We featured an astonishing graphic on the front of the July 22 edition depicting the paltry amount of roads Habersham County can afford to fix this year – just 10.43 miles out of 506.
With taxes already up and other major needs looming – such as the jail and the hospital debt – the county has been working on putting a Roads & Bridges SPLOST in front of the voters in November.
An additional penny sales tax – bringing us to eight cents total countywide – would help generate at least $44 million for road projects over the next five years.
That could allow the county to spend five times the amount on roads annually than it does now, which would, if the tax later passed a second time, allow the county to theoretically fix all its roads over the next decade at the current rate. It also would allow the cities to take their share of the money and make some road fixes as well.
But let’s not put the cart before the horse, as this tax has to get off the ground and there are a few challenges.
First is passing the tax through the voters in a year where taxes have gone up, inflation is on a record pace and voters already approved a renewal of the E-SPLOST during the May primary.
There also is the issue of whether the county can get the full penny through a signed pact with all seven cities. Going into a meeting after press time Tuesday, Tallulah Falls was the lone holdout, as Alto agreed to gather at the same time and was expected to approve their part of the deal.
Tallulah Falls Mayor Mike Early saw the required agreement of all parties as an opportunity to try and save his town some money on the new public safety radio system that is being constructed. Early hoped to save something on the order of $400,000 in exchange for allowing the Roads & Bridges SPLOST to go through to its full potential.
If the Roads & Bridges SPLOST is capped at .75 cents, it will cost the county (and to a lesser extent, the other cities) something like $11-12 million.
So Early obviously thought, what’s $400,000 between friends for 22 radios when we are talking about $11 million on the back end?
The two deals have nothing to do with each other, but it became a very open game of political backscratching, the likes of which are usually kept far more private. But Early wanted everyone to know what the conditions of the game are, so that they will know who to get upset with if it falls through. Initially, county leaders expressed that they would not compromise on this point.
We will wait and see where this road leads, but whether we want this tax or not, it is desperately needed, one way or another.