A few things I learned in Athens this week during the Legislature’s biennial conference:
1. Transportation will dominate the 2015 session, but not necessarily the way you might imagine. The study committee tasked with recommending a way forward for funding infrastructure has not yet issued its report, isn’t expected to do so until the end of the month (the due date was Nov. 30), and most likely won’t suggest “a” way forward. Rather, we will get a menu of options … and no clear-cut answer as to who’s the chief, er, chef.
The optimist in me says the changed tone and increased urgency about the need to put more money into roads and bridges (and maybe rails) points to a strong likelihood legislators will end up passing a strong, if not exactly overwhelming, package.
The pessimist in me says we’ve seen this movie before, following the report of the 2010 Special Council on Tax Reform and Fairness for Georgians. That report, too, was issued a bit late and without a clearly defined, consensus policy. It had no obvious, passionate, recognized leader among legislators, who seemed to look at every turn for someone else to push through a reform package. The result was a late, halting effort that was immediately picked apart by critics on all sides — and no legislation passed in 2011. Instead, a more modest and somewhat forgettable package was passed a year later in the name of the same ambitious “tax reform” effort. Lawmakers declared victory and went home
via Prospects for transportation, school bills in Georgia come into focus | Kyle Wingfield.
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