GA Voters Unnecessary

The Georgia Legislature opposes any voter control over any government expenditures.

This includes passing Charters that ensure that city councils and county commissions can ignore voters and spend whatever they want.  It includes the right of these entities to add whatever they want to the public debt. The voter abuse in Cobb County over the funding of the Braves Stadium is the most visible example. Everyone wondered how the Cobb County Commission could make Cobb taxpayers to add $billions in bond debt and exacerbate Cobb highway gridlock without taking this to a vote. We still wonder why we subsidize professional sports businesses at all.

The last Charter for the City of Dunwoody expanded spending and borrowing with no voter control by authorizing the city to spend and borrow whatever it wants by creating “taxing districts”.  The only limit to the amount cities can borrow includes using all private property value on the digest as collateral, not the value of city owned assets.

This is government of the government, by the government and for the government, not a government of the people, by the people and for the people.  We attempted to send candidates to challenge this treason, but the “establishment” doubled down to defeat them.

In 2010 Georgia morphed its regional planning commissions into regional taxing entities to introduce unelected governance, transit villages, megacities, greenspace and on-street bike lanes required by Agenda 21 implementation.  In 2012, these Georgia Regional Commissions put an $18 billion TSPLOST on the ballot.  It failed to be approved by the voters in 9 of the 12 regions. This defeat made national news. 

The first problem with the $7 billion TSPLOST in Metro Atlanta was that none of the projects proposed would even begin to solve the congestion problem.  Metro Atlanta had not expanded its roads and highways to accommodate its growth.  The next problem was that Georgia had adopted the Agenda 21 view that “transportation” had to be redefined to include public transit and the $3.5 billion expansion of the unsustainable MARTA system.  The next problem was that road construction costs had instantly and magically doubled in cost.  The chamber of communists spent $10 million on the campaign and my rebel band spent $10 thousand and defeated them.

Despite the fact that UN Agenda 21 is dead, the laws remain on the books. The Georgia Legislature is still packed with members who are only beholden to the special interests and the largest special interest group in Georgia is government. We have a real dilemma in Georgia. We would be crazy to elect Democrats and our Republican “establishment”: is anti-voter.  I would have thought that Trump’s populism would have converted some of our Republican legislators, but that is not the case.

The latest offering is GA HB 820, Revenue and taxation; procedure for counties following a rejection of a tax digest. It allows counties to create their own versions of MARTA.

The other special interest groups pushing this are MARTA, GRTA, the unelected regional commissions, the developers, who want to continue “economic development” scams, the construction companies, the bond sellers and the free-spending city and county officials.

All public transit should be privatized.  It is too expensive to operate as a government entity. Ridership is abysmal and these agencies will never be self-supporting.  It’s the last thing we need.  We need to replace GDOT with engineers who will solve the gridlock.

Commuter trains need to be in densely populated enclaves like Manhattan where ridership is high allowing it to break even.  Atlanta is the least dense city on the planet.  MARTA is the creature of DeKalb and Fulton and should not expand.

Commuter bus service needs to be privatized, otherwise we will continue to pay for empty buses to operate. Politicians should not saddle taxpayers with any service that requires endless tax subsidies and could be provided by the private sector.

Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader