MARTA hearings this week deal with service cuts

It’s MARTA patrons’ last chance to have their say before fare hikes and service cuts. Staring down the barrel of a massive budget deficit, MARTA officials have come to some gloomy conclusions.

To balance the budget, they say, they need more of their patrons’ money. And they’ll have to provide less service.

But before they sign on the dotted line, they’re spending one last week asking riders what they think.

In two public hearings Tuesday evening and two more on Wednesday, MARTA will lay out its case for cutbacks and raising fares to $2, and ask for the public response. On June 22, the board is scheduled to vote.

What changes it approves should roll out in the following months.

MARTA CEO Beverly Scott has looked at the budget every which way she can and says there’s no getting around the recession.

As the economy has slid, the sales tax revenues MARTA expected to get next year from Fulton and DeKalb counties have shrunk by $74 million. In addition, the recession means fewer people paying to ride to jobs and shops, and lower gas prices meant fewer people choosing MARTA over their cars. Altogether, the MARTA budget for the fiscal year that’s about to start came up $109.8 million short.

That size hole could have led to drastic cuts, like shutting down all service one day a week. To avoid that, earlier this year MARTA asked the legislature to allow it access to its own money, to lift a ban in state law that prevents MARTA from using its capital reserves for operating expenses. No dice. In the end, MARTA was saved from such extreme cuts this year when the Atlanta Regional Commission agreed to funnel $25 million of its own federal stimulus dollars to MARTA.

Now the cuts left on the table are more mundane, the kind that shape the life of a city bit by bit rather than with a wallop.

They include:

• Raising fares to $2

• Cutting back train service to midnight

• Increasing wait times by several minutes

• Raising parking fees where it’s already charged

• Internal MARTA cutbacks

Though it comes at a time when many can least afford it, the fare hike is overdue regardless of the financial situation, Scott has said. Fares were last raised in 2001, from $1.50 to $1.75, and MARTA said then that it should stay at that level for five years.

If the $1.75 fare had risen every year with inflation, it would be $2.11 today, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics online calculator.

In community meetings in recent months, riders seemed to understand that. What they had a harder time with was service reductions, said MARTA’s assistant general manager for communications, Ryland McClendon.

That’s sort of how MARTA officials feel too, she said. “We are the transit provider in this region, and so we wish we were in a position where we did not have to make impacts on the service,” she said.

MARTA’s got company. Across the country, transit systems battered by falling sales tax revenues and slow fare sales are in a similar position. Miami-Dade Transit is reducing bus service on 60 routes. In California, the Orange County Transportation Authority cut 100,000 hours of bus service, and has a link on its Internet home page labeled, “Budget Crisis.”

St. Louis, Mo.’s “Metro” has made the type of cuts MARTA dreaded this spring, stopping almost all bus routes outside the city’s Interstate highway perimeter, and in general eliminating for the moment all service to 2,300 bus stops. Local news reports carried images of desperate and crying riders unable to reach their jobs.

“It’s affected a lot of people,” said Metro spokesman Jerry Vallely. A bill awaiting the Missouri governor’s signature provides for a $12 million stopgap that the agency hopes will restore about a third of the service it cut, at least for the moment.

Even if the cutbacks now under consideration at MARTA are passed, that will balance the Atlanta transit agency’s books only for the fiscal year starting July 2009. The stimulus was a one-time deal, ARC and MARTA officials cautioned, and the drastic options MARTA escaped this year could be back on the table again.

If you go

What: MARTA’s final public hearings before approving cutbacks and fare hikes

When: Hearings begin at 7 p.m. Information and speaker sign-up will be available from 6 p.m.

How: To pick up info or ask questions, come before 7 p.m. After 7 p.m., it’s just an official presentation and then listening to public comments, not answering them.

Where: Four locations

TUESDAY

• Atlanta City Hall

55 Trinity Ave.

Bus routes 21, 49, 55, 97 from Five Points Station.

Special bus shuttle will be provided from the Five Points Station.

• North Fulton Service Center

7741 Roswell Road, Sandy Springs

Bus route 87 from the Dunwoody or North Springs Station

WEDNESDAY

• South Fulton Service Center

5600 Stonewall Tell Road, College Park

Bus route 180 from College Park Station

• Maloof Auditorium (Downtown Decatur)

1300 Commerce Drive, Decatur

One block west of Decatur Station