T-SPLOST Explained —Corey Hull of VLMPO at LCDP (Part 1)

T-SPLOST is a ten-year one-cent sales tax, organized in twelve regional taxing districts, through committees composed of county chairs and city mayors, plus an executive committee with some of them plus 3 people from the legislature, which funnels transportation funding requests to GDOT, which picks, and then sends to a referendum in 2012. Got all that? No? Well, Corey explains it much better than I do.

You've heard Corey Hull of the Valdosta-Lowndes County Metropolitan Planning Organization (VLMPO) give a brief version of T-SPLOST at VLCIA. Here he talks at greater length at the Lowndes County Democratic Party:

The Georgia legislature passed what was then known as House bill 277 called Transportation Investment Act of 2010.... It created or proposed a one percent sales tax for transportation purposes throughout the state of Georgia. It creates twelve special transportation taxing districts that are based on the boundaries of the regional commissions. And that is where the connection with the regional commission stops. They are not the same body....

So who are these regional commissions?

Chairman Paulk and Mayor Fretti are our representatives from Lowndes County.

There's a mayor and the county commission chair from each county in the region.

It also created an executive committee. The executive committee is five persons plus two members from the House transportation committee and one member from the Senate transportation committee. In our case there are five county chairmen serving on that, and Ashley is on that for Lowndes County.

The Roundtable has elected Mayor Travis Parker of Nashville as Chairman, and he is the non-voting chairman of the Executive Committee as well.

The state transportation budget is $2 billion dollars, of which $1.1 billion is federal funding, mostly from gas tax. The state has to match the federal funding, and is getting closer to not doing that. This sales tax was the legislature's way of handling that.

Here's the video.

Corey Hull of the Valdosta-Lowndes County Metropolitan Planning Organization (VLMPO)
explains T-SPLOST (HB 277) Transportation Investment Act of 2010
at the monthly meeting of the Lowndes County Democratic Party (LCDP),
Gretchen Quarterman (Chair), Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia.
Video by John S. Quarterman for LAKE, the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange.

Stay tuned; there's more.

-jsq