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Big bump in road THE ANNOUNCED delays in state road construction projects, including several of great importance to Greater Rome, should have come as no surprise. The only surprise is that it took so long for the ax to fall. What's new this time isn't the "bad news" for Floyd County but rather the dropping of "bad news" on the entire state - $7.7 billion in projects either delayed or dropped from the priority construction timetable for lack of available funding. THE GOOD NEWS in all this is that - finally - the DOT is launching a major effort to enlist public opinion on its side - to get the General Assembly to face up to this question. Unfortunately, the legislative reaction to this point has been to mumble about new sales taxes, either statewide pennies on everybody, or regional special-purpose pennies (where only in the Atlanta metro could bring in enough money for truly major work, leaving the rest of the state to go hang again). There are other ideas being tossed around as well (the DOT apparently has about nine different scenarios) with the least-mentioned being the most obvious. That's raising the per-gallon state tax on motor fuels, now 7.5 cents and the lowest in the nation. Quite frankly, as this newspaper has been almost alone in pointing out for years, this is the only way to go. It bases road-building funds on road usage. If "raising taxes" is the kiss of death for politicians, then the sales-tax approach is arsenic. At least a fuel tax is a "user fee" - don't drive and you don't pay; drive less and you pay less. How can anybody justify adding to the tax on clothing in order to build more roads? It'll be easy to judge whether the legislature is going to get serious about this or just try to keep stalling ... and issuing more road construction bonds, to be repaid with interest that makes that much less money available for future road needs. THE STATE SALES tax of four cents to the dollar is levied on fuel purchases too. The DOT now gets three of those pennies. It used to get all four until the General Assembly took one away to drop into the general fund where the politicians could spend it as they saw fit ... meaning on stuff other than highways. First step: Restore that penny to the DOT. Second step: Forget the sales tax mumbojumbo. Third step: Drop the chatter about "private/public initiatives" to build roads, which is bureaucratese for toll roads. Nothing wrong with toll roads - but for everything in the state? As the DOT makes quite plain, and gives the public a good look at on its new county-by-county tally of unmet needs on the Internet at www.whatsthebigidea.com, there's a bit more to all this than four-lane, pay-per-mile expressways. By the way, one detects the hand of Doss, who recently stepped aside as board chairman, in the conception of that web site. It's too intricate - with detailed lists of every project in the state, plus connected maps showing where the stalled roads are - to have been produced in the short time since the new chairman took the helm. Besides, it carries the Doss trademark as shown in the recent downtown Rome bridge/parking deck stalemate: Maneuver the hard-headed obstacles (in the current case, the General Assembly) to a point where they've got no choice left but to do something. WITH EVERY STATE around Georgia levying a fuel tax that's twice or three times as much, is it any surprise the state can't come up with enough dedicated money to meet the needs of the fastest-growing state in the Southeast? When it comes to roads, Georgia's General Assembly appears to believe that it can afford to buy a 2007 model new car with an income that hasn't had a raise for the past 27 years. Sure, other things may be needed to really get a decent road-building program going - regional SPLOST funding, toll roads in the right places. But the basic building block of highway construction is the motor fuel tax. That's the only place to start. Let's raise the fuel tax to at least 15 cents a gallon. Let's restore to the DOT the General Assembly's misbegotten sales-tax penny (now worth at current gasoline prices at least two cents to the gallon).
Then let's look at where the state stands on road-building money and, if toll roads or regional special penny taxes would remove the remaining speed bumps ... fine. But first, let's put some wheels back on the road-building vehicle.
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