The fate of Georgia’s transportation network—and its economic future—will be decided in a few short months in a once-in-a-generation referendum on a special sales tax; at least that’s what proponents of the T-SPLOST claim. For opponents, the narrative is not nearly so cut and dried. Three very divergent camps seem to be jockeying for the attention of voters, and it’s by no means clear how that will shake out in the state’s 13 diverse regions in which referendums will be held.

On the left end of the spectrum, we have the recent statement of opposition by the state chapter of the Sierra Club as somewhat representative (though not entirely so, at least in urban Atlanta where the NAACP and others are also raising questions about the equity of the sales tax and lack of transit solutions for working-class minorities in the city). The environmentalists say that the project lists as written are a raw deal, too heavy on business-as-usual roads, and not heavy enough on transit. Further, they think the narrative of this being our only chance to fix transportation is false. State Sierra Club Director Colleen Kiernan, in a May 11 editorial in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, lays out the case that other cities like Seattle have rejected roads-heavy referendums and gone on to approve transit-heavy project lists. Of course, the political climate is very different here.

The business-as-usual crowd Kiernan references is the T-SPLOST’s main wing of supporters. Locally, Caterpillar cited the referendum’s call for widening US-441 south of Athens as a major factor in the manufacturer's site selection, and the tax has the support of numerous Chambers of Commerce throughout the state. They see job creation and economic development, and also suggest that faster commuting times promised by wider and faster roads will put more money in people’s pockets than the sales tax would take out.

Then there’s the no-new-taxes-ever Tea Party wing, which opposes the notion on principle, pointing to cost overruns on so many other government projects. In a way, this whole referendum process is an outgrowth of that mentality, with state leaders, having bought entirely into the "no taxes" argument, punting the question of needed infrastructure directly to voters rather than voting to increase taxes themselves. Throw in the far Right's healthy skepticism of regional planning and the public transit projects that the Sierra Club wing is demanding more of, and it spells trouble for the tax's supporters. It may just be that the coalition of environmentalists and anti-tax hardliners is the one that will emerge to prevent T-SPLOST from passing—at least for this round.

If these two groups are each capable of deconstructing the narrative that the T-SPLOST is the only way to solve our transportation problems, then things will surely get much more interesting. The legislation that created the T-SPLOST process includes a penalty of higher local contributions to state transportation projects for regions that fail to pass the referendum. That would mean local governments having to raise taxes to make up the difference, or infrastructure issues going unaddressed. Will legislators from regions affected by that provision stand by and enforce that hardship on their constituents, or will local self-interest (and voter pressure) kick in and encourage them to repeal that aspect of the legislation?

With passage hardly guaranteed, even in congested Atlanta, could legislators soon be back at the drawing board? It seems unlikely that if voters across the state handily reject their respective referendums, we will see new project lists crafted that include more transit, as the Sierra Club would like. The question then becomes whether a hypothetical "round two" pushes decision-making down—perhaps to smaller metro regions or shorter time-scales than the current 10-year interval—or up to large-scale state planning.

Despite what the Sierra Club is pitching, the idea of a transit-driven T-SPLOST as a “Plan B” seems like one of the more unlikely outcomes here. The whole issue seems to hinge on which narrative is stronger in Georgia’s conservative majority: pro-business or anti-tax. While our local slate of projects does seem like a stinker, the Atlanta list actually looks like a pretty good deal for environmentalists, considering the conservative approach to transportation we've come to expect in Georgia.

That makes it surprising that the Sierra Club and others would reject it; perhaps their strong rebuke will cause pragmatic pro-business types to recognize that transit is actually good for economic development and begrudgingly cooperate with more liberal types to put contractors to work building rail lines instead of highway lanes. I’m not holding my breath, though. Most likely, we’ll see a split, with different outcomes in different regions, which will still require legislative revisiting of transportation, unfortunately now convoluted by new taxes in some places and not others.