MARTA may cut service one day a week, chief says

MARTA’s general manager told state lawmakers Tuesday that the transit system could be forced to cut service by a day a week or for full weekends unless it gets more control over how it spends its money.

But during committee meetings at the state Capitol, some legislators portrayed the metro Atlanta transit agency as a profligate bureaucracy prone to outlandish pay raises and led by officials who sought to shift blame for risky investment deals.

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“I don’t think anyone, even [billionaire investor] Warren Buffett, could have foreseen what has taken place in our economy in the last six months,” MARTA General Manager Beverly Scott told lawmakers.

MARTA wants legislators to lift a restriction in state law that requires the agency to spend half of its revenues on capital projects, rather than operations. As a result, Scott said, $65 million in MARTA revenues the agency desperately needs to operate the system sits in reserve accounts.

MARTA gets more than half its revenue from a sales tax levied in Fulton and DeKalb counties, but those revenues have been plummeting. The rest comes from other sources, including ticket sales. The agency carries 479,000 people a day, nearly 30,000 of them transferring from transit systems from outside Fulton and DeKalb.

“If you went off line for a day, I can’t imagine the traffic,” said Senate Transportation Committee Chairman Jeff Mullis (R-Chickamauga).

But Tuesday, some other lawmakers hammered Scott and members of her staff for hefty pay increases awarded to MARTA employees in 2007-2008 and for involving the agency in complicated banking deals.

Rep. Jill Chambers (R-Atlanta) and Rep. Earl Ehrhart (R-Powder Springs) quizzed MARTA staff on the pay increases. MARTA staff members explained that the pay raises were given when the economy was performing better and included people who had been promoted.

Chambers also questioned MARTA’s banking deals. Over the last decade, with the encouragement of the federal government, MARTA got involved in complex “lease-back” deals that depended on the health of big insurance companies like AIG. With those companies now decidedly unhealthy, MARTA was at risk of owing nearly $400 million.

They’ve negotiated that down substantially and hope to make it zero, Scott and her staff said, at least partly because the investors realize the bad publicity that would arise if they demanded immediate payment.