Bill Johnson on the gas tax

By Jennifer J. Foster

I have heard from GOP gubernatorial candidate Bill Johnson about my column criticizing the effort by Madison County officials to secure more funding for road projects and his decision to sign their pledge (“Think critically about campaign promises you hear,“ Oct. 3).

Johnson contacted me via e-mail and asked me to call him to discuss “why I made the pledge and how I intend to keep it.“ I wrote him back that while I would certainly be happy to call him, he was also welcome to write a piece explaining his decision; if he did so, I told him, I would post it here on the blog exactly as he provided it.

He chose to write his response, and it appears below.

Thanks for responding to my inquiry.  As you commented, I recently made a commitment to the Tennessee-Valley area to return 80% of the gas tax paid in that area to develop infrastructure there.  Your question was how can the citizens in the area know I will keep my commitment?

Firstly, I’d like to mention that as Director for the Alabama Department of Economic and Community Affairs (ADECA), I coordinated the state Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) investments and sent more than $1 million dollars to the various BRAC committees to not only make sure we didn’t lose BRAC jobs under that process, but to ensure we gained jobs.  Through that process, our BRAC committees did an outstanding job gaining thousands of new, high-paying jobs for Alabama.  When compared to other industrial-related recruitment projects, the cost per job was miniscule.  We definitely realized tremendous bang for our investment.

As head of ADECA, a large part of my responsibility was working with communities on economic and workforce development.  I understand very well the implications and requirements on locating new companies and jobs AND how important delivering the infrastructure to capitalize on those jobs is.

Even though I managed more than $240 million a year at ADECA, there was never enough money for economic development.  I frequently met with mayors, county commissioners, senators and representatives who were looking for funding for infrastructure for new companies and jobs. My priority on the funds was this:  they had to have a ‘bird in the hand’; i.e. an actual company willing to locate and commit to creating ‘X’ number of jobs for the amount of our investment.

My commitment on the gas tax is going to be the same:  my priority is going to be targeting limited infrastructure dollars to support economic development and job creation.  In the case of Huntsville, we already know more than 10,000 plus jobs are on their way.  On the Alabama side of Ft Benning, I have had ADECA staff working more than a year making sure they are prepared for the growth that will be associated with the new BRAC jobs.
We believe that at least one third of those new families will end up living on the Alabama side of the Chattahoochee River because of our outstanding quality of life.

I can assure the citizenry of your area that when I make a promise or a pledge, I’ll do everything within my power to see it is carried out.

I will give Johnson this much: He gives it a good shot.

But my problem with the pledge is two-fold: One, Johnson—and all the other candidates who sign the pledge—are making policy five years out. The pledge calls for the return of 80 percent of the gas tax money collected in Madison County to Madison County for the first term of the next governor. That’s five years from now. The information I had on the BRAC-related growth in Madison County calls for that growth to have happened by 2011. The next governor won’t take office until January 2011. Add four years—and the reality that you can’t know what future needs might pop up in that time period—to that, and you can see why I called this approach “reckless planning.“

The second problem is the more insidious and serious one, especially for rural communities throughout Alabama. As I noted in the column, economically depressed areas rely on the redistribution of the gasoline tax to help them meet their infrastructure needs. If Johnson’s philosophy as governor is going to be “bird in the hand,“ that’s going to mean a lot of uphill sledding for a lot of Alabamians—not just those in rural communities, but also those in places that are in transition after having seen factories or plants leave the state (or the country altogether). Here in this area, the cities of Valley and Wadley immediately come to mind. Those cities and other towns like them have to remake themselves; they have to attract new industry if they are going to survive. Their roads have to support that industry. They don’t have a tourist economy. They don’t have other resources for local revenue at their disposal. How are they going to build those roads to attract that industry if they can no longer rely on the state to provide the funding to—quite literally—pave the way?

I had an interesting conversation about this same issue with Democratic congressional candidate Josh Segall about a year ago. As I mentioned before in profiling him, Segall is passionate about creating jobs and economic development. In his editorial meeting with the Opelika-Auburn News, he talked about all the development potential that exists at Lake Martin but is yet virtually untapped because of the infrastructure problem there. You have to have the roads first, he said; otherwise, you can’t get companies’ attention.

I commend Johnson for stepping up and at least trying to shed some light on this issue. But I still think it’s bad policy.