If you want to understand metro Atlanta — its past and future, its strengths and weaknesses and most of all the interplay of money, race, class and geography that drive its decision-making, the relocation of the Atlanta Braves to Cobb County offers the perfect case study.
It begins in classic fashion, with a deal cooked up over months of secret talks between the political powers that be and the business elite, with no public knowledge let alone input. Once the deal is sprung, politicians make it clear that public reaction will have no impact, and that the “public process” is nothing more than a legal formality. Deal is done, so shut up.
Oh, and that part about negotiations being secret? That’s not entirely true. While most of us were in the dark, investors with inside knowledge were apparently buying up key properties near the stadium site that were about to become much more valuable. You see, the good ol’ boy network takes care of its own.
Then there’s the issue of transportation. In much of the nation, political and civic leaders would do this backward. They would actually study the transportation shortcomings of the proposed site of a major development BEFORE public money was committed to build there. They would try to determine if the proposed site could handle the additional traffic, what transportation alternatives are available and how those alternatives could be financed.
Silly people. As you can tell by our smoothly functioning transportation system, the Atlanta way is to make the commitment before such problems can be studied, and then worry about transportation after the fact. According to the state Department of Transportation, nobody from either Cobb County or the Braves even bothered to contact its planners about the challenges posed by the proposed new stadium site, already one of the most congested areas in an already congested metro region.
That may seem illogical to some people, but again, those “some people” fail to appreciate the genius of the Atlanta way. If taxpayers were fully aware beforehand of potential problems and the cost of fixing them, they might balk at the deal that their betters have agreed upon. It’s a lot easier to give taxpayers the bill later, once it’s too late to turn back.
Inevitably, the move is also being viewed as the latest chapter in a long-running competition fueled by mutual resentment between the city of Atlanta and its surrounding suburbs. Gritting his teeth, Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed played the regional leader, depicting the move as no big deal since the Braves would only be moving 12 miles up I-75. But the truth is that the regional mindset advocated by Reed is more aspirational than real, undercut by issues of race and class.
And as usual, that tension expresses itself most clearly around the question of mass transit. When the Braves’ decision was announced, the head of the Cobb Taxpayers Association immediately worried that it was merely a Trojan horse used to disguise the larger goal of smuggling MARTA inside the county walls, with all the “crime” that would bring. That’s an odd leap of logic, but it tells you a lot about how visceral that issue remains.
The chairman of the Cobb Republican Party, Joe Dendy, was equally blunt:
“It is absolutely necessary the (transportation) solution is all about moving cars in and around Cobb and surrounding counties from our north and east where most Braves fans travel from, and not moving people into Cobb by rail from Atlanta.”
It’s impossible to see statements like that and not notice very strong echoes of the debates of 30 and 40 years ago, in which Cobb and Gwinnett counties barred MARTA from crossing their county lines out of belief that by doing so they would keep the city’s majority black population at a safe distance.
Look around: No major urban area in the industrialized world has managed its transportation needs without a significant investment in mass transit. But because of the fears that divide us, metro Atlanta hasn’t made a significant investment in mass transit in more than a generation, and that failure is crippling us. We can and apparently will move sports teams around as if they were deck chairs on the Titanic, but while we continue to do things “the Atlanta way,” the rest of the world moves ahead without us.