MARTA inches closer to choosing Clayton bus maintenance facility site

MARTA has narrowed its property search for a Clayton County bus maintenance facility to three sites.

Credit: Emily Haney

Credit: Emily Haney

MARTA has narrowed its property search for a Clayton County bus maintenance facility to three sites.

MARTA has narrowed its property search for a planned Clayton County bus and rail maintenance facility to three sites, the transit agency said Tuesday.

Two properties on Conley Road and the former KMart Distribution Center on Old Dixie Highway are the leading contenders for the facility, which MARTA expects will bring dozens of new jobs to the south metro community. 

“We started with 15 sites, and using a number of evaluation criteria have reduced this now to three sites,” Virgil Fludd, MARTA’s assistant general manager of external affairs, told the Clayton County Commission Tuesday. “We looked at the physical location, zoning, the availability of property (and) access to transit.”

The facility will initially maintain buses exclusively, but Fludd said MARTA wants the chosen property to be flexible enough to allow for work on rail once that service is up in running in the county in about a decade.

MARTA plans to choose a site this summer and begin environmental analysis in the fall, Fludd said.