Archive for the ‘Local’ Category

The problem the proposed transportation sales tax, or T-SPLOST, purports to solve would seem obvious. Here’s how the first advertisement by a group pushing the tax framed the issue:

“Metro Atlanta, we have a problem: one of the longest average commutes in America, over an hour a day. Five hours a week you don’t spend with your family; 260 hours a year.”

But what if the length of our commutes isn’t a problem we can solve? At least, that is, not by building new infrastructure to relieve congestion.

That’s the implication of new data from INRIX, a private company that tracks traffic information.

The latest INRIX Traffic Scorecard, updated this week with data through April, shows traffic congestion increases the average commute in metro Atlanta by only about 10 percent — less than six minutes a day.

Let me repeat that: Congestion adds less than six minutes to the average metro Atlanta commute. And to reduce — not eliminate — that six-minute problem, we are asked to tax …

Continue reading T-SPLOST: Is traffic really a problem in Atlanta? »

The claim by proponents of the T-SPLOST that there is “no Plan B” — no alternative to the proposed 1 percent increase in the sales tax and the $6.1 billion in regional transportation projects it would build — has always struck me as silly.

Is there another plan already prepared and waiting in the wings should voters reject the tax in July? Probably not. In that sense, the “no Plan B” talk rings true. But surely no one believes local and state officials would just quit trying to speed up the construction of new roads and mass transit. A second option would emerge, probably sooner than later.

That said, there is one real nightmare scenario for those who would have to create a Plan B: The tax fails in metro Atlanta, but passes elsewhere.

We in metro Atlanta tend not to think about the tax referendum outside our 10-county region. But the rest of the state is divided into 11 other T-SPLOST regions, and the tax might very well pass in some of them.

Legislators discussed the …

Continue reading What’s Plan B if T-SPLOST fails here, passes elsewhere? »

Stories like this one from today’s AJC are infuriating to me:

For all the tens of millions of dollars that taxpayers pour into the Fulton County jail every year, the lockup can’t perform the basic function of keeping inmates locked up in cells.

The 23-year-old jail has such shoddy door locks that inmates can jam them with soap, toilet paper, shards of cloth or other trash and leave their cells at will. Motor-operated sliding doors on the maximum security levels can be jimmied open with pieces of cardboard.

This year’s Fulton County budget includes $68.1 million for the jail. Since a 2006 federal court order to improve security at the overcrowded jail, the county has spent more than $50 million to house inmates elsewhere and an estimated $86 million more, including interest, to renovate the facility.

And yet, the locks on the $@^*@&! cells don’t even work properly.

Consider stories like this one as you read about Georgia Republicans’ plans to shrink Fulton County’s impact on …

Continue reading Oh, Fulton County: A jail with locks that don’t work (Updated) »

Before spending a few hundred million taxpayer dollars — for example, on a new stadium for the Falcons — it is worth mulling worst-case scenarios. The worst of the worst cases for the stadium is that, within a few decades, football as we know it is extinct.

Get this straight: I’m not predicting football’s death. The NFL and college football have never been bigger. Projecting the sport’s demise would seem to put one in the company of Harold Camping, the nonagenarian preacher who (twice!) last year forecast Doomsday, not among UGA football’s season-ticket holders.

That said, there are some dark clouds on the sport’s horizon. What better time to pause and consider those clouds than before a deal is signed and the bonds — for which Atlanta’s hotel tax revenues would be committed until 2050 — are sold.

The place to start is with the dominant story this NFL offseason, which concerns player safety. The NFL faces 70 lawsuits covering more than 1,800 ex-players who claim …

Continue reading Falcons stadium proposal begs a look at football’s future »

In any election, you’ll hear a lot about each side’s efforts to woo the woo-able. You’ve heard the names before: “soccer moms” and “NASCAR dads.” With that in mind, here’s a label for the group that might settle July’s T-SPLOST referendum: QuikTrip parents.

They live in the suburbs and have the area’s longest daily commutes. This costs them increasing amounts of gas money and family time. If you’ve seen or heard some of the advertisements about the T-SPLOST, the QuikTrip parents are the target audience.

This group may have become even more important this week when the Sierra Club said it was opposing the tax because, among other things, the project list devoted “only” 40 percent of the revenues to mass transit. In a region where only about 5 percent of commuters use transit, the Sierra Club’s stance displays a realism I’d expect from Don Quixote managing Buddy Roemer’s presidential campaign. Yet, I’ve heard the same concern from other …

Continue reading The voters who just might decide the T-SPLOST’s fate »

A tough slog for Democrats in Georgia may be getting even tougher, thanks to one of their old friends: Cynthia McKinney has filed paperwork to run for Congress in Georgia’s 4th District as a member of the Green Party.

The incumbent, Hank “capsized Guam” Johnson, has made more than his fair share of gaffes since defeating McKinney in 2006 and entering Congress. But compared to her, he’s a statesman of the highest order.

Still, it took a runoff for Johnson to beat her in that year’s primary, and even then she won 41 percent of the vote. This will be a general election, and 41 percent of the Democratic vote would be enough to keep Johnson from winning a majority. The GOP candidate last time out, Liz Carter, won 25 percent against Johnson. Neither she nor any other Republican will win this heavily Democratic district. But the GOP candidate will get enough votes to make it tough for Johnson to beat McKinney — or (shudder) vice-versa — without a runoff. McKinney would need just a …

Continue reading Here we go: Cynthia McKinney is running for Congress again »

Here we go again. MARTA is back to complaining about the state-imposed 50/50 restriction on its sales tax revenues, which holds that half the money can go to subsidize operations but half must be reserved for maintenance and capital projects. From an AJC report:

MARTA General Manager Beverly Scott warned Monday that the transit agency needed to start preparing for deep service cuts in part because the state legislature failed to lift regulations on how much it can spend on operations.

That failure coupled with projections that sales tax revenues — MARTA’s main funding source — will come up $130 million short in the next five years of what had been previously projected means the agency will have to make cuts to ensure it has the $40 million in operating reserves required by law.

“We will have to gut significant parts of the service,” Scott said.

I dealt with this issue a couple of years ago in the special series of columns I wrote about MARTA’s perennial financial woes. In …

Continue reading Repeat after me: The 50/50 split is not MARTA’s real problem »

My news-side colleagues at the AJC did it again. By taking their examination of suspicious test scores nationwide, with the “Cheating Our Children” series that began last Sunday, they felled another wall standing between the public and the truth about what’s going on in our public schools.

The question now is what the public, and those who make public policy, will do with this information. There are lessons both from and for Atlanta.

From the experience of Atlanta Public Schools, we know that, as explosive as the information about suspect wrong-to-right erasure marks on standardized tests at dozens of schools was, little would have come of it had there been no political will to look deeper — and keep looking.

In a couple of meetings during the process sparked by AJC reports, then-Gov. Sonny Perdue demonstrated a palpable anger about the way adults had cheated schoolchildren. That fire in his belly proved crucial when supporters of APS tried to pooh-pooh the wrongdoing …

Continue reading In broader cheating scandal, lessons from and for Atlanta »

Given the local debate about using $400 million-plus in tax revenues to build the Falcons a new open-air stadium, I couldn’t help but notice this nugget from team owner Arthur Blank’s comments about the penalties handed down to the New Orleans Saints for that team’s bounty program (via Pat Yasinskas at ESPN.com):

“I think the league has handled it well and appropriately,” Blank said. “One of the other owners made this point, but I told the commissioner I totally agree with him, the NFL, outside of our stadiums, the only things we really own are our reputation, our integrity, our shield and the relationship and trust we have with our fans and our sponsors. Anything that’s done that violates that or hurts that, is something that has to be dealt with.” (emphasis added)

Only a handful of NFL teams own their own stadiums, and Blank’s angling for taxpayers to fund a new dream home for his team certainly doesn’t put him in line to join that exclusive club.

Or maybe he meant the …

Continue reading Dear Mr. Blank: About that line about NFL teams owning their stadiums . . . »

After a long winter — in terms of the state Legislature and the GOP presidential race, not the temperature — the boys of summer are almost back, which means spring is near. But before we could reach Opening Day, we found out it’ll be the last season for one Larry Wayne Jones Jr., better known as Chipper.

Those of us who watched the Braves’ unprecedented streak of division titles during the 1990s and early 2000s have been treated to a succession of retiring greats during the past few years: Tom Glavine, Greg Maddux, John Smoltz, Bobby Cox and, now, Chipper Jones.

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And that got me thinking: Is Chipper the best Atlanta Brave ever?

Note the phrasing: Atlanta Brave. So, greats from the franchise’s days in …

Continue reading Poll Position: Who was Atlanta’s greatest Brave of all? »