You’ve got to hand it to Tim Lee.
The dude aims high when it comes to tackling big initiatives: last year, Cobb County’s commission chairman stealthily spirited away the Braves from Atlanta. This year, he pushed to have a sales tax referendum put on the ballot and then had his business buddies step in with a load of money to help persuade recalcitrant voters to keep taxing themselves to the tune of $750 million.
Next, he will apparently involve himself in his greatest, and most dangerous, quest — getting something with the term “Transit” passed in Cobb County.
For those of you upset that Lee wants to see rapid transit rail cars full of Atlantans coming and going from Cobb, don’t worry. We’re talking BRT here, which is short for Bus Rapid Transit, elongated people movers that roll along in their own dedicated traffic lanes. These are real fancy buses that cost a lot of money, but they’re still just buses. And the plan is a lot cheaper than it was going to be.
By cheaper, I mean just half a billion dollars, which is whittled down 50 percent from original wish list.
The problem is … well, there are two problems. One, Cobb doesn't have the money for its half of the project needed to receive matching funds from the feds. And two, it's transit, which is the third rail of Cobb politics, although these are fancy buses and there is no actual third rail here.
As I was saying, you have to hand it to Tim Lee. Cobb could use some kind of transit option, even if it’s only cool stretch buses that sort of act like trains.With the Braves coming to town, you’d like to have a way of getting large groups of fans to the ballpark without having them queue up for limited parking.
Also, photos of fancy BRTs passing by the new Braves stadium (or even the Big Chicken on Cobb Parkway) would look good in future Chamber of Commerce promotional brochures extolling the new urbane Cobb.
Wary of those ‘spoiled brats’
Lee is taking a chance politically by going after the BRT. I think he’d argue it is needed and leaders do what they think is right and sometimes they must take chances. You know, damn the torpedoes. (I think he’d say that but he’s not talking because he’s mad at the AJC.)
Lee’s entry into politics was in 2000 when he went against the grain as a neighborhood leader supporting a sales tax vote to pay for green space and parks. It lost. Back then, he was a leader of the Northeast Cobb Homeowners Group, which got neighborhoods to come together for the common good. One could argue he was a suburban community organizer, which is a noble calling.
But despite his intention to buck the political winds, Lee is not a numbskull. In 2012, he was one of the key metro area leaders advocating for a $7.2 billion regional transportation sales tax (TSPLOST), a proposal about as popular in Cobb as rail cars filled with Ebola patients.
Cobb voters sent it packing 2-1 in an election season that coincided with Lee’s own re-election effort. In his own election, Lee narrowly defeated former Cobb Chairman Bill Byrne, who was 10 years past his political prime and outspent by Lee 4-1.
So one would assume that Lee learned a lesson from the ill-fated 2012 TSPLOST campaign, one filled with endless town hall meetings and citizen input.
Sometimes it got to Lee, who once called residents who didn’t want light rail in the county “spoiled brats.” He later apologized but one can imagine he didn’t want to deal with spoiled brats next time around.
The following year, he wheeled and dealed in top-secret negotiations with the Braves, wooing them with his charm and $400 million in public sweetener fees. Once the deal became public the effort was rolling fast like an old-fashioned locomotive with one of those cow-catchers pushing opponents aside.
For my next trick: one more spoiled BRT
This year, Lee originally wanted to earmark $1oo million of the SPLOST money to help build the BRT. Other commissioners objected. They said adding the bus transit to the sales tax vote could kill it. They probably were right. Lee backed off, but weeks later the county’s transportation director wrote the U.S. DOT assuring the feds that Cobb was still moving ahead with its BRT planning.
“Cobb will continue station development and operating plan development through 2015,” the transportation chief wrote in an email. “Previously, Cobb had planned to secure local funding through its SPLOST.”
“Alternatively, Cobb County intends to seek necessary local match funding sources through a bond referendum in the March 2016 (primary).”
The email, obtained by the AJC’s Dan Klepal, was the first public inkling of Lee’s plot. Asked about it by Klepal, a testy Lee said he is considering 2016 because it is the next election. The referendum would ask voters to support a property tax to fund the transit.
After the conversation, Lee, or one of his minions, immediately leaked the info to the Marietta Daily Journal so the local boys could beat Klepal on his own story. Well-played by Chairman Lee, I must admit. If you want to ding a reporter who’s been dinging you, then let someone else ding you first.
So here we go again down the transit route, with Lee going against prevailing wisdom, again knowing he’s right.
