With no funding, regional SPLOST projects on hold

Officials in Whitfield and Murray counties say they’d still like to do the projects that would have been funded by a regional Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax (SPLOST) defeated by Northwest Georgia voters in July. But without those SPLOST dollars they don’t see work on those projects starting any time soon.

Voters in the 15-county Northwest Georgia area, which includes Whitfield and Murray, rejected the 10-year transportation SPLOST 63 percent to 37 percent during the general primary.

Whitfield County residents rejected the tax 70 percent to 30 percent. Murray County residents turned down the tax 54.97 percent to 45.03 percent.

The 10-year tax was expected to raise $1.5 billion, with about $190 million of that going to Whitfield and Murray.

Some of the projects in Whitfield County it would have funded include $5.9 million in improvements to Airport Road and $17 million to widen Dawnville Road from Underwood Road to State Route 286. In Murray County, it would have provided about half of the $26 million needed to complete the Spring Place Bypass and $1.8 million to replace the bridge on Dennis Mill Road at Rock Creek, among other projects.

Whitfield County Board of Commissioners Chairman Mike Babb opposed the tax and said he wasn’t surprised Whitfield voters defeated it because Whitfield would have been a donor county, raising more tax money than it would get back from the state.

But he still says the local projects it would have funded are important.

“All of the projects on that list came from our MPO list. We have a Metropolitan Planning Organization that looks out 25, 30 years into the future for Whitfield County,” said Babb. “We just took the projects from that list that we didn’t have funding for and put them on our list for the SPLOST.”

Babb says the defeat of the regional SPLOST basically leaves Whitfield County where it was before the vote.

“We still have the projects out there. They are still on our MPO list. We’ve just got to figure out the funding mechanism,” he said. “We’ll look for local funding. We’ll look for state funding. We’ll look for federal funding.”

Could some of those projects be funded from a future local SPLOST, one were all of the money is raised and stays in Whitfield County?

“I have never been anti-SPLOST. It has been a good thing for Whitfield County because of I-75 and the high percentage of local sales tax paid by people coming in from out of the county,” Babb said. “At some point in the future, I don’t know when, if we want to go forward, and we aren’t getting any more money from the state level or the federal level, the best way to raise money is from a local sales tax that the citizens must approve and that they can limit by either the number of years it will last or the amount of money it can raise.”

Whitfield County’s last general government SPLOST expired at the end of 2011.

Murray County Sole Commissioner Greg Hogan said there’s no way the county can complete the projects on its list without state funding.

“We are going to be at a standstill on all of them until the state allots the funds,” he said.

Both men said that each county’s public works and transportation budgets will be harmed by a provision of the law that created the regional SPLOSTS. That law raised the matching funds required for transportation projects in counties that defeated the SPLOSTS to 30 percent from 10 percent.

Some tea party activists are urging the General Assembly to overturn that provision, and they have been joined in that call by local elected officials from across the state in those areas that voted down a SPLOST.

State Sen. Charlie Bethel, R-Dalton, said he supports returning the required match to 10 percent for all local governments and he expects a bill to do that will be introduced in the General Assembly when it convenes in January.

“I couldn’t handicap what percentage of the Legislature would support such a measure. For that matter, I don’t think the governor’s office has weighed in on that issue,” he said.

Some elected officials in the three regions of the state that approved SPLOSTs reportedly oppose reducing the matching funds required of those counties that voted down a SPLOST.

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With no funding, regional SPLOST projects on hold

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