The amendment seemed to come out of nowhere, as they occasionally do in the sunset hours of legislative sessions. Around 10 p.m. on one of the final days of lawmaking at the Georgia capitol, there came wedged inside House Bill 213 a measure to allow a half-cent tax increase for MARTA.
For Brandon Beach, the legislator carrying the bill in the Senate, it was a dealbreaker, and the North Fulton Republican took to the Senate well that night to speak out against the amendment. Soon enough, the half-penny tax was stripped from the legislation so that the original bill — which Beach approved of — could pass. And it did.
“I wasn’t going to ask North Fulton for another half-penny” for MARTA, Beach told me last week. “This (bill) wasn’t the vehicle to do it.”
As he pointed out, Fulton and DeKalb counties have been paying a one-cent sales tax for MARTA since the 1960s, and North Fulton communities haven’t exactly received their fair share of service over the years.
But Beach, who’s secretary of the Senate transportation committee, remains supportive of HB 213 as first written, a raft of pro-MARTA concessions which, among other things, unties the transit agency’s hands when it comes to how it spends its money. He praises the turnaround the agency has executed under Keith Parker, MARTA’s CEO and General Manager. Only the tax-increase amendment threw him off the rails.
The irony of all this is that the half-penny’s revenues were seen as a way to generate enough local money that, coupled with federal funding, would allow MARTA to expand north up the Georgia 400 corridor, running trains all the way to Windward Parkway. (A conservative estimate is that the half-penny hike would have raised $150 million annually, for 40 years.)
MARTA’s northbound push is something Beach, whose day job is CEO of the North Fulton Chamber, would very much like to see. Early plans project stations at Northridge, Holcomb Bridge, North Point Mall, Old Milton Parkway and Windward Parkway. The extension would cross the highway twice and run partly up 400’s west side, thus avoiding eastside neighborhoods and elementary schools, and the wrath of residents who packed public hearings last summer.
“We want MARTA,” Beach says. “The people want MARTA. They realize the need for it. You look at two companies, State Farm and Mercedes. One of the reasons they chose to expand and locate in North Fulton is because of MARTA and transit. They want their employees to have it.”
The trick is finding the right vehicle to raise the estimated $2 billion it would take to expand MARTA up 400. (Trains, or heavy rail, is the preferred way to go, for MARTA and for Beach.) Maybe funding will come through counties levying their own version of the T-SPLOST that failed here in 2012. Maybe the Community Improvement Districts (CIDs) — the business organizations that tax themselves to pay for public improvements — could contribute.
Of course, any kind of tax referendum would likely wind up back in Fulton’s lap. Would North Fulton residents vote for it?
“Quite honestly, I don’t think they would,” Beach says, but things could change.
“MARTA’s service has improved now. They’ve got really nice new buses. They did a re-set of their routes, so now they’re going to the General Motors facility. They’re going to Avalon, where people are working and living and eating. I used to look at the buses five years ago and there would be no one in them. Now people are using them.”
MARTA would have a better chance to expand, he says, if it spelled out in clear detail what voters would get for their money. “If we laid this out, maybe we could sell it.” That strategy worked for a recent bond package on roads in Forsyth County. “But, I will tell you, it’s going to be a tough sell, just because of the history of MARTA.”
This brings Beach to a favorite topic: a regional transit system covering metro’s five core counties. He’s for establishing a truly regional transit authority, which would include MARTA, but under a different name. He calls it “The ATL.” The Atlanta Transit Line. But getting Cobb and Gwinnett to join the system is key.
With a rebranding, maybe real regional transportation could work. Certainly, public sentiment has shifted in transit’s favor recently. Clayton County voted overwhelmingly to join MARTA in November. Poll results released last week showed a majority of Gwinnett residents in favor of joining, too, though county leaders said residents won’t get a chance to vote on it any time soon. Too bad.
Times are changing rapidly for transit in metro Atlanta — albeit not fast enough for us to keep up with competing cities like Dallas. Still, it’s much better since the days when Beach was an Alpharetta city councilman, and just mentioning MARTA, he says, might have gotten him thrown out of office.
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