Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed, speaking at a panel on cities and mobility here at the famed South by Southwest festival, said Monday he would lobby the Georgia General Assembly today for a plan to expand MARTA.
Reed, seated next to Muriel Bowser, the mayor of Washington, D.C., called cities the future of America and the nation. Transit and mobility are two key components of economic vitality, he said.
An $8 billion plan to expand MARTA through a half-penny sales tax referendum stalled at the Gold Dome earlier this session amid opposition from lawmakers in north Fulton County. But a piecemeal plan has been pitched by MARTA and others that would allow the Atlanta residents to vote on a sales tax increase on its own.
The smaller plan, which also has faced opposition from lawmakers in the northern suburbs, could support a $2 billion expansion, supporters say. Reed also hasn't fully given up on the larger expansion plan.
“If other folks don’t want to help us, we’d like the ability from the state government to help ourselves,” Reed told the panel at the J.W. Marriott Hotel in Austin. There are only four remaining days in the legislative session after today.
Young people don’t want to rely on cars, he said. The other part of the equation, Reed said, is jobs.
“Cities are at war for jobs,” he said.
Reed repeated a long list of economic development wins that have happened in the city and the suburbs near MARTA rail, including State Farm (Dunwoody), Mercedes-Benz USA (at a campus to come in Sandy Springs), Kaiser Permanente (Midtown) and a new headquarters for NCR (also in Midtown).
“It’s all near transit,” he said.
After the panel, Reed said he is hopeful that lawmakers will listen and a compromise that helps lead to expansion of MARTA – and that allows for the northern suburbs to expand their road networks – can be reached.
“I think there is a very strong desire for significant road improvements in the northern part of (Fulton County) that will not happen until 2020 if we don’t get some kind of compromise,” Reed said. “If we don’t have a referendum that will resolve these road and transit issues then no group will make progress until the next referendum window in 2018. I don’t think folks want to end up in that place.”
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