Decatur Mayor Indicates that DeKalb Will Also Call For Regional Transit System
Decatur Metro | September 21, 2010At last night’s Decatur City Commission meeting, Mayor Bill Floyd presented his fellow commissioners with a draft of a resolution (see pages 127 and 128 of the attached materials from the meeting) that would show support for the transportation referendum one-cent sales if the 10-county district would also support creation of a regional transportation system for the Atlanta metro area.
He told the commission that DeKalb’s other cities were considering similar resolutions.
Fulton County’s mayors – sans Kasim Reed – have recently proposed a similar deal, though they indicated only Cobb, Gwinnett and Clayton would have to agree to be part of the regional transportation system.
Though the resolution did indicate that he supported the penny sales tax on top of the existing MARTA penny sales tax, Mr. Floyd expressed concern over getting the transportation referendum passed if we were saddling the greatest proponents of initiative – Fulton and DeKalb residents – with an extra penny.
He noted that conversations on the details of a regional system were ongoing and there had even been talk of “weighted voting”, where DeKalb and Fulton residents would get a greater say in regional transportation decisions if they were paying twice as much as the outer counties.
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I think Mayor Floyd and the other mayors are on the right track with these resolutions, but they need to flesh out exactly what they mean by a “regional transportation system.”
The transportation bill as passed includes a lot of poison pills for transit and MARTA specifically. I think a lot of transit supporters signed onto the plan just to get anything passed, but as currently structured, there’s not much hope for transit to get additional funding through the sales tax. One obvious problem is that MARTA is having to cut existing services under their current funding and the bill specifically prohibits any of the new funding from going to operations or maintenance of the current MARTA system. How can we expect the new funding to improve transit if we can’t maintain what we already have? The bill also creates problems for receiving any federal funding for expansion of transit since the Federal Transit Administration usually requires that a region proves it is willing and able to support its core system (MARTA in our case) before providing any funds for expansion of the transit system. Lastly, the bill would only authorize the sales tax for ten years, and FTA typically requires at least a 20 year revenue stream to be in place before providing funding.
So even if Cobb, Gwinnett, and Clayton pledged to join Fulton and DeKalb to create a regional transit system, these structural problems with the bill must be corrected to truly make the funding workable for transit investment.