Our View: Transportation fix will take full cooperation

We’re big on boundaries.

Georgia has 159 counties — more than any state but Texas — and more than 500 cities, with additional cities in various stages of creation. We have school districts and community improvement districts and soil and water districts and water management districts and county commissioner and city council districts.

By drawing lines on a map, we seem to think we can separate our problems from their problems, our resources from their resources. And the smaller the governmental entity, the more control we feel we have over what takes place within its borders.

That’s the theory, and in many cases it’s valid. Local control does have benefits.

However, lines and borders can also produce the opposite effect. Sometimes, they reduce our ability to tackle problems and make the most of opportunities. That’s because problems and opportunities sprawl across boundaries, and we often lack tools properly sized size to address them.

That’s certainly part of metro Atlanta’s problem with transportation. The challenge can’t be addressed by cities or counties — it crosses too many boundary lines to be solved at that level. And year after year, leaders at the state level refuse to address it as well, in part because the problem isn’t statewide in scale. Many legislators from outside the region have apparently concluded that there’s nothing to be gained by helping out a metro region that’s distrusted by many of their folks back home. Even worse, some legislators from within the metro region still prefer to indulge in the petty feuds pitting suburban vs. urban, north vs. south, and in some cases white vs. black. As a result, there is no effective metro Atlanta caucus in the Legislature to defend the region’s interests. Other loyalties — loyalty to political party, loyalties to the House or Senate as institutions, loyalty to leaders — almost always take precedence over loyalty to the metro region.

Outside the Legislature, however, something important may be stirring. The Metropolitan North Georgia Water Planning District, for example, has brought together elected officials, private citizens and water professionals from 15 metro counties. Since its creation in 2001, the district has provided metro leaders with a forum in which to talk and think in regional terms about regional water issues, from conservation to water quality to wastewater management. They plan as a region, they think as a region, and in some limited ways they now act as a region on water issues.

The metro region’s Transit Planning Board has served a similar function in an entirely different policy area. Formed by MARTA, the Atlanta Regional Commission and the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority, the board worked for months to produce Concept 3, a vision for linking the region through commuter rail, heavy rail, streetcars and bus rapid transit.

More important, transit board members rallied as a region to defend that vision when a key project was threatened. Earlier this year, the state Department of Transportation announced it wanted control of a 4.3-mile piece of rail corridor that was central to Atlanta’s Beltline project. Other leaders in the region rallied to Atlanta’s defense, eventually forcing the DOT to back off that claim.

An even more impressive demonstration of the region’s growing political maturity came this spring. Facing financial crisis because of a severe drop in sales-tax revenue, MARTA had sought permission from the Legislature to dip into its capital reserves to tide it over. It was an entirely reasonable request, but the state House of Representatives refused. As a result, MARTA faces crippling cuts in service that would ripple throughout the region.

Then something remarkable happened. A committee for the 10-county Atlanta Regional Commission voted to try to redirect $25 million in federal stimulus money to MARTA. In effect, leaders in areas outside MARTA’s two-county service area agreed to sacrifice construction projects in their own counties for the regional good.

The proposal has yet to be finalized by the whole ARC board, but five or 10 years ago, such a step would have been inconceivable. Slowly, under the leadership of Cobb County Commission Chairman Sam Olens, Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin, Fayetteville Mayor Ken Steele and others, regional leaders have set aside parochial concerns in pursuit of larger regional goals.

That maturation, and that capacity for cooperation, will be be essential as the region attempts to address its problems. It also suggests that metro Atlanta is ready to take the next step to regional governance.

The most promising mechanism for such a step is the proposed regional sales-tax for transportation, passed by the Senate this year but blocked in the House. It would give regional leaders power to propose a transportation plan to the citizens of metro Atlanta and ask those citizens to vote as a region to tax themselves to pay for that plan.

Just a few years ago, local leaders lacked the willingness or ability to cooperate on such an endeavor. Today, they’re more than ready to make it a success. All they need is some leadership at the state level.

But sadly, that still seems a long way off.

Jay Bookman, for the editorial board (jbookman@ajc.com)