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Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Gwinnett attitudes change S-L-O-W-L-Y
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In a straw poll taken along with Tuesday’s primary, almost 70 percent of Gwinnett County Democrats said they would support paying an extra penny in sales tax to extend MARTA rail service to their county.
Gwinnett Republicans, on the other hand, rendered the opposite verdict, with almost 63 percent saying they would oppose a penny MARTA tax. Personally, that outcome was surprising — I thought the rejection rate among GOP voters would be even higher, given that a state primary election in the middle of July tends to be ignored by all but the hardest core of the party faithful.
The turnout numbers bear that out. Only 36,000 Republicans voted in Gwinnett’s primary Tuesday, compared to more than 81,000 in February’s Republican presidential primary.
However, the best gauge of just how conservative that group of voters really was comes from another straw-poll question on the ballot. Gwinnett Republicans were asked whether “the Republican Party has moved too far to the political left,” and more than 57 percent said yes, the problem with the party is that it has gotten too liberal. That is not a widely shared assessment.
Given that background, it’s a bit of a surprise that 37 percent of Gwinnett Republicans nonetheless said they would support a MARTA tax and rail service. Apparently, some minds are changing.
But others are not. In the AJC’s GwinnettTalk blog, readers were asked whether they supported a MARTA extension and why. The refrain from opponents was distressingly familiar.
“We don’t need Marta out in Gwinnett County!” one commenter wrote. “It will just bring all the criminals, thugs and rif raf from Atlanta out here — we have enough of that already and don’t need more. Let them go to the Perimeter Mall or 5 points! Keep marta out of Gwinnett!!!”
“I voted NO because I don’t want more crime in our area,” another commenter said. “We have enough as it is!”
Logically, that kind of argument is easy to rebut. Criminals don’t ride mass transit on their way to robbing a bank or breaking into a home. They use cars that are driven on highways. Furthermore, as it developed from rural to suburban to increasingly urban, Gwinnett has developed its own home-grown crime problem as well as other problems long associated with urban areas.
The idea that Gwinnett could hold the world at bay by barring MARTA from its doorstep proved wrong long ago.
Unfortunately, however, logic doesn’t help much in dispelling an objection based less in rationality than in fear, much of it race-based. The question for Gwinnett, and for the metro region as a whole, is whether such attitudes can be overcome to allow progress toward a badly needed regional transportation solution.
Gwinnett has long been considered the region’s biggest obstacle to a cooperative approach, in part because it has never developed a leadership group with enough vision to see beyond county boundaries. And the irony is, no county has more to gain from a regional transportation solution than Gwinnett, and more to lose if transit doesn’t become an option.
While traffic is a problem everywhere in metro Atlanta, it may be most acute in Gwinnett, both in terms of commuting to jobs outside the county and in terms of local traffic within Gwinnett itself.
Getting from place to place inside Gwinnett has become a major hassle.
Furthermore, 20 years ago urban areas had more to gain from transit than suburban areas. That has now reversed. Even before gasoline hit $4 a gallon, long-term demographic and business trends had begun to concentrate wealth and population in the urban core, a phenomenon seen not just in Atlanta but in cities around the country. Expensive gasoline can only accelerate that trend.
With travel more expensive, suburban communities such as Gwinnett need affordable, convenient transit options to tie them more closely to the urban core. But a lot of people in Gwinnett still don’t see it that way.
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It’s official: GOP=2Lib4Ga…
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Last week I mentioned that Gwinnett Republicans had put a straw-poll question on Tuesday’s ballot asking GOP voters whether “the Republican Party has moved too far to the political left.”
Well, the results are in. More than 57 percent of Gwinnett Republicans say that yes, the party has moved too far to the left.
