tax proponents, of course, have been telling us for the last two years that traffic was THE reason for spending your $8.5 billion. But that was then, and this is now.
The government’s own projections show that your $8.5 billion won’t change your commute all that much, that $2.8 billion of transit projects will only be partially funded, and no one can explain where massive transit subsidies will come from when the 10-year tax ends.
No problem. Leinberger presented an entirely new justification for your tax dollars: economic development (you should know that Chris, along with Atlanta Regional Commission Chairman Tad Leithead, and a number of other high profile proponents are developers, Realtors, and builders, many of whom stand to profit on your dime).
Forget the knotted traffic ball logo; picture dollars in some new “economic development” theme with implied long-term, high paying jobs for all.
Leinberger went so far as to tell a Thursday audience, “You don’t build [rail] to move people. That is not your goal. That may sound counterintuitive, but that’s not why you build transportation systems, and again, particularly rail transit. For 6,000 years we’ve been doing this. You build transportation systems for economic development.”
There it is — a regional stimulus program (how are those other government stimulus programs working for you?).
Leinberger obviously omitted a key observation at Tuesday night’s forum by Georgia Public Policy Foundation Adjunct Professor Baruch Feigenbaum: that the current project list is not a transportation system, but a patchwork of projects.
In a final act of desperation at both events, Leinberger played the race card. Brown countered at the forum, and Leinberger dropped it.
PS: CNBC’s “Top States for Business 2012” ranked Georgia 9th of 50 states.
Bob Ross
Peachtree City, Ga.
