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.