I look forward to voting "no" in July 2012 to the T-SPLOST tax. My reasons:

The groups of people who decide on how our many billions of TAX dollars (statewide over 10 years) are spent will not be accountable to the taxpayers. Tax money from taxpayers should go to the State of Georgia and be spent by public servants whom we elect and whom we can replace, if they waste our tax money.

The layers of nonelected groups (GDOT, GMRDC, GRTA, ARC, MARTA and 12 regional roundtables), having hundreds of taxpayer-funded meetings will waste huge amounts of our tax money on "administration," which has nothing to do with building a road. That's what we are already paying the Georgia Department of Transportation to do.

Priority will be given to "transportation" projects that qualify for federal matching funds. The federal government has no money, in case you have not heard. So it will be money borrowed from China, England, India, etc.

Also, to get federally borrowed funds, federal restrictions and regulations will run the costs up so that for each one of our tax dollars, we will maybe get 50 cents in actual transportation improvements. And I do not want the federal government telling Georgia taxpayers what to build in our state. Federally funded MARTA is a mess, for example.

We should pay our current Georgia taxes (including tax on gasoline) and elect people we know from our part of the state to go to the statehouse to represent us and work with the GDOT to build the roads we (including the chamber of commerce) tell them we need. And if they waste our tax money (supposedly set aside for transportation) on other projects, so that we don't get any new roads and our existing roads repaired, we should vote for someone else who can get the job done.

We should not allow our elected officials to pass off their responsibilities to nonelected groups over whom we have no control. It is as simple as that.

Vote no to an additional transportation tax. We are already paying a tax for transportation.

Rick Frommer
Murrayville