Regional divisions hobble metro Atlanta

Michelle Knapp and Suzanne Taylor are the Ambassadors of Suburbia, the self-labeled “blonde and brunette” boosters of OTP. Their passion for all things north of I-285 was on full display one recent afternoon as the 40-something moms marched across downtown Woodstock in matching T-shirts emblazoned with the letters OTP.

OTP, as in Outside The Perimeter, as in there’s nowhere else they’d rather live, work or play. It’s not that they’re opposed to venturing ITP, or Inside the Perimeter. They just don’t see much need to.

“Fifteen years ago, you had to go ITP,” said Knapp, whose Scoop OTP website lists the retail and restaurant offerings of Cobb, Cherokee, Forsyth and north Fulton counties. “Roswell, Canton and Woodstock all rebuilt their downtowns and now have these cool vibes. You don’t really need to go anywhere else.”

The OTP-ITP identity split highlights a divided metro Atlanta. There are signs the region wants to work together to solve its problems. Yet a slew of serious economic, government, business, political and environmental divisions threaten to strangle the region’s growth, which lags that of several peer metro areas since the recession.

Metro Atlanta, an amalgam of 150 cities spread across 29 counties, is something of a poster child for regional disharmony. Fulton County alone includes 14 cities, with largely white, Republican northsiders famously feuding with mostly black, Democrat southsiders. The city of Atlanta, with only 8 percent of the region’s 5.5 million people, doesn’t have the clout to unify the region.

Tax breaks seduce corporations across county borders. The Braves quit Atlanta for an eager Cobb County and will leave a hole on the edge of downtown. A road-and-rail referendum to fix traffic fails miserably. A few inches of snow and ice deep freezes the fallacy of counties working together.

“We have water, environmental, infrastructure and K-12 education issues — the same issues we’ve been dealing with for 30 years with no significant progress. None,” said A.D. Frazier, who has long straddled metro Atlanta’s business and political worlds. “The problems we have require visionary and long-range solutions. But we have atomized the metropolitan area, balkanized it.”

The world’s most successful urban areas — London, Paris, New York, Chicago, Denver, Toronto, Singapore — run regional transportation systems, consolidate government functions and plan development beyond artificially created political jurisdictions. Highways, after all, don’t stop at the county line.

A fragmented region is inefficient, costly and environmentally unsound, according to a recent report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The Paris-based think tank estimates that a region with half as many governments as a similarly sized region is 6 percent more productive.

“Metropolitan areas are really the unit of economic competitiveness in the country and world today,” said Bruce Katz, an urban scholar at the liberal Brookings Institution in Washington. “The national government is, essentially, dysfunctional. State governments have withdrawn as reliable partners. If metropolitan areas are not making hard decisions, no one else will.”

Take St. Louis, for example. St. Louis County alone counts 91 municipalities and so many duplicative court, police and road services that taxpayers unnecessarily spend an extra $750 million a year in taxes. It’s no wonder civic leaders have tried, and failed, a half-dozen times to consolidate city and county governments.

Look at Greater Toronto — which is building $16 billion in transit projects. Over the next decade, $80 billion more will be spent on transportation in Ontario — largely in the Toronto-Hamilton area — with about 20 percent dedicated to transit.

Meanwhile, Georgia legislators pat themselves on the back for $1 billion a year recently set aside for roads and bridges with virtually nothing for trains.

Weak connections

An Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll three years ago showed that only 35 percent of residents felt a strong “connection to the Atlanta region.”

Aaron Renn, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, writes that “you can put people in the same governmental box, but that won’t necessarily create common ground. … People living in cities and those in their suburbs often have different values, priorities and even a different culture.”

Yet the same AJC interviews, bolstered by more recent polling, reveal deep frustration with the region’s traffic and officials’ inability to fix it.

Metro Atlanta shows signs of coming together. Clayton voted to join MARTA — the system’s first expansion in decades. North Fulton wants rail to Alpharetta. A recent poll showed majority support among Gwinnett voters for MARTA. The General Assembly recently allowed counties to join together to tax themselves for transportation projects.

Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed said companies locating major offices along MARTA — such as State Farm in Dunwoody and Kaiser Permanente in Midtown — are taking politics out of the fraught debate about transit. Now, he said, it’s all about jobs.

“Communities that cooperate are going to be on the winning side in the future,” he said.

Yet, Reed and the city of Atlanta recently committed nearly $16 million in incentives to lure NCR to Midtown from Gwinnett County. In light of that and other cross-border moves, the Metro Atlanta Chamber and some local chambers are considering calling a truce on the poaching of business from one county by another — a practice other regions have long employed.

“You can’t just tell somebody, ‘Your end of the boat is leaking.’ That doesn’t work,” said Dan Kaufman, president of the Gwinnett Chamber of Commerce. “We sink or swim together. We rise or fall as a region. That’s what we are.”

A balkanized region

Metro Atlanta’s anti-regional roots run deep. Georgia has 159 counties — only Texas has more — and legislators are loathe to consolidate and lose power.

Recent trends head in the opposite direction, with new cities cropping up across metro Atlanta. Next up: Tucker and LaVista Hills. A half-dozen new towns are on the books.

“The explosion of all these cities caught me completely off guard,” said former Gov. Roy Barnes. “It hampers any kind of regionalism.”

Metro Atlanta’s tangled racial history also explains the region’s balkanization. The state Supreme Court in 1953 declared unconstitutional Atlanta’s attempts to annex Fulton County property – keeping the city small and, eventually, majority black. White flight ensued. Cobb, Gwinnett and Clayton voters later refused to join MARTA, many fearing a suburban surge of African-Americans and crime.

“This whole atomization thing has deep roots and it’s probably centered on race,” said Frazier, who runs a private equity firm.

Kaufman attributes the region’s lack of unity to its newness, to residents’ hesitancy to embrace the globalized, sprawling, big-city behemoth that is metro Atlanta.

“We’re just now getting comfortable with being a big deal,” he said. “The region is beginning to come to grips with the first-order issues we confront: transportation, education, infrastructure, water. And the lesson we’ve learned is that we can’t be balkanized.”

There is at least one major precedent for regional success: Atlanta’s winning bid for the Olympics. Organizers raised an estimated $3 billion in public and private money to host the games, build 7,500 hotel rooms and sprinkle sports venues, parks and apartments from downtown Atlanta to Conyers and Savannah.

Fear of gridlock got locals off the Downtown Connector and on MARTA. Nearly 50,000 Georgians volunteered. Frazier, the Olympics’ chief operating officer, coordinated 57 law-enforcement agencies across the region.

“There was the unity of a common purpose and a sense that either (the city’s) reputation would advance or it would be a disaster,” he said. “We were all in this thing together.”

Nixon to China

The Olympic glow didn’t last. The region has added nearly 2 million people since the Games without any needle-moving investments in transportation, water supply or regional cooperation.

The Georgia Regional Transportation Authority, or GRTA, was born in 1999 with a mandate to reduce smog and fix the transportation mess. Then-Gov. Barnes lined up nearly $9 billion in bonds over five years for rail, roads and a downtown transit station.

Barnes was also instrumental in the 2001 creation of the Metropolitan North Georgia Water Planning District – the state’s first regional attempt to solve a “water quality crisis.”

GRTA, eventually, was gutted and today runs commuter buses. Only one major reservoir, in Canton, has been built in 50 years.

“It takes leadership. It takes the use of political capital,” Barnes said. “As balkanized and as polarized as we are, and with the Republicans’ base in the white suburbs and exurbs, it’s going to be a very difficult process. But a Republican needs to do it. It’s like Nixon going to China.”

Perhaps metro Atlanta doesn’t have the mechanisms — outside the governor’s office and General Assembly — to act as a region. The Atlanta Regional Commission performs regional planning duties and provides services for the elderly. But it lacks power to make big things happen.

The Metro Atlanta Chamber, Reed and, more quietly, Deal, helped push the latest transportation funding measure, but only after Atlanta area voters roundly rejected T-SPLOST despite the chamber’s strong backing. The chamber and Reed also helped push to deepen the port of Savannah.

The chamber’s new Choose Atlanta recruiting campaign hitches the regional wagon to the “Atlanta” brand in recruiting business, a strategy chamber CEO Hala Moddelmog said could lead to broader cooperation down the road.

“Working together produces bigger results than working alone,” she said.

Snowmaggedon 2014, the snow and ice storm that shut down the region and left tens of thousands of motorists stranded for hours or even days, underscored the region’s inability to work together. Nobody, including Deal, took control until the region was gridlocked.

Yet even when the sun shines, Metro Atlanta can’t get its transportation act together.

Traffic congestion costs an Atlanta commuter an extra 51 hours of commuting time each year, according to the Texas Transportation Institute, and more than $3.1 billion a year in lost time, fuel and environmental degradation.

Recent polls by the AJC and the ARC show that nearly three-fourths of Metro Atlantans believe transit, i.e. rail lines and commuter buses, is “important” or “very important” for the region’s future. Yet only 36 percent of the AJC’s respondents said they’d pay higher taxes to fund any transportation project.

So it was little surprise three years ago when voters roundly rejected the $7.2 billion sales tax increase for roads and rail across the region’s 10 core counties. Much of the criticism revolved around a project list that had something for everyone but satisfied no one, along with doubt that the money would be well-spent.

“If they would actually use the money for what they say they’re going to use it for, then (taxes) make sense,” said Tracy Schrein, 45, who said she commutes three hours daily from Canton to Sandy Springs and back. “But usually they’ll use it someplace else. You’ve got to keep them honest.”

Cross-border moves

Cities, though, find enough money to poison the well of regional cooperation. Major corporations, lured in part by cash incentives and tax breaks from local governments, hop-scotch from one Metro Atlanta community to another.

Athenahealth left Alpharetta last fall for Midtown and up to $1 million in cash from the city and the state. Worldpay US quit Sandy Springs for Midtown’s Atlantic Station and $1.5 million in city and state money.

Gwinnett is perhaps the biggest victim. NCR has been promised nearly $16 million in grants and property tax abatements when it moves its headquarters from Duluth to Midtown. Financial technology firm Fiserv quit Norcross last year for Alpharetta and an estimated $11 million in local and state tax breaks and grants.

The Braves will benefit from $400 million in taxpayer cash to help build their new home in Cobb.

Such moves do little to boost a region’s economy — one critic labels them a “job creation shell game” — and a lot to stoke distrust and an every-county-for-itself mentality.

“It does not convey the image metro Atlanta wants to convey,” said the Gwinnett Chamber’s Kaufman.

Despite its losses, Gwinnett may be a bellwether of change. With a population fast approaching 1 million, Gwinnett is already majority-minority, with blacks and Latinos outnumbering whites. A recent chamber poll shows that nearly two-thirds of Gwinnett voters want MARTA. Kaufman doesn’t expect a voter referendum on joining MARTA before 2018.

MARTA and North Fulton officials are also planning a heavy-rail line up the Ga. 400 corridor, though no funding is identified. Clayton County regained MARTA bus service in March and sales tax money could add rail to the transit mix.

A one-shot bond program to help transit systems buy equipment is all that Gov. Deal and legislators included for transit in this year’s budget. Yet legislators also gave the agency more flexibility to use its revenue as it sees fit. They also voted to let a county or adjoining counties seek another transportation referendum.

The green shoots of collaboration have even spread among the region’s business recruiters who’ve grown weary of headlines touting a company’s relocation up, or down, a clogged interstate.

“We’re learning to play nicely with each other,” Kaufman said.