TSPLOST Opinion piece

 by Jim Martin

You have probably been bombarded with junk mail, robo-calls, and television commercials encouraging you to vote for the TSPLOST (transportation local option sales tax) on July 31. The expense and magnitude of this effort as well as the lack of an equally well funded contra campaign may have made you suspicious of those who are behind it. These are companies that have a big financial interest in seeing this thing happen, as it will transfer an enormous sum of money from taxpayers to various contractors. It will also increase the value of specific assemblages of land. The support of local officials for this thing has been bought with the promise of a 15% kick back to local budgets. Politicians, like as our anti-tax governor, are naturally attracted to proposals like this that allow them to raise taxes while publicly maintaining that they have not raised taxes. In short, there is something in this for everyone except the taxpayers.

Our leaders who are now asserting that this tax will fund desperately needed projects are the same officials who have chosen not to fund these projects for years. Clearly they perceive these projects to be less important than other expenditures such as the ill-fate Brand Atlanta Campaign (“every day is an opening day”). Of course, these are only reasons to be suspicious of the TSPLOST and not reasons to vote against it. Here are 13 reasons to vote against it:

1. This is not “just a penny” it is about $8 billion. It would have added more than a dime to the cost of my lunch today, over a hundred dollars to my total tax bill last year, or a few hundred dollars to the price of a new car. I would choose to spend this money differently if it were not taken in taxes.

2. This tax, unlike the watershed and APS sales taxes, will not offset any other taxes or fees. It will only fund new expenditures most of which would not otherwise occur.

3. This tax will be paid by us, not by someone else. Although it is often pointed out that non residents shopping in the city will contribute somewhat to this revenue stream, their contribution is never quantified. It is likely that the reason for this is that the tax will be overwhelming paid by the same people who are now being asked to vote for it (us). Unless about a quarter of the tax is paid by others (see #4 below) the average Atlantan will lose on this deal regardless of the merits of transit expenditures.

4. Sales taxes are not deductible on federal income tax returns and thus forego a federal subsidy of about 27% (the average marginal income tax rate) compared to deductible taxes. $1 worth of transit therefore costs taxpayers about $0.73 when it is paid for with property taxes or state income taxes, but costs us the full $1 when it is paid for with sales taxes or fees.

5. The proposed projects are designed to benefit the suburbs at the expense of the city. They are overwhelmingly commuter-oriented and will therefore make distant suburbs more attractive communities in comparison to city neighborhoods. Large areas of Atlanta are under built and sparsely populated. Our area (the northwest) has a lot of vacant land ready for residential development and a lot of affordable residences in a variety of forms including single family houses. We will create a disincentive for the purchase and improvement of this with the TSPLOST projects. Atlanta is not Manhattan and does not require more infrastructure to support unnecessarily long commutes.

6. Sales taxes are regressive. They preferentially impact the poor and middle classes who spend most of their incomes locally rather than saving, investing, and traveling. These are the people who can least afford to fund new expenditures.

7. Sales taxes (unlike gas taxes) have nothing to do with roads or with transit. No rationale has ever been provided for tying this tax to these projects other than that those proposing it think that it will be an easier proposal to sell to the uneducated public than others that actually make sense.

8. Sales taxes are already high in Atlanta and increasing them further will be bad for commerce. With this tax, the sales tax rate in Atlanta will be 9%, one of the highest in the country. With increasing local sales taxes, consumers will be less likely to patronize local merchants vis-à-vis tax-free mail-order merchants.

9. There is no evidence that the proposed TSPLOST projects will solve any regional traffic problems. Planners acknowledge that these represent a very small fraction of the transit projects that they would like to build. Previous “fixes” for traffic problems have been remarkably ineffective at reducing traffic and effective at increasing suburban sprawl. The extension of 400 did not solve freeway congestion. It built Alpharetta.

10. This tax is unlikely to be temporary. Both the APS sales tax and the water and sewer tax were originally proposed as temporary measures. Both have since been renewed twice, both have become part of the operating budgets of the associated authorities, and both are now re-pitched to voters with the rationale that their revenue is needed for routine operations and therefore offsets property taxes and water rates.

11. The proposed TSPLOST projects are not particularly progressive. Many of these are simply road building projects of the sort that we have been engaged in for many decades. Others involve transit with minimal utility. Some are so ill defined that it is absurd to dedicate large sums to their construction.

12. The proposed Cobb County transit line, which will be funded with more than $600 million from the TSPLOST, will probably be bad for Berkeley Park and the surrounding communities. The planners involved with this project are dedicated to bringing a rail line off of I-75 onto Northside Drive. This rail line is quite likely to come through Berkeley Park and Loring Heights. See the April 2012 BPNA newsletter for more details on this.

13. Creating dedicated revenue streams, as the TSPLOST proposes to do, is intrinsically problematic. This is unnecessary as we already have too many structures in place to fund transit (city, county, state, federal, ABI, ADA, GRTA, ARC, MARTA, CCT, etc.). New structures will create new overhead expenditures, obscure responsibility, and create new opportunities for high-interest borrowing. One of the proposed projects, the Beltline, involves bailing out another project for which a different dedicated revenue stream (the TAD) has already been created and burdened with expensive debt.

Comments:

Expanding the MARTA trains beyond DeKalb, Fulton and the City of Atlanta is just nuts.  MARTA can’t pay its current bills and more empty buses and trains will only make it worse.  Regionalism undermines city and county sovereignty.  Why would we vote to put our roads under the control of an appointed, unelected soviet-style, central planning, crony infested, top-down, unaccountable committee ?   Google TrafficTruth.net and Vote NO on T-SPLOST.

Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader