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DISTRICT 80 TRANSPORTATION
SURVEY BECAUSE YOUR OPINION MATTERS! |
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| We
all know that traffic is a mess. When a late afternoon drive to
pick up the kids from practice and swing by the store for a gallon
of milk feels like planning a trip overseas, it’s clear that
we need to fix it. It’s not just that our quality of life
and our home values suffer from all this congestion. Our economic
security is at stake as well. It’s easy to understand companies
thinking of relocating to our region deciding to pass on the idea,
when our competitors like Research Triangle in North Carolina are
already hard at work addressing their transportation issues.
Our State Legislature has some explaining to do. For years, our legislators have dithered, played politics as usual, focused their energies on cultivating relationships with their lobbyist friends, and failing to come to grips with the problem. The House leadership, the Senate leadership, and the Governor each had a different approach and an agenda shifting from year to year. Meaningful compromise eluded them. In 2008, a transportation bill languished until the last moment and then failed to pass with only four minutes left in the Session. In 2009, they dithered again, and negotiators reached an impasse with only an hour to go. Meanwhile, you and I sat in traffic. This year, the House leadership, Senate leadership, and Governor actually managed to hammer out a compromise. The kind of boondoggle they cobbled together can make "compromise" seem like a bad word. Here’s what the new transportation bill does. It divides the state into 12 regions; DeKalb is part of a 10 county metropolitan Atlanta region. Each county and one of its cities plus Atlanta City Hall have a vote on the region’s "roundtable" set up to oversee improvements. That means that DeKalb has only the same say as a county that has a small population – or even a county with a grossly mismanaged or ethically challenged leadership. The Governor will propose a list of transportation projects, and the "roundtable" then gets to pick which ones they like. The Governor has a "carrot" and a "stick" to get the projects that he and his cronies have focused on. The "stick" is that if the "roundtable" can’t find projects they like on the Governor’s menu, a "special district gridlock" is declared and our region punished by being excluded from the new transportation funds for two years. The "carrot" is a slush fund of 15% of the money raised goes to those county and city governments. The whole process is an invitation to backroom deals that would make ENRON proud. Only after all the deals have been cut do we get a vote. We come in at the end of a very long process, and no shovel breaks ground until 2013 at the earliest. The amount of money that would be raised in the Metro area, estimated at nearly $8 Billion over ten years, is going to have an impact. As of now, we can only hope it’s a good impact. You and I would never design a system like this. It’s cumbersome. It’s political. And it needs to be fixed. How do we fix it? If you send me to the Capitol as your new State Rep, I want to know what you think should be done to unlock the gridlock. After all, they’re your roads. You paid for them. So
here’s my question:
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