Jill Chambers Loses House Seat and Other Good MARTA News
Decatur Metro | November 3, 2010Got the BAD case of the Democrat blues this morning? This may cheer the transit-Dems up. From Atlanta Unfiltered…
Rep. Jill Chambers will be giving up her job as MARTA’s top watchdog, after losing her seat in the Georgia House of Representatives on Tuesday by about 275 votes to Democrat Elena Parent.
Chambers, first elected in 2002, has scrutinized and occasionally tormented the rapid-transit agency as chair of the Legislature’s MARTA Oversight Committee, also known as MARTOC. She’d questioned MARTA spending on lobbyists, pay raises, consultants, fitness equipment for employees, intricate bond deals and much more. And that was all before lunchtime.
Chambers has been under harsh scrutiny of late after the MARTA fiscal watchdog filed for personal bankruptcy.
In other MARTA news, Maria Saporta points out that 70% of Clayton County residents voted in favor of a non-binding referendum to “become a full participant in MARTA by charging a sales tax in support of MARTA and the county’s public transportation needs.”
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Thanks for sharing this very welcome news! More! More!
I wouldn’t rejoice quite yet. The GOP could find someone just as obstinate as Chambers to chair MARTOC — perhaps some Atlanta-hatin’ rep from east BFE.
Yeah, but a little bit of justice and taste of one’s own medicine feels good.
Agree. Some of us don’t have much to be glad about today.
Surely even the Gold Dome folks can sense that it’s a new day for transit. Folks just aren’t going to stand still for their nonsense any longer.
(Didn’t mean to imply I wish Jill Chambers ill. Just excited to have a new person in there to assess things. )
I’m all for more street cars / trolleys/ light rail. i still think we need high speed rail along the state lines with feeder lines coming into each major city, and then lines going between athens-atlanta-macon-augusta-columbus-savannah-albany-brunswick, andddd we need a northern and southern arc for the highways. or maybe just a complete outer perimeter, then we could have people arguing about itp v. itop v otp. it’d be great!
All I REAAAAAAAAALY want for christmas though, is for Marta officials and local transit heads from the surrounding area to go to portland/seattle/dc/toronto and see what transit that not only works but goes places people want to go looks like and fix marta here!
Agree. I think folks in Georgia just don’t know how good it can be. Why not include Chicago? Mass transit sure seems to work well there in the central city areas, not as sure about other areas.
It works very well in the (gasp) suburbs there, too. Lots of commuter rail to get folks downtown (think big Amtrak-like trains instead of MARTA cars). I used to live in town and reverse commute out to a job in burbs and the commuter train was quite nice.
Havent been there yet, just naming places i’ve gone in the past year that had awesome transit
And San Francisco, and Philadelphia.