Atlanta Regional Transportation Plan 2040

The Plan
This is a plan to spend $126 billion to rebuilding MARTA with new trains and buses, build light rail, a rail hub, toll lanes, bike lanes, trolley cars and consulting fees with a little for roads and bridges from 2012 to 2040. We recommend a NO VOTE.

The Vote
An additional 1% sales tax will be on our ballot in 2012. The Atlanta Regional Commission has enlisted everyone to talk us into this. We urge a NO vote for lots of reasons. It seeks to extort tax dollars from the adjoining counties to bail out a MARTA it won’t use. It is inflationary. It relies on federal tax dollars fresh off the printing press. Most of the spending in this plan is totally unnecessary and misdirected. It holds our roads hostage to the expensive, underutilized train craze. It’s wise to wait until after the 2012 Presidential election. A Republican President would not force us to pay the $100 million per mile installation cost of light rail or force us to pay $70 billion to buy MARTA new trains and buses and expand to the exurbs. It forces us to double our subsidies to the failed public transit system.

It’s Obama’s Plan
GE and Siemens told Obama they wanted to sell more light rail and heavy rail trains and buses to public transit in the States. Obama told Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood to find a way to force states to support light rail and public transit. Ray told the Georgia Legislature that no federal money would be coming their way unless they adopted regional planning with plenty of money for public transit and light rail. Obama wants to “fundamentally transform” the U.S.; this is part of that plan.

The problem is that he wants to transform it into a third world socialist country with government of the government, for the government and by the government. The Federal Government is currently in debt for $120 trillion. It’s broke. It’s a failed state. The Plan assumes that the Federal Government will continue to keep inflation at 2.2% and continue to fund State spending. It’s naive. Even the phony CPI number is running at 3.6%.

It’s U.N. Agenda 21 Implementation
George Soros hired Obama to implement U.N. Agenda 21. This is the plan that wants open borders, global governance, an 80% reduction in global population (starting with us), no sovereignty for the USA and no private property rights, Their excuse is man-made global warming and seeks to reduce carbon dioxide with cap & trade. Agenda 21 has us all living in high density transit villages in large metro areas with no cars, powered by wind and solar. It’s their version of global communism. Their plan is to ruin the U.S. economy with government spending, debt and national bankruptcy. Google gctparty.com for the best video presentation on UN Agenda 21.

The Federal Government is insolvent and is printing the dollars they want to give us out of thin air. We are already experiencing inflation due to the expectation that the trillions of dollars printed are entering the economy causing what will be a colossal bout of hyper-inflation. The dollar and all of our assets will be worth very little, very soon.

Planned Cost
The Transportation Plan is presented in two pieces. Phase I will cost $61 billion; Inflation adjustments take this to $83 billion, a 36% increase. Phase II will cost an additional $66 billion. Inflation should take this to $90 billion. Inflation should take the total cost of both to $173 billion.

Phase I funding assumes that the federal government will still exist and will give us $21.7 billion, the state will contribute $8.4 billion, local counties and cities will contribute $27 billion, if we vote for this boondoggle, new toll roads will deliver $3 billion for a total of $61 billion.

Phase I spending includes $23 billion for road maintenance and expansion, $36.1 billion for MARTA bus and train replacement and expansion and other transit, $7.1 billion to convert failed HOV lanes to toll lanes and $2.1 billion for bike lanes and sidewalks. The TOLL LANES will be funded by Bonds. Whatever Bonds the Region sells will cost double after we pay interest.

Phase II and the additional $66 billion will be transit heavy. It will include light rail. The cost to install light rail in Seattle WA was $176 million per mile. I can’t imagine we would step into this hole, but it’s in the Plan.

The Georgia Legislature passed the Transportation Investment Act of 2010. Georgia was sliced into 12 Regions. The Atlanta Regional Commission has 10 counties in and surrounding Atlanta included in the MARTA expansion. We will get to vote as a region to increase our sales taxes by 1%, (think grocery store). It would have been nice if the out-lying counties would have had the opportunity to opt out of this MARTA scheme. Cities and Counties keep 15% of this tax revenue for their own transportation projects. The bulk of the other 85% goes to the Region for light rail and MARTA, etc.

Tax Facts
Georgia’s motor fuels tax revenue is $858 million a year and auto license tag revenue is $310 million a year. But only $675 million is spent on roads and bridges. The Georgia Department of Transportation receives less than $7 million in General Revenue Funds,

The State of Georgia budget is $18.2 billion. It spends $10.8 billion, 59% of its revenue on public schools; that’s in addition to your property tax. Another $3 billion or 17% is spent on healthcare. The Georgia State sales tax rate is 4%. The County sales tax rate in Georgia is usually 3%.

The 10 counties in the Atlanta Region will be able to vote on this Transportation Plan. The votes will be counted on a Region basis rather than county by county, so if your county votes NO, it could still pass if the majority of votes in the Region are YES.

MARTA Problems
MARTA collects $121.5 million a year in revenue from riders, and leases but costs $725.16 million a year to operate. 83% of its operation comes from tax subsidies. That’s an atrocious amount to expect in subsidies going forward. If sales tax revenues and federal and state grants dwindle, MARTA will need to retrench and raise fees or go out-of-business.

MARTA reports that riders used MARTA 116 million times in 2010. This is typically split in half with 58 million bus rides and 58 million train rides. MARTA is leveraged to the hilt with $1.8 billion in bond debt from selling bonds to pay for capital improvements and pays $133 million in debt service on these bonds.

MARTA ridership is limited for most of the day; not many people in the big buses or long trains. Only 3.6% of the population uses it to go to work. This system continues to require tax subsidies to support expansion, operations and maintenance.

If MARTA was a private business, it would need to cut 83% of its costs to survive. It has limited ridership and doesn’t charge enough to pay its bills. They have proposed a rider fee increase from $2.00 to $2.50 in 2012. This is a failed business model and getting bigger is not going to fix it. Tax payer subsidized public transportation is not a good deal for drivers or tax payers.

Transit Villages
MARTA, in its quest for customers, has co-opted large malls to add multi-unit, high density apartment and condo units to MARTA properties. This creates transit oriented development (TOD), a Transit Village. This is a high tax European socialist model, surprise, surprise.

The High Street Project by Perimeter Mall is scheduled to resume in 2012 next to the MARTA station with 3000 rental units. That will move our already lopsided ratio of homeowners 8000 to renters 7000. They don’t want us to drive cars; they want us to use MARTA for everything. These mega-developments will arise next to MARTA stations at all malls with close by office buildings. Parking will be limited.

Rents will be high at first, but after the apartment ages a bit, rents will go down all the way to section 8 housing units with rent subsidies from HUD. This disperses low income housing everywhere MARTA goes. The Federal DOT, HUD, Perimeter Community Improvement District (PCID) and the Atlanta Regional Transportation Commission are working closely with developers and MARTA to create train-riding ghettos among the subdivisions. HUD low income housing project building has failed; this is their new model.

This is a game-changer for home owners in the suburbs. Many now have their children home-schooled or are enrolled in private schools. They can no longer assume that their home values can be tied to the quality of the public schools. These high density developments will also trump local zoning. The creation of the Atlanta Regional Commission responsible for regional planning has trumped city councils. The sovereignty of the City of Dunwoody is a myth. Ceding our mobility to unionized transit workers is crazy. One bomb on a train or bus will bring hoards of TSA employees to grope and take nude photos of us. I’ll keep my cars, thank you.

Tough Vote
The first problem will be public transit vs. roads & highways. MARTA only goes where it goes. If you only drive your car, you only care about roads. The second problem is close-in counties vs. out-lying counties who don’t have MARTA and wouldn’t use it. A third problem is resistance to any tax increase during this, destined to be long, economic depression. A fourth problem is the very real threat of a dollar and asset value crash, due to excessive government debt. If the federal government cuts its overspending, this federal money would go away. A yes vote on this plan would raise the county sales tax by 1% to get a lot of things we don’t want.

Bond Scams
Part of the “private / public partnerships” touted by politicians, besides toll road operators, includes Bond brokers looking for customers and apartment developers looking for projects. This seems an unlikely time for local governments to be borrowing money, but it is so pervasive I still think it’s a virus.

Road Problems
Most folks in Metro Atlanta are required to drive their cars to work and shop, drive their kids to and from school and get around. Public transit only goes where it goes; this is not necessarily where you need to go.

If highway I-285 was built to be an interstate bypass, it should have been built way out in the boondocks rather than tightly squeezed around the city of Atlanta. It is now incorporated into the Atlanta work commuter grid, with no room for both local and interstate traffic.

Nashville TN has a similar problem with I-24 except there, the interstate highway only ruins part of Nashville’s commuter routes. Nashville can still build commuter roads in its boondocks to offer optional routes.

For Metro Atlanta, there is nowhere to go except to widen I-285 or begin to build a real bypass over time, linking GA highways to intersect I-75 and I-85 further out. There is an effort to make US-27 a link coming from Chattanooga TN to I-75 and I-85 South, below Atlanta. Most of Georgia’s budget has gone to education and healthcare for decades, with not much being spent on roads or highways for Metro Atlanta.

Georgia DOT has refused to add lanes or widen roads, because “we drivers will just fill these lanes up again”. The Federal government including the DOT and EPA are equally at fault for this obstructionism. Other large cities continued to widen and add roads and highways for the last 3 decades. Metro Atlanta Transportation has been held hostage for decades by MARTA politics and now the light rail crazies have joined in. GDOT instead wanted HOV lanes nobody uses, so now they want them to be Toll lanes nobody will use. We are a nation of suburbs and commuters. We have no alternative but to expand our road systems to continually abate the gridlock. Smart governments get ahead of this. Not so bright governments react after the fact. Really dumb, suicidal governments refuse to do anything effective. Most of the GDOT budget goes to debt service. Paying for projects with Bonds makes them twice as expensive and now GDOT is broke. They are implementing their population decrease plan.

This Regional Transportation Plan is right out of the Obama playbook. He wants us to vote for this to create VERY EXPENSIVE Transit Villages to prop up MARTA based on their Transit Oriented Development Plan (TOD). Obama will force Georgia Power to put up VERY EXPENSIVE wind and solar power units to drive up the cost of our energy to 5 times what we pay now. The directive by the Secretary of Transportation to submit Regional Plans is what started the creation of the Regional Commissions and this Transportation Plan.

Send me an email to join and read my blog at NTL Conservative Blog, the Dunwoody GA Tea Party blog. It was great to see you at the Dunwoody July 4th Parade. Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party, ntl@mindspring.com NTL Conservative Blog 770-394-1284