Transportation Summit:

Public Now Recognizes Transportation As Major Issue And Time To Do Something Is Now, Summit Told

By Dick Pettys
InsiderAdvantage Georgia

(12/12107) Georgia voters now recognize transportation as one of the state’s biggest problems, and it’s time to quit talking and do something about it, a variety of speakers told a James magazine / InsiderAdvantage transportation summit Tuesday.

“At some point in time we’ve got to stop and make a decision … we’re closing in on that time,” House Transportation Committee Chairman Vance Smith said during a panel discussion with his Senate counterpart, Sen. Jeff Mullis.

“Our leadership has given us a task,” said Mullis, who with Smith conducted a series of hearings across the state looking for funding solutions. Their report is due before the session. “We’re danged determined,” he said.

Pollster and syndicated columnist Matt Towery, who is CEO of InsiderAdvantage, offered preliminary findings of a special survey conducted specifically for conference attendees.

“Transportation will become an issue as it never has before,” he said, attributing part of that to the interest in having a new commissioner at the state DOT and part of it to this finding: “The public is beginning to say that transportation is one of their top issues.”

That is a huge shift from polls dating back to the 1980s in which transportation usually finished in the bottom half of burning public issues. “We have seen transportation bubble up as an issue,” he said.

The summit drew an impressive turnout of industry representatives and elected officials. Among the other speakers: DOT Commissioner Gena Abraham, on the job just seven days; DOT board member and former Chairman David Doss, and Craig Lesser, managing director of the international affairs initiative at McKenna Long and former Commissioner of the Georgia Department of Economic Development.

Abraham, the first woman to head the state transportation department, said she’s found the picture at DOT isn’t as bleak as some perceive it to be. It’s not the hide-bound dinosaur some believe, she said. But Abraham, who has built a reputation as a fix-it expert with hidebound agencies, said there are problems, nonetheless.

“I have never met a more dedicated staff of professionals than I have at GDOT … and I don’t say that lightly,” she said, dismissing prior reports she’d seen that “didn’t leave a positive impression of DOT.”

She acknowledged there have been some things that were “difficult to admit … (in) senior staff meetings; not easy to discuss. But these guys have been frank, they’ve been real honest and I think they’ve really been looking for a change.”

But the agency isn’t delivering on its promises, she said, and part of that is because it hasn’t really known until now just how many projects are in the works. She said she got varying answers when she asked that question, starting with 1,100, then 1,300, then 1,500 and ultimately 5,430 and, “as of last night,” 9,211.

“If we can’t answer the basic question of how many projects we have, I understand clearly why we’re not delivering our program,” she said.

The department is awash in long-range plans, but they all need to be pared down so the agency can focus on “a shorter window, things we can actually deliver,” she said.

Abraham said she’s open to innovative funding mechanisms like public-private partnerships. “I’m all for trying things new. Not all things are going to be successful but that’s okay with me … I’m not scared of failure. Failure brings a good learning model for success.”

At the same time, she said she’s not yet comfortable that the department can adequately manage a public-partnership endeavor and believes it needs a staff dedicated specifically to that. Too, she said, basic policy questions haven’t been answered – should such partnerships generate revenue, be revenue neutral or be subsidized by the state? “It’s going to take us a while to get through these,” she said.

Abraham also said she wants to streamline the process by which the state funds off-system roads. “We are going to move to objective criteria and GDOT is going to say which projects are most important to GDOT … not just the political needs of a certain community.” She said local officials are screaming – “Just tell me the system so I don’t have to come see you twice a year and beg for money.”

And she said she’d like to have one person assigned to manage a project from start to finish. That’s not the case now. Typically, projects are “thrown over the fence” from one person to another.

On competing tax proposals that have been raised to finance the state’s enormous backlog of road needs – one a statewide sales tax increase and the other a local option approach to allow individual counties to band together for cross-jurisdictional needs – she said she doesn’t have an opinion yet.

“But we do have a very significant funding issue and I’m going to be talking about that in the next few days, and PPIs are one of the solutions but they’re not going to solve everything,” she said.

During a panel moderated by David Doss, some top level names in the public-private arena chewed over the state’s readiness for public-private partnerships.

“Georgia is at a decision point,” said Denver Sutler, former secretary of Florida’s DOT. “The industry is going to be moving to places where leadership is being demonstrated and action being taken.”

Bill McGuiness, executive vice president of Skanska, one of the world’s leading construction groups, said the state got off to a good start with the partnership concept only to falter.

Doss said he thinks it’s time to clear the slate of all the proposals on the table and start over, beginning first with a PPI to convert all the inside-perimeter high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes, which aren’t tolled, to high-occupancy toll (HOT) lanes, which are. Tolls from that project then could be used to fund additional projects, he said.

Lesser, who spoke during a working lunch, told the group there’s no time to waste in fixing the transportation problem.

As the state’s chief industry-hunter, he said, no industrial prospect ever admitted that the road system and its problems kept them from choosing Georgia. “What we really don’t know is what we may never have been considered for because of what they read in the national press or what the statistics about the commute time suggested to them … That list may be longer than we want to conceive.”

He suggested technology could hold one answer to congestion. Supplying everyone with a global positioning system when they bought a car, and enabling them to find alternative routes, “not only would solve our transportation issues – but think of the marketing value around the world.”

In their concluding panel, Smith and Mullis did not say what they would recommend to the Legislature. “The time is drawing near. You will all hear that plan,” Smith said. Mullis did say at one point he favors a statewide approach.

Among the findings in the InsiderAdvantage / James Magazine survey was that “trucks, trucks, trucks” were cited as a highway problem, Towery told the group.

Sixty-two percent of the survey group would support truck-only lanes supported by tolls, he said.