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In local-option transportation issues, a pull between region and state

April 28, 2009 —

One of the South’s emerging political tension points is the competition between the traditional prerogatives state governments and the growing aspirations of “regions,” which in most cases can be defined as an assortment of local governments, united by a traffic jam.

This tension can be traced in the legislative battles in Georgia and Texas this year over local-option transportation proposals.

For the second year in a row, the Georgia General Assembly failed to agree on a comprehensive plan to fund the state’s growing transportation needs. The traditional rivalry between the House and Senate and the jostling over next year’s governor’s race were the big sticking points, but this was also a state-region problem. The House wanted to have a statewide sales tax to fund a comprehensive statewide roads program, while the Senate wanted to allow counties and cities to join together to put local option sales taxes on the ballot in their jurisdictions.

Over the past three decades, local option taxes for transportation have become common across the United States, including Georgia and Texas. As metro areas have grown, it has become harder to contain transportation needs within a single county or city boundary, and so the definition of “local” has grown trickier. In Georgia’s case, we’re talking about the sprawling Atlanta Metro region, which has been gobbling rural real estate at a world-record pace for decades.

Another significant difference from previous local-option plans is that operating costs could be funded under the measure in Georgia, as well as the capital costs involved in building road projects. That’s another regional reach into a funding area which had previous been left to the state.

Emerging regions can also be threatening to the cities and counties being swallowed up in them. One criticism of the Texas proposal has been that small cities could be outvoted in region-wide referendums.

The Texas local option plan, which would fund some 200 miles of commuter rail in the North Texas suburbs, has been kicked around in the legislature for the better part of this decade.

This year, the bill has passed the Texas Senate, but still faces an uphill struggle in the House. Just as Atlanta business leaders walked the rope line on the last night of the Georgia session trying to get the funding bill passed, former pitching great Nolan Ryan, the president of the Texas Rangers, came to Austin to plead for the local option bill. To convince the House, he’ll need to bring some real heat.

One big difference between this measure and the one in Georgia is that the Texas bill would allow areas to vote for a variety of fees as well as a 10-cent increase in the gasoline tax. That’s the right direction, in the opinion of Martin Wachs, who has written extensively on local-option transportation measures.

“I’m concerned sales taxes are not the best way to fund transportation,” said Wachs, who is director of the Transportation, Space and Technology Program at the Rand Corporation.

Voters like the specificity of local-option transportation planes, Wachs said. The success rate for local tax referendums is only about 50 percent, but projects tend to get recycled. This has caused local sales taxes to creep upward to more than 10 percent in some localities, he said.