Letter to Editor: Money for Nothing by Bill Evelyn

If you want to complete all the projects approved on the Region 1 – Northwest Georgia T-SPLOST constrained project list, your county is going to need more money. There is a $370,069,058 shortfall from the GDOT projected costs (cost – $1,341,693,365) of all the projects and dollars committed to all the projects (committed – $971,624,307). These are based on 2011 numbers. Therefore only 72% of the projects are completely paid for by the new T-SPLOST tax. The counties in Region 1 will need to make up the dollar shortfall from other sources or drop projects from the list.

The vast majority of the projects don’t begin until 2016 or beyond for good reason; there are not enough technically skilled people to start all projects immediately nor have they collected enough money to start the projects. So as more-and-more of your county projects are unfunded you become more-and-more of a tax donor county. The GDOT still gets their $10,689,980 in program fees already approved in the T-SPLOST, but you paid that money for nothing.

“It’s always hard to educate anyone to believe that there are some instances in which the Constitution, correctly read, does not yield the outcome they’d prefer”–

Kevin R. C. Gutzman, JD, PhD

Bill Evelyn
Director
State of Georgia Tea Party, LLC