It’s been 25 years since Gwinnett County voters told MARTA, in no uncertain terms, to get lost.
The 70 percent of voters who said no to paying a penny sales tax to let buses and trains roll made sure their answer was undeniable and generational.
But here we are, a generation later, and the issue has surfaced again. This time it's in the form of a Gwinnett Chamber of Commerce trial balloon, a survey just released that said 63 percent of voters were in favor of expanding MARTA into Gwinnett.
Of course, that figure dropped to 50 percent when those surveyed were asked if they would pay a penny sales tax. The other 13 percent, it seems, would answer “Yes!” to “Do you want a new car?” but “NO!!!” to “Would you like to pay for it?”
Gwinnett Commission Chairman Charlotte Nash, knowing that MARTA is the third rail of suburban politics, said she doesn’t think the time is right to bring the question to the public.
"It's such a divisive issue; I'm not ready to say we're going to tear this community apart by calling a referendum on that," said the chairman. (Yes, she is officially called chairman. They don't go for that PC chairwoman nonsense in Gwinnett.)
Back in the day, the MARTA campaign dredged up all sorts of underlying — and not-so-underlying — unease of the racial variety. One AJC reporter interviewed 30 residents, and six mentioned they did not want an influx of blacks coming into their neighborhoods via rail. The term “undesirables” was thrown about, and some cars bore the bumper sticker “Share Atlanta Crime — Support MARTA.”
But that was a different day, another Gwinnett. Back then, the county had 353,000 residents, 89 percent of them non-Hispanic whites. Today, non-Hispanic whites are a minority, just 43 percent of the 826,000 residents. The population has become a sociological gumbo: 24 percent black, 20 percent Hispanic and 13 percent “other races,” mostly Asian.
Still, that doesn’t necessarily portend victory for a MARTA effort.
Bruce LeVell is a businessman and former head of the county’s Republican Party. He thinks the demographic tide will turn Gwinnett solidly Democratic within five years. But currently, he still thinks voters would reject the idea of paying to bring MARTA inside the county borders.
LeVell was on the MARTA board when Gwinnett still had a seat, and he says the agency is burdened with a terrible image.
In fact, LeVell said he hatched a plan eight years ago with a majority of other MARTA board members to change the name. LaVell is in the jewelry business, and if a certain kind of diamond bracelet isn't selling, you attach a couple of rubies, call it something charming, like "The Camelot," and voila, the baubles start moving again.
The name “Breeze” sounded good to him, like the Breeze cards. “Catch the Breeze,” he figured, was a better marketing tag than “It’s SMARTA.” (Actually, anything is better.)
But LeVell’s coalition dissolved.
During his time, he and some Gwinnett business leaders also dusted off ideas of light rail running parallel to I-85 for about 10 miles from the Doraville station. Heavy rail, LeVell said, costs more than $200 million a mile. Light rail is maybe a quarter of that.
“But people were like we were trying to start a riot,” he said. “Oh my God! They’re trying to bring MARTA to Gwinnett County!”
Some old emotions die slowly.
He doesn’t think Gwinnettians are disinclined to public transportation or even transit, they just don’t like MARTA. He said the idea would fly if the system was locally run with a seamless integration with The Transit Agency That Shall Not Be Named.
“Why not just call it Gwinnett Rail and connect to Doraville?” he said. Gwinnettians “won’t send their one cent downtown. And the rider doesn’t care who the operator is. What difference is the name of the rail, if we can get partnerships?”
Emory Morseberger, a developer who lives in Lilburn, also occupied the Gwinnett MARTA seat, which was later done away with — sort of a representation without taxation thing. He thinks now is the time for MARTA in Gwinnett.
“The tide has changed dramatically,” he said. It’s not just minorities moving to the county, but many folks who have lived elsewhere, places where they rode rail and caught buses.
“The brand needs to be changed and they need to fold in with the other systems,” he said.
But, he said, that will take work, because “there’s a very loud five 5 percent here, the Tea Party types, the kind who think transit is a socialist plot.”
“I think the (Community Improvement District) and business people need to carry the flag on this,” he said. “It won’t be the political leaders.”
Steve Ramey is the guy the pols fear. The 65 year-old leader of the county Tea Party was born in Gwinnett, and in his eyes it’s devolved “from Mayberry to a cesspool.” He said the value of his Lilburn home has dropped, gangs are terrifying residents, and unchecked development is clogging the county roads.
Still, MARTA ain’t the answer, he said. He still relies on getting behind the wheel.
“I hardly go anywhere unless I have my car,” Ramey said. “And I hardly go anywhere unless I’m armed.”
He said the transit agency squanders money by continually running empty buses and trains.
“It was never gonna make money; it was never designed to make money,” Ramey said. “It’s meant to take people places they can’t afford to go.”
The people who will come out to vote, those who are older and white, will be the ones to defeat any measure, he said.
He also hearkened back to well-worn arguments: “I think people are concerned with people coming to the county. It doesn’t take much, you can have a knapsack to take jewelry and a gun and go back. That’s what scares people.”
But, I must point out, before you fall into type-casting, that Ramey runs the Diversity Campus Career Guide, a magazine and Web site that “provides information for minority students on resume writing, career fairs, job opportunities and post-graduate studies.”
Gwinnett no longer has easy labels: LeVell, the former head of Gwinnett’s GOP, is black.
Ramey, the stalwart transit foe, acknowledges that Gwinnett will likely welcome MARTA one day.
“It probably will as the old die out and the new people move in,” he said.
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