Urgent Care Needed

Really?

Now that all the TSPLOST whining has degenerated into whimpering it seems reasonable to ask a simple question:

What made this a crisis?

Anyone who's lived in the metro region for more than five years knows a few things. Traffic here is pretty bad. You're one wreck away from an extra hour tacked on to a thirty minute commute. Most folks "ain't from around here" and where they're from they send their worst first. MARTA sucks. Always has, always will. Local politicians are as corrupt as they come and are second only to their greedy business cronies. Hartsfield[1] serves as proof that power corrupts and that with adequate cashflow even corruption can appear to work. Sometimes.

What we don't know is how a chronic condition, one we had learned to live with, one that had gone into a very limited remission suddenly became critical. Why 2012? Why not 2006, ten years after the Olympics when the shine had gone all patina? Why not Y2K? If you believe the loudmouth who was pumping the TSPLOST nothing has been done on GA400 and I-285 since 1972, so why not the mid-eighties?

The answer is simple and unsurprising. The Feds are cutting back on the money they will dole out to Atlanta to prop up the Georgia DOT and other local interests. And we've become addicted to Fed Funding. Intentionally. And it's not like we have used these funds wisely. We've sqandered it to keep gasoline taxes artificially low, avoid applying impact fees to address the costs associated with development and hand out tax abatements like candy. That kind of hedonistic, drug addled thinking has put us in such a precarious position that the tiniest reduction in Fed Funds pushes us from chronic but manageable to critical, near death.




[1] @TOD we've not tacked on the "Jackson" as we're not sure whether that is about Jesse, Maynard, or Michael.