Closing out last night’s Decatur City Commission meeting, Mayor Bill Floyd took a moment to follow up on some of his comments from last week, when he presented the commission with a resolution concerning Georgia’s 2012 transportation referendum, which would mirror a recent Fulton Mayors’ (sans Atlanta mayor Kasim Reed) proposal.

Floyd relayed to the room that since the last commissioner’s meeting two weeks ago, the Fulton mayors had asked the DeKalb mayors to join their resolution – which stated that the County would only support a second transportation penny sales tax on top of the current MARTA penny, if Gwinnett, Cobb and Clayton County agreed to creating a regional transportation plan – instead of starting a parrellel effort in DeKalb.

The mayor mentioned that he had spoken with all the DeKalb mayors at this point, and all were on-board with his original resolution.

Though he didn’t confirm either way, it sounded like the DeKalb mayors would probably take the Fulton mayors up on their offer.  If a joining of forces does come to pass, the mayors in the two counties plan to hold a press conference at the Georgia Capitol to announce their decision.

Stay tuned.

Thomas Wheatley’s got the goods.  And I don’t just mean that in a slightly uncomfortable way.

Creative Loafing’s resident transit-psycho has obtained a 2007 analysis done for MARTA (PDF), which details all of the potential financial problems that would need to be overcome if Metro Atlanta’s Rapid Transportation Authority was ever dissolved and merged into a larger regional transportation infrastructure – as has been recently suggested by Decatur Mayor Bill Floyd and a majority of Fulton County mayors.

Among the higher hurdles that would have to be cleared:

• Any “entity” that acquired MARTA would be required to pay in full or defease (aka annul) all $1.9 billion of MARTA’s bonds and $400 million in sales tax revenue “commercial paper” notes.
• If MARTA still has withstanding “lease back” transactions on any of its railcars – Wheatley thinks that most of these have since been “unraveled” – a merger would trigger a default under the lease agreements and MARTA would be forced to give up the railcars “or require a significant termination payment”.
• If MARTA ceases to exist, the existing 1-cent sales tax in Fulton and DeKalb would also cease to exist.

Wheatley believes with an insane amount of “lawyering”, all of these issues could probably be overcome.  However, this just goes to show you, none of this is going to be EASY.

At 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.