Tuesday, January 3, 2012
Transit Mayor Reed begins 2012 with eye on transportation tax
Posted by Scott Henry @ScottTheHenry on Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 4:53 PM
OK, so it unofficially began a while back, but today, in his first public speech of 2012, Mayor Kasim Reed made a special point of asking the movers and shakers in the Kiwanis Club of Atlanta to support his vision of a metropolitan area made more navigable by better transit options and more affluent due to a boost in infrastructure construction.
My guess is that if you are a member of any group to which the mayor will be speaking between now and July, you will hear some version of this pitch:
I need you all, as we go through a conversation about the TSPLOST, to care about it. Because I believe this: We need to pass it. I'm not asking you all to come to any conclusion today, but I'm asking you to start paying attention to it and to start caring about it.We've got two major problems facing our state. One is lack of wage growth [compared to] other Southern cities. If you have folks not making the money they used to make, it impacts the ability of the city to compete. The other problem is a lack of high-paying jobs in technology, bio science and construction...
I submit that if you support the regional TSPLOST effort, we will pump somewhere below $650 million and $750 million into the metropolitan Atlanta economy every year for the next 10 years and end up investing about $9 billion.
I believe this is fundamental to maintaining our position as the center of the South. So I need you to be for it.
As has become his style, Reed framed his talk in terms of some of his pet themes: staying competitive, taking risks, going for the big get.
"Atlanta is best…when it's aiming for something and when it's competing. We're not good at shrinking or being small," he told the crowd. "When we take risks and when we stretch, we're the Atlanta that you know and that you care about."
Now, he was talking to a largely business-oriented audience, so it was no surprise to hear him tell folks, "My primary job is to make sure Atlanta remains the center of commerce in the South." But it's not simply a line. That sentence — whether one agrees or not that that's an appropriate goal for a big-city mayor — comes as close to the core Kasim as you're likely to get. It's why he's always jetting off to D.C. or working with the governor on getting funds to deepen the port of Savannah; he wants to get an edge on the competition.
I don't know if the TSPLOST will pass, but it'll be close. Maybe down to the wire. That's why I predict you'll be hearing a lot on the subject from the guy who went from polling at 7 percent to becoming mayor.
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