State House speaker says too early to say what happens if regional TSPLOSTs fail

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July 10, 2012

State House speaker says too early to say what happens if regional TSPLOSTs fail

Charles Oliver charlesoliver@daltoncitizen.com The Dalton Daily Citizen Tue Jul 10, 2012, 09:57 PM EDT

Georgians will likely give a split result on regional transportation Special Purpose Local Option Sales Taxes (SPLOSTs) on July 31, says state House Speaker David Ralston, R-Blue Ridge.

“I expect it will pass in some regions and fail in some regions. And that was the way it was designed, to be a regional decision made by the people in those regions,” Ralston said Monday during a stop in Dalton with other state House leaders.

The General Assembly passed the Transportation Investment Act in 2010 which created 12 regional groups across the state to develop transportation lists that would be funded by regional SPLOSTs if approved by voters in a region.

Whitfield and Murray County residents will vote as part of a 15-county area covered by the Northwest Georgia Regional Commission. The SPLOSTs would each be 1 percent and would last 10 years but could be renewed by voters. If all the SPLOSTs are approved, the taxes would generate about $1.6 billion each year in revenue. To pass, the SPLOST must be approved by the majority of voters in each region as a whole.

Ralston said he believes the coastal area and Southwest Georgia are the regions most likely to pass those SPLOSTs.

“Metro Atlanta is going to be close,” he said. “But the whole idea is that this is a decision that needs to be made as close to the local level as possible.”

What happens to transportation planning if the SPLOSTs fail in Atlanta and most other regions of the state?

“I don’t want to start thinking about what happens if it doesn’t pass yet. I think that’s sort of planning for failure,” Ralston said. “If we get to that point we’ll sit down with members of the General Assembly and the governor’s office and transportation officials and take a look at it. It took us three or four years to get to coming up with a plan in the 2010 session. It was a long, tough road to get there. The thought of starting over is not one that we want to dwell on too much now.”

Ralston said he is disappointed that the U.S. Supreme Court recently upheld the federal health care reform law.

“If there were any positives that came out of that decision, I think the rejection of the Medicaid expansion at the state level was one of those positives. We are facing a shortfall already of over $300 million in the Medicaid program that we are going to have to deal with, regardless of Obamacare,” Ralston said.

The health care law required states to expand eligibility for Medicaid, the joint federal-state program that provides health coverage for low-income persons. The Supreme Court ruled the federal government can not penalize states that refuse to go along with that expansion.

Ralston said it would have been “devastating” for the state budget if lawmakers had been forced to expand Medicaid as the law called for.

“It would probably mean that we would have to go in and in one or two fiscal years cut out one fourth of the current budget (to pay for the expansion),” he said. “I don’t even want to ponder what that does to education or what it does to public safety or what it does to some of the real core functions of government.”

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State House speaker says too early to say what happens if regional TSPLOSTs fail

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