Will metro Atlanta get a regional transit system this year after all?
For months, the topic has bedeviled legislators, infuriated urban advocates and threatened failure for the transportation tax referendum scheduled for 2012. But high-ranking legislative leaders said they simply weren’t ready to take it on this year.
But when asked recently about the possibility, House Speaker David Ralston told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that it's not out of the question.
“That’s certainly an option,” Ralston said. “I’m not saying it’s at the top or the bottom or in the middle right now.”
In December, Rep. Donna Sheldon, R-Dacula, chairwoman of a commission that is working on the regional transit issue, said she expected no such legislation this year because the issue needs time and care.
Ralston stressed that his new comments are not a turnabout from Sheldon’s. “I don’t want to suggest that it is a live probability,” he said. “It’s not a shift, it is that we are just looking at all of the reasonable options that we have this session. That is an option.”
The criticism over the past 10 months stems from a referendum that is scheduled to take place in summer 2012, when metro Atlanta voters will decide whether to levy a 1 percent sales tax to fund a list of transportation projects in the 10-county region.
The project list is to be finalized this fall by local elected officials. If mass transit is to have a serious shot at a piece of that pie, advocates argue, transit investments must be named on the list under a new regional transit agency -- not under MARTA or other parochial transit agencies, which may turn off some voters. They also hope it could address problems that Fulton and DeKalb advocates have with the referendum law, such as who pays for MARTA.
Cobb and Gwinnett counties have their own transit systems and have been participating in the regional transit discussions.
Elected officials of the Gwinnett Municipal Association have endorsed creating a new governing body.
“We need a regional transit coordinating agency to provide for greater efficiency, help prioritize our transit needs and coordinate how we can best meet those needs on a regional basis,” Norcross Mayor Bucky Johnson, past president of the group, said in a statement released Wednesday. He also is the nonvoting chairman of the executive committee that will draft the region's project list.
Atlanta City Councilman C.T. Martin said creating the regional agency this year would alleviate some of his concerns about the referendum law -- but the devil was in the details.
“I still would have to know how it’s been designed,” Martin said.
Indeed, creating a new transit agency could do little more than create a new layer of bureaucracy, leaving the current players unchanged beneath it. Or it could eliminate MARTA and other agencies and put all their operations, expansion and planning within one new entity.
Ralston said that it was too early to say where Atlanta would fall in that spectrum. While having a regional agency operate transit was a possibility, he said, "What’s important to me is that we have an agency, whether it’s a new agency or an existing agency that’s modified, that has a strong planning component."
Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed heads a regional group that has suggested regional transit legislation to Sheldon’s commission, which will meet March 9. That legislation suggests a model like Chicago's, where the parochial agencies may stay intact with a regional agency above them. The former head of Chicago's agency, Steve Schlickman, recently left it partly because of urban-suburban tensions over resources, and he said having a single unified system is preferable.
Reed has not lost hope the Legislature will come around.
Told of Ralston’s latest comments, Reed smiled slightly. “It’s going to be a gardening process,” he said, “where you’re just going to have to stay at nurturing relationships, making sure you’ve got a solid piece of legislation, and then watching the rhythm.”
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