As state leaders consider new funding for transportation, allowing more counties to join MARTA should be the top priority. It is important to remember that Georgia’s governor and state legislative leaders deserve credit for last year’s historic legislation on mass transit.
Many current leaders at the state Capitol co-sponsored a bill in 2014 that removed a restriction on Clayton County raising its sales tax. It would have been easy for the governor or legislative leaders to quietly quash this bill. But they did not.
The governor signed the bill and set in motion a lively series of events that ultimately led to Clayton County voters deciding for themselves whether to join MARTA. On November 4, 2014, 74 percent of Clayton voters said “Yes” to raising a one-cent sales tax for buses and possibly trains. A national media outlet declared: “By far the biggest win of the day for transit occurred in Georgia.”
This month, buses will roll into Clayton County and provide regular MARTA services for the first time. This is what success looks like. The governor and state legislative leaders helped make this happen.
We should make sure this success repeats itself.
To do so, we need a change in the law. State law currently gives only five counties the right to join MARTA: Cobb, Gwinnett, Fulton, DeKalb and Clayton. Voters in other counties, such as Rockdale and Douglas, do not have the same right to vote on MARTA. The state should lift the five-county restriction even if that requires a constitutional amendment.
The time-tested MARTA Act, now more than forty years old, allows voters to decide whether to create a long-term source of funding for transit. In Clayton County, for example, voters approved a one-cent sales tax likely to raise over $46 million per year. The MARTA-Clayton contract requires collection of the full penny sales tax for at least 33 years. That means Clayton’s voters in November dedicated over $1.5 billion for mass transit in just one county.
Because the contract that voters approved is specific to Clayton, county officials were able to negotiate with MARTA for terms appropriate to their county. Their contract ensures half the money will be spent on a high-capacity transit line, preferably commuter rail.
Under the MARTA Act, each county gets to negotiate with MARTA for what it wants. MARTA may or may not agree, but the contract goes before voters only if both the county commission and the MARTA board agree. Then the voters decide whether to approve the contract in a referendum.
In addition to expanding transit, we need to make sure we get the best use of our road dollars. When the road system expands far beyond the reach of transit lines, as it has over the last 60 years, we get too many homes and businesses without access to transit. Transit will never catch up if we keep expanding the road system at this rate. Moreover, when the road system expands to a certain point, it becomes too big to maintain.
A “fix-it-first” policy is in order. We need to fix roads first before we expand them again. Road maintenance, like transit maintenance, is expensive. New roads today create maintenance costs tomorrow. We have structurally unsound bridges across the state that need to be fixed today. We should make sure that any new funding for roads is dedicated to fixing our current roads, not expanding or creating new roads.
Fixing current roads rather than expanding them and letting voters decide whether to join MARTA would be great ways to make sure future generations get the best of both roads and transit.
