The dozen miles of U.S. 41/Cobb Parkway between the Kennesaw city limits and Interstate 285 is an unremarkable stretch of road.
Yet, what does – or doesn’t — happen in coming years along this hilly highway will speak to the future of both Cobb County and the greater Atlanta metro.
The broad, heavily used north-south corridor between Acworth and Fulton County is the latest arena for the popular Atlanta-style sport of squabbling over public transportation. At issue this time around is whether a Cobb County SPLOST approved for the November ballot should include money for road improvements that could eventually be part of a proposed Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system.
Cobb County Commission Chairman Tim Lee stoked the debate earlier this month by observing that individual intersection improvements could add up to the local match for a federal grant that could pay half the cost of the $500 million transit project.
The political firestorm that resulted led Cobb officials to rapidly hit the delete key, removing from a project list about $72.5 million in work that federal grantmakers might count as matching money.
A chastened Lee said during a commission meeting last week that, “My intent, if the board sees fit in the future, would be to bring the BRT project forward in a public environment, in a separate election, on its own merits.”
That backtracking is intended to douse any voter revolt that could doom the six-year, penny sales tax. The SPLOST would raise an estimated $750 million for various public work in Cobb.
Given the tenor of the times, Lee’s effort to dial down political heat makes sense in a pragmatic way. Yet we wonder what would have happened if he had brought the same tenacity to the transit debate that he showed in shoving through in record time the deal to move the Atlanta Braves to Cobb.
Yes, we criticized here his actions then, but there’s no arguing that Lee embraced political risk to ram through a proposal he apparently believed naysayers would later come to appreciate.
America’s pastime is not a controversial transit project, though. Yet, motorists using I-75 or Cobb Parkway during peak times know that relief is needed today. Not to mention the improvements necessary to handle expected population growth in coming decades.
Neither will come cheaply. But the price will prove a bargain compared to the cost of doing nothing, or grossly under-reacting to future needs, we believe. Clinging to the status quo and underinvesting is a strategy for failure in a nation and world changing at digital speed.
The BRT battle shows again two large issues that Cobb officials and the region as a whole must find ways to resolve. The first is endemic citizen distrust of government. That’s a tough problem, in good part because government’s actions have often taken a prybar to public trust. Yet we’re hopeful that an intense, sustained application of honest dealings, civic engagement, transparency and promise-keeping can improve things over time.
The second point may prove more difficult to rectify. Simplified, it is the widespread belief that there is somehow a free lunch. The kind of meal magically marked “no charge” that will pay for public infrastructure needed to both accommodate future growth and needs, or even maintain the roads, bridges and traffic signals already on the ground.
Both situations present a formidable challenge to Atlanta’s regional thinkers. To believe only that opponents of most any civic investment are a loud minority is to ignore a big lesson from the 2012 regional T-SPLOST. The nearly 2-to-1 whuppin’ that five-county penny sales tax took at the polls indicates a long-simmering level of government distrust.
And yet, one of the beliefs emerging from the T-SPLOST’s defeat was that smaller, more-local approaches might prove more palatable to taxpaying voters. The nascent uprising in Cobb raises serious questions about this thesis.
All of which means that Cobb officials behaved logically in tapping the brakes on BRT. Stepping back and methodically presenting the project to the public as one large, transparent chunk may be the best way to sell taxpayers on its merits.
Doing so requires convincing voters of an argument made in the project’s paperwork — that doing nothing “threatens to stifle the vibrancy, efficiency and important regional contributions” of an important Atlanta commercial and residential corridor.
Let’s get that conversation underway ASAP. Before it’s too late.
