Habersham County leaders and citizens are between a rock and a hard place when it comes to this Roads & Bridges Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax. Since that is a mouthful, we will use its colloquial name from now on – T-SPLOST.
When the idea first came up to present a T-SPLOST to the voters, the county manager and commission did not want to call it by that name. Rather, they thought Roads & Bridges SPLOST would make it sound more palatable to the citizens.
It would be even better to shorten it to R&B SPLOST, but that might somehow suggest it was a tax to improve on the presence of one particular musical genre in the community.
Whatever you call it, a tax by another name brings the same amount of alarm among citizens these days. As for the county leadership, they are forbidden from advocating for the tax to be passed.
At their recent town hall meetings, the county leaders have made a presentation about the condition of roads in Habersham County and the status of road costs and where we stand on certain things compared to other counties.
While they cannot advocate for the tax directly, two things are unequivocally true. First, the commissioners voted to put the tax on the November ballot, so they obviously think we need it and would benefit from it.
Second, the presentation given at the county town halls paints an inherently grim picture of our road situation here. The average person who sat down and watched the presentation for the first time with no knowledge of Habersham County, its political players or anything else about the county would no doubt say the presentation was indicating that we need this thing.
Chairman Bruce Palmer and attorney Doug McDonald argued at a recent town hall about this very issue, with McDonald claiming Palmer’s presentation is an endorsement of the tax, and Palmer saying he is simply presenting facts.
The difficult problem is, they’re both right, and that’s what makes this situation so hard.
Another note that came up in that meeting mentioned that we don’t know what we will get from Local Maintenance and Improvement Grants (LMIG) because our gas tax has been suspended for most of this year. But we know that Nov. 11 will be the final suspension of said tax, since Gov. Brian Kemp will have no more political capital to gain from its absence by then.
So what we are saying is, we are going to pay for this one way or the other. We can vote this down now and probably pay for it later, or we can vote it in now and add to our burgeoning daily tax burden.
It’s a difficult choice to be sure.