Adoption of TSPLOST and debt reduction

The Transportation Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax (TSPLOST) failed in all but three of the twelve regions in Georgia in 2012. This paper investigates what factors attributed to this failure despite millions of dollars of advertising to raise public awareness. In addition, the paper assesses whether the stated goal of debt reduction has been observed for counties in Georgia that implemented SPLOST. We are able to locate the counties which passed the measure and using census data we are able to identify key features of Georgia counties which may or may not explain why some counties voted the way they did. Our preliminary findings indicate that the main reason counties adopted the TSPLOST was their level of per capita income. Counties with higher per capita income were significantly less likely to vote for the TSPLOST. The logit model evaluated at the average values of the explanatory variables, revealed that the probability that the TSPLOST was adopted by the average county was 22%.  In terms of debt reduction, we used the debt accrued by the school district in the county as a proxy for overall county debt. Our findings are that the adoption of TSPLOST is not associated with low levels of debt. The population of the county on the other hand was positively related to the level of the debt in the county. Though this paper focuses on the state of Georgia, we believe that the adoption and performance of the TSPLOST measure provides insight for other states and regions considering it.