DRIVING GEORGIA FORWARD

DAVID CARAVIELLO

TThe process of adding an electric vehicle charging station to one of Georgia’s highways is far more involved than just plunking down an outlet off an Interstate 75 exit ramp. Does there need to be a canopy, like those which cover the pumps at gasoline fueling stations? Do there need to be restrooms and opportunities to grab food and refreshment? How do you process payments so they’re secure, and make the entire facility safe for the roughly 20 minutes that people spend in their EVs waiting on their car batteries to recharge? N

“We want these to be customer-driven,” said Jannine Miller, Director of the GDOT Office of Planning, one of several hats she wears within Georgia’s transportation leadership. “We want local communities to have opportunities to grow from the economic development of tourists coming through. We just published a request for information to gather more input about how we implement the plan. Those are the kinds of things we want to figure out.”

These are the questions that Miller and her team at the GDOT Office of Planning mull over on a daily basis as Georgia prepares for a surge in electric vehicle use that will surely accompany the state’s role as a hub for EV manufacturing. But automotive electrification is hardly the only issue on Miller’s plate—she also serves as Executive Director of the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority (GRTA), the State Road and Tollway Authority (SRTA), and the AtlantaRegion Transit Link Authority (ATL), making her one of the most important voices in shaping Georgia’s transportation present and future.

It’s not a coincidence that she’s wearing all four of those hats at the same time. Her predecessor, Chris Tomlinson, also oversaw the three agencies: GRTA (which deals with transportation-related air quality), STRA (which operates toll roads), and ATL (which coordinates transit options beyond the MARTA network in 13 counties). But Miller brings an added degree of gravity to those multiple roles thanks to her other job as GDOT’s Planning Director, a position appointed by and accountable to the governor.

“Planning is about the future and making sure we understand, as best we can, those new paradigms that the future is going to bring to us,” Miller said. “We're used to growth at this point in metro Atlanta. But we're not necessarily used to as much growth as we're seeing in, say, metro Columbus, metro Augusta, or metro Savannah. That population and traffic growth is really, really new to them. They have been given some more tools and a little bit more funding through the bipartisan infrastructure law. And we coordinate with those metropolitan areas in their transportation planning and help them understand the tools that are available to them and methods that they can take to get ahead of their growth.”

Transportation has been a passion of Miller’s since her childhood, during which she recalls playing with Matchbox cars and designing street grids on paper. A native of New York State who’s been in Georgia for three decades now, Miller has done a little of everything in the transportation arena—worked in supply chain for The Home Depot, ran the Center of Innovation for Logistics at the Georgia Department of Economic Development, oversaw GRTA in a previous stint at the agency, worked in a pair of White House cabinet agencies including the U.S. Department of Transportation as Senior Advisor to then-Secretary Elaine Chao.

It was Gov. Brian Kemp who recommended that Miller head the three agencies in addition to her position as GDOT’s Planning Director, to which he also appointed her. “Jannine Miller is a great public servant who will further her statewide impact,” he said when endorsing her for the posts in December of 2022. “She has distinguished herself as a leader in the field of transportation and infrastructure on both the state and national levels. Jannine will bring an innovative approach and a deep knowledge of the issues facing commuters and those who move Georgia-made products through and beyond Georgia as she steps into these new roles.”

Miller manages the multiple roles by working out of two offices, one at GDOT and one at GTRA/SRTA/ATL, splitting her week between the two locations and occasionally using telework. But “it's less about a physical place to go than it is about being coordinated with the teams and managing great people,” she said. “I'll tell you what, none of these are fixer-uppers, so to speak. We've got great teams doing great work in both agencies. So really, the play here is coordination and streamlining.” Four agencies, one leader

It’s a quirk in Georgia’s governance structure that led Miller to effectively wear four leadership hats all at the same time. Georgia is one of just nine states, she said, where the governor does not appoint a transportation chief. The Georgia Constitution provides that the GDOT Commissioner, who is the Department’s CEO, is appointed by the State Transportation Board. That led former Gov. Roy Barnes to pull SRTA out of GDOT and make the agency accountable to him, the beginning of a domino effect that gradually gave the governor’s office more control over the state’s transportation infrastructure.

Barnes also created GTRA, in an attempt to pull metro Atlanta into compliance with transportation air quality standards that were connected to federal funds. The GDOT Director of Planning role was created and made accountable to the governor in 2009 under then-Gov. Sonny Purdue, for whom Miller worked as an advisor, to give the state’s chief executive influence over how transportation funds are strategically deployed. The final piece of the puzzle, ATL, was signed into law by then-Gov. Nathan Deal in 2018 to coordinate and improve transit options in a 13-county metro Atlanta area. N

Having one person at the head of all four agencies allows Miller to help coordinate projects—like bringing ATL and GRTA into the loop on SRTA tolling initiatives, which might not have happened earlier when the agencies were under separate leaders. “That’s one example of the coordination and streamlining that can happen with one person at the top,” she said.

As the head of three state agencies and GDOT’s Office of Planning, Miller is afforded a unique perspective on transportation issues in metro Atlanta and throughout the state. That includes the Savannah area, where Bryan County has become one of the fastest-growing counties in America, and where the continued expansion of the Port of Savannah requires a constant search for solutions to relieve pressure on road and rail infrastructure. GDOT’s Office of Planning is preparing to publish a Coastal Empire study that will identify over $1 billion in transportation investments that could make a difference for the four-county region, Miller said.

“That includes everything from widening some arterial roads to widening I-16,” she added. “Taking intersections that right now are built for a fraction of the traffic, and upgrading those so they can handle more flow. It’s an exciting batch of information that we're going to hand to them to consider in future referendums and for GDOT to know how, when we're investing our bonds in that region, where the most effective places are to put that to get them ready for all that.”

There’s also something else happening in the Savannah region: construction on a $5.5 billion Hyundai electric vehicle plant in Bryan County, which began in January. At the same time, work is underway on a $5 billion Rivian electric vehicle manufacturing plant in Morgan and Walton counties east of Atlanta. Between them, the two factories are one day expected to pump out over 700,000 electric vehicles annually, according to the Georgia Department of Economic Development. And it’s Miller and her team that are laying the groundwork for the EV surge to come.

THE ‘MUTUAL’ EV RAMP-UP

The first Georgia-made Hyundai electric vehicle is forecasted to roll off the assembly line in 2025 and the first Rivian will be manufactured in the Peach State a year later. Already, over a dozen companies that sustain the EV industry supply chain have set up operations in Georgia. Kemp wants Georgia to become the electric mobility capital of the United States, and more EVs made in the state naturally translates to more EVs driven in the state.

“The Hyundai Motor Group, which also includes Kia, makes some of the most popular SUVs in the ICE world,” Miller said, using an acronym for internal combustion engine, “so we know that drivers in the Southeast and Georgians, in particular, are going to migrate to electric vehicles. I’m certain we’re going to see those around. And we've got a nice kind of mutual ramp-up happening—so it's not like EVs are here all of a sudden and we don't have charging stations, or we have all these charging stations and there are no EVs sitting at them. We both are going to kind of ramp up equally, as best as you can do that.”

Indeed, the EV movement is underway—Tesla’s Model Y was the thirdbest-selling SUV in America in 2022; according to Kelly Blue Book, its 231,400 units sold outranked only by the Toyota RAV-4 and Honda CR-V. According to GDOT, Georgia’s 4.4 EVs per 1,000 vehicle registrations leads the Southeast. Georgia has been allocated $135 million through the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program (known as NEVI), which requires that funding first be used to build out EV charging stations largely along existing interstate highways—with the goal of allowing EV drivers to eventually travel comfortably from coast to coast.

EV charging stations in the Peach State built with NEVI funds must be available to drivers of more than one model of electric vehicle, be no more than 50 miles apart, and be less than 1 mile from the interstate. Although Georgia DOT will not own or operate any EV charging equipment—it plans to partner with private entities or community partners for the managing of the actual stations themselves—the agency is clearly quarterbacking the effort to deploy those charging stations, which will be built with federal funds.

“The charging stations that we'll be deploying with the NEVI funds have to be universally accessible,” Miller said. “So even Tesla drivers can have an adapter plug that enables them to charge into the universal EV supply equipment. And right now, the law tells us that we have to be at 150-kilowatt charging—that's a quick charge. In 20 minutes, you'll have all the charge that you need, and you probably won't even need that much, necessarily.”

And EV charging locations will not mirror gas stations one-to-one, she added—the EV fueling profile is far different, more akin to charging your cellphone at every opportunity rather than filling up only when the gas tank nears empty. “It’s just a very different operational paradigm,” Miller said. And while the NEVI funds require a focus on the interstates, Miller said GDOT is looking beyond that to the prospect of community charging—which provides options for those who don’t have access to individual chargers and potentially deepens the pool of EV drivers.

“There were special discretionary grants that were set up in the bipartisan infrastructure law about community charging so that wherever there's a lot of multifamily housing or rental units, we want to make charging opportunities available to them at home as much as folks who have a single-family homeownership profile where they get to charge at night,” Miller said. “We're looking to balance all that out, so it's not just about folks who have resources. Because not too long from now, EVs are going to be affordable for everyone.”

That is the job of a transportation planner, after all—to look into the future and seek solutions to challenges that haven’t even arisen yet. And it provides Miller with a unique and useful perspective as she shuttles between her two offices, juggles her four leadership roles, and creates plans for the future of Georgia’s vast transportation network that includes 9.1 million registered motor vehicles—and, eventually, one EV charging station every 50 miles of interstate highway. N