Atlanta Voters Reject Tax Hike to Fund Transportation Projects

This story appears in the Aug. 6 print edition of Transport Topics.

Atlanta-area voters rejected a proposed 1% sales tax increase last week that supporters said would have paid for $6.14 billion in transportation infrastructure projects over 10 years, a bipartisan proposal that had the backing of business groups, Georgia’s governor and Atlanta’s mayor.

Residents of eight other multicounty regions in Georgia also rejected the proposals to fund infrastructure investments in their regions, while three others approved the increase during the July 31 statewide election.

“It’s certainly disappointing that we won’t have the resources to accomplish all the projects needed to get Georgians moving quicker, but it does force state officials, including myself, to focus all our attention on our most pressing needs,” Republican Gov. Nathan Deal said in a statement. “We’ll have a ‘need to do’ Transportation Improvement Program list, but not a ‘want to do’ list.”

Atlanta and the surrounding counties had planned to use the increased tax revenue for 157 projects over the next decade. The plan included major highway improvements and expansions to the city’s rail transit system. The tax was voted down 63% to 37%.

Several of the projects aimed to ease congestion at highway bottlenecks. Eleven of the country’s 250 worst freight bottlenecks are in Georgia, the American Transportation Research Institute found last year; seven are near Atlanta.

For example, funding would have helped pay for a $53 million project to improve the interchange between Interstates 85 and 285 northeast of Atlanta, the No. 9 freight bottleneck in 2011 and the worst in Georgia, according to ATRI.

Ed Crowell, president of the Georgia Motor Trucking Association, speculated that an anti-tax sentiment was one of the key reasons the vote failed in most areas.

“People are particular irate with the taxation system and the inability of Washington to do anything competent with our money, but they take that out on the state level as well,” he told Transport Topics.

GMTA did not take a position on the measure, Crowell said. Since each region had its own plans for the revenue, some members favored it and some were opposed.

But Crowell noted that in the three regions where the vote passed, the plans were almost entirely for highways.

“Those regions are in need of economic development, and they had a clear set of projects that were all focused on improving roads and improving mobility in their regions. And the people were comfortable with those regional plans,” he said.

In a statement to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper, local Tea Party Patriots coordinator Debbie Dooley took credit for the measure’s failure.

“We were successful because average citizens got engaged in the process,” she said. “Our message of distrust of elected officials to spend our tax dollars wisely resonated with both Democratic and Republican voters.”

Georgia has a statewide sales tax of 4%. Every county imposes an additional 1% to 3% tax on top of that, and Atlanta has a 1% sales tax in addition to both of those.

The American Highway Users Alliance recognized the anti-tax sentiment in the votes, but also saw a misunderstanding about transportation needs among voters, something that is common around the country, said Greg Cohen, the group’s president.

“Most people have very little understanding of the serious growing deficiencies of our transportation system,” he told TT. “Those of us whose livelihoods depend on it need to do a better job of making the case for investment.”

Darrin Roth, director of highway operations at American Trucking Associations, said he is not convinced that Georgia’s votes are indicative of much on a national sphere, except for Americans’ aversion to tax increases.

“This isn’t necessarily a good indication of what’s happening around the country,” he said, adding that about two-thirds of statewide referenda on transportation funding so far this year have passed.

Beyond the Tea Party, other groups pushed back against the tax increase as well, he said. The Sierra Club complained that not enough money was planned for transit, while the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People said it largely ignored African-American communities.

“It appears as if it’s a proposal that died of a thousand cuts, rather than one particular thing that killed it,” Roth said.

Both ATA and GMTA support increasing fuel taxes as the easiest and fairest way to add revenue for highways.

“There isn’t anything more efficient than the fuel tax, in terms of funding road-related projects,” Crowell said.