Georgia Transportation Bill Passes
Decatur Metro | | 10:07 amWow, we sure have come along way in two weeks!
Two weeks ago, Georgia’s House transportation chair stated that he had “not been inundated” with calls from voters to get a transportation bill passed.
But then forces were rallied, Facebook pages were created, MARTA vandalized their own buses, and Atlanta business leaders were rounded up and sent to the State Capitol to plead their case.
And last night, after three legislative 40 day “years” of trying, both houses of the Georgia legislature finally passed a bill. That bill would divide the state into 12 regions, where a “roundtable” of local, elected officials would be tasked with coming up with a list of transportation projects, which would then go before the region’s voters, who would decide whether the proposed list was worth an additional 1-cent sales tax.
Oh, and MARTA would get a three-year reprieve from being forced to use only 50% of its revenue on its operating budget. No one yet knows what this means for all those bus routes that are currently slated to be cut, but I’m sure MARTA will let us know in due course.
Sonny still has to sign it, but his peeps sound upbeat about it.
A good day for Georgia! The legislature is letting us do something! Hooray!
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Crickets!? After three years of nothing?! Crickets?!
Is it that underwhelming?
My face is hurting from smiling so much!!!
Big props to you & Thomas & MARTA & all the groups who helped make this happen!!!
And big props to the Gold Dome politicians too!!!
Oops!
Big Props to other media, especially the local TV news folks, for making MARTA the BIG story this week!
And Beverly Scott deserves special praise for the great MARTA strategy & for getting the big guns down to the Capital. Now she has all eyes on MARTA & an excellent opportunity to remake it into the best run transit system in the country!
I think our trust levels are so low that we don’t dare to hope.
That’s what it is, karass. That’s exactly what it is!
I won’t believe it until I see it happening. And you will note there is still no “policy” change, just an extension of the status quo budget definition juggling act.
I hope it’s good enough. I use public transit whenever I can, although my daily commute is on an Emory Cliff shuttle, not MARTA. Would be very sad to see the proposed cuts go into effect.
Bets on whether MARTA’s capital budget will last all three years? Or will it be spent in one or two years?
I’ll bet it gets spent in five quarters.
Then we can argue over whether it was due to ineptitude or a general lack of financial support.
Can we hold GDOT to the same critical standard DEM?
At least MARTA isn’t so poorly managed that it will have to pass up “tens if not hundreds of millions” in federal funds for road projects, because it will be unable to supply the standard 20 percent local financial match”
I’m not sure what GDOT has to do with MARTA in this instance. I don’t know if GDOT is poorly managed or not; I haven’t followed those issues. But it probably is.
In any event, my point is simply that the MARTA spending restriction is a red herring. It solves nothing beyond the next year or two, at most. MARTA will be back asking for more money in no time. So the real debate we need to have is: to what extent do we tap the state’s already stretched budget to provide massively subsidized transportation for people in metro Atlanta? I’m not saying that the question is never posed that way, but the spending restriction issues obscures it sometimes.
If we both agree that cities need transportation to function, then the fact that GDOT is even more mismanaged that MARTA is indeed relevant. Because if you propose cutting back severely on MARTA, you must alternately rely more heavily on roadways.
For someone who likes to hold MARTA accountable, I’m surprised you aren’t interested in the fact that GDOT is so in over its head that it’s on schedule to borrow $3 billion over 10 years just to keep up. Not to mention, if we can’t meet the 20% federal match in the future, we’ll pass up hundreds of millions in federal grants. That’s not all that great when you’re city is competing with other cities for jobs and stuff.
As for the MARTA spending restriction, I’m not sure anyone is saying that lifting it will solve MARTA’s problems. But it gives a bit more flexibility, which is sorely needed at this particular juncture, when everyone is hurting from declining revenue.