CARLTON FLETCHER: Albany leaders put good government ahead of ‘sexy’

And the people who love me still ask me, “When are you coming back to town?” And I answer quite frankly, “When they stop building roads.”

—Alison Krauss

When politicians and government officials want to make a big splash with constituents/taxpayers/voters, they pass legislation that’s, in the parlance of the profession, “sexy.” They pay off favors for special interest groups, put chickens in every pot, build speed humps, give a tax break that’s going to have an impact on bottom lines.

But when politicians and government officials go about the business of serving — and I mean really serving — their constituents, they do what the Albany City Commission did Tuesday night.

They pass a well-planned, long-thought-out infrastructure project that, while in no sense of the word sexy, has the potential to impact the community in a significant way for generations to come.

What the commission did Tuesday has been on the drawing board for the past couple of years. It was one of the first long-term projects City Manager Sharon Subadan advocated for after arriving in the city, and it’s a project long-time city employees like Phil Roberson — and aren’t Subadan and others who understand the way the city works happy this guy didn’t retire when he threatened to do so a couple of years ago? — Bruce Maples and Derrick Brown spent days and weeks and months fine-tuning, waiting for all the right pieces to fall into place.

Despite the clamor from often hostile disgruntled citizens, city officials didn’t use up all of the allocated Local Maintenance and Improvement Grant money doing piecemeal road resurfacing over the past year-plus. They knew what was coming, and they knew that every piece of the financial puzzle would be crucial.

The largest and most vital piece of that puzzle fell into place last year when voters overwhelmingly approved the Special-Purpose Local Option Sales Tax VII referendum. One of the primary elements of that $98 million referendum was a whopping $10 million line item for street repairs.

With the financial pieces in place, Subadan, Roberson, Maples, Brown and others like Deputy Public Works Director Stacey Rowe started fine-tuning their plan. They unveiled it Tuesday, and the commission unanimously passed it.

The headline-making bottom line of the plan is to spend $17.5 million in funding that is in place over the next six years to create a program that will allow the city to resurface all of its streets on a rotating basis every 15 to 20 years, which is the optimal time-frame that engineers recommend for the kind of streets in the city.

Here’s the way it works: The city will use the $1,617,962 in LMIG funding it has socked away, plus the annual $996,245 it gets from that state fund and $2,385,793 in SPLOST collections to complete Phase 1 of the resurfacing plan in 2018. That $5 million will be used throughout the city’s six wards to address the most immediate needs, including the 35 percent of the city’s streets that Rowe said had been rated “very poor” during a citywide audit.

Over the following five years, the city will utilize its projected $996,962 LMIG allocations (the state uses a formula to determine the actual amount) and $1,522,841 in SPLOST collections — which gives the city $2,519,087 per year — to continue the program. If all goes as planned, the city will bring streets throughout the city up to optimal standards and will have put in place a process whereby street maintenance will continue on a prescribed basis.

Certainly the general public — outside, of course, those who complain about every pothole they encounter — is not going to get overly excited about a program that resurfaces the city’s streets, just as there was little more than a ho-hum when Subadan, Roberson and Public Works officials convinced the City Commission — which deserves its share of applause for seeing the benefits of such programs — to green-light a $40 million Georgia Environmental Finance Authority loan application that will allow the city to begin work immediately on severely needed sewer improvements rather than wait for SPLOST collections to trickle in.

Ward IV City Commissioner Roger Marietta perhaps embodied the spirit — and emphasized the significance — of Tuesday’s vote when he said, “I’m sick tonight and probably shouldn’t be here, but I came because I wanted to express my support for this project.”

Most citizens won’t share Marietta’s enthusiasm. That’s a shame because they should. What the city did Tuesday could be legacy-making. Sexy? Nope. Good governance? Oh, absolutely.

Email Carlton Fletcher at [email protected]. Follow @ABH_Fletcher on Twitter.

Staff Photo