John Sherman v. the Peachtree Street streetcar
April 18, 2007 at 2:25 pm by Mara Shalhoup in NewsFirst he tried to block the Beltline, the wildly popular urban-renewal project that eventually will put a loop of light rail, parks and trails around intown Atlanta.
Now John Sherman has it out for the proposed Peachtree Street streetcar, the pros and cons of which I wrote about earlier this month. And he’s using the same argument — namely that taxpayers, not the government, should be the ones to green-light the project — this time around.
I described the following scenario in the April 4 article, meaning I should have seen Sherman’s streetcar antipathy coming:
Of course, the streetcar does face some significant hurdles. As currently proposed, the project would be funded in large part with a new tax on property owners in the corridor — a concept that could meet opposition.
Then the AJC reported last week that the opposition, headed by Sherman, had surfaced:
John Sherman, president of the Fulton County Taxpayers Association, says it would be unfair to tax the property owners along the Peachtree corridor to help pay for the $1 billion project without a referendum.
“It’s taxation without representation,” he said. “It’s why we revolted against England.”
Back in March, when I talked to Sherman about his issues with the Beltline, he said he had nothing against the Beltline itself — only that property owners should be the ones approving the $1.7 billion in future tax revenue that will help fund it. (The other half of the Beltline’s cost would come from private donations and federal funds.)
“Greater transparency is needed, and less hype,” he told me. “I think the taxpayers should have some kind of voice in this.”
Some think Sherman is a rabble rouser who’s standing up against worthy and well-supported causes in order to make a name for himself. If so, at least he’s consistent.
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April 18th, 2007 at 3:55 pm
Sherman is either an idiot or a charlatan if he think this is “taxation without representation”. For that to be true, this tax would have to be voted on by the politicians in another state or county. To be truly analogous to the Revolution, the politicians would be in another country or, say, the UN.
You see, Mr. Sherman, you do have representation……you may not like the decisions made by them but you are represented. We do not live in a democracy, thank God, because democracy is a euphemism for mob rule. We don’t want that, do we?