CARLTON FLETCHER: Forget Grover Norquist: The taxman cometh

Let me tell you how it will be. There’s one for you, 19 for me. ‘Cause I’m the taxman.

— The Beatles

Ward IV Albany City Commissioner Roger Marietta asked at last week’s commission work session for the go-ahead to take the lead in working with Dougherty County officials on resurrecting the T-SPLOST 1 percent transportation tax that was rejected in the region in 2012.

Marietta noted that new law passed by the state Legislature during the 2015 session not only would allow a second go at the transportation initiative in 2016, it would allow counties that could not generate regional support for the tax to go it alone in seeking voter approval.

Marietta pointed to such transportation needs in the county as street and road resurfacing, as well as the replacement of dilapidated hangars at the Soutwest Georgia Regional Airport, in making his pitch for a second run at T-SPLOST. He told the commission, “Regions that passed T-SPLOST (in 2012) are really benefitting, and I think it’s something we should consider. Even if we push for it to move forward, the people will be the ultimate deciders in whether it passes or not.”

The measure failed in Southwest Georgia, to the shock of many, for a number of reasons. Groups like the tea party opposed the measure on their general no-tax philosophy, while individuals such as House District 150 Rep. Winfred Dukes opposed T-SPLOST because he said it did not offer enough for the mostly black communities in south and east Dougherty County to get on board with a buy-in.

Dukes said before the vote, which failed by a 57-43 percent margin in the Southwest Georgia region, that T-SPLOST was asking some of the country’s poorest people to pay for “roads they don’t need with money they don’t have.”

Still, the measure got an almost 50 percent favorable vote in Dougherty County and might have had an opportunity to pass the second time around had the state Legislature not also passed HB 170, the so-called Transportation Funding Act of 2015. That piece of legislation is designed to bring around $900 million in transportation money into state coffers through an increase in the state’s gasoline tax, and various reports say the price of gasoline in Georgia will rise sharply as a result, anywhere from 6 cents to 26 cents a gallon when the bill goes into effect on July 1.

Republican leadership in the state, many of whose members no doubt regret signing that ridiculous Grover Norquist no-tax-increase pledge, have attempted to creatively insist that they’ve kept their pledge despite approving one of the largest tax increases in the state’s history. They’re labeling the increase a “fee,” counting, no doubt, on state voters who are either so dumb or are so blindly loyal to the party that they’ll buy into the wordplay and commend their leaders for holding the line on taxes.

That’s not to say that raising the state’s notoriously low tax on gasoline is not warranted. But if, as many say, state leaders are setting the stage for an increase at the pump of more than a quarter a gallon just to ease transportation woes, it would appear that the Legislature took advantage of the lower cost of oil — and, thus, gas at the pump — to lessen the outcry that would normally follow such a large tax increase.

(Nobody said these guys don’t know how to play politics.)

With some experts saying gas prices may slide back down toward the $2-a-gallon level in the state over the short-term because efforts to artificially increase oil prices have failed, the coming tax increase may indeed slip by with little more than a whimper from Georgia taxpayers, even the ones who insist a 1 percent SPLOST is too much.

That, Commissioner Marietta and others who support a second go at T-SPLOST, is what you’ll be up against as you move forward. A word of advice: Try to find a way to change that last “T” in T-SPLOST to an “F” — for “fee” — and you might have a chance. Maybe ole Grover can help you with that one.

Email Carlton Fletcher at [email protected].