Metro Atlanta’s regional identity beginning to take form

Maybe it’s global warming, I don’t know. But you can almost hear the ice beginning to crack and melt around us. It may be the sound of things finally breaking free, the sound of movement.

The first sign of thaw came last spring with the decision by the 10-county Atlanta Regional Commission to redirect $25 million in federal money to MARTA. That not only represented a tangible, financial commitment to transit, it marked an equally important commitment to the concept of metro Atlanta as an entity that has shared needs, obligations and resources.

The elected officials on ARC, many of them far removed geographically from MARTA’s service area, acknowledged by their vote that the ability to think regionally and act regionally has become critical to competing in a global economy.

It was, you might say, metro Atlanta’s Declaration of Interdependence.

As MARTA officials made clear, though, that $25 million was only a temporary fix. The agency’s looming budget crisis began long before the economy cratered, and its causes have little to do with mismanagement, corruption or other issues. The truth is that broad-based transit on the scale required by a major metro region simply cannot be sustained through local sales tax revenue and federal dollars, as Georgia tries to do. No other state in the country takes that approach.

If transit is to play its necessary role in metro Atlanta’s future, either direct state financial aid or a regionwide funding mechanism will be essential. And with the state budget already under enormous strain, the regional approach to financing transit seems inevitable.

The importance of finding a solution was driven home earlier this month in Clayton County, where budget woes forced the county to end transit operations by March 31. If carried out, that move will strand thousands who need transit for access to school, jobs and shopping, and it makes the prospect of severe cuts in MARTA operations look a lot more real.

The most recent sign of a possible thaw comes from state Rep. Fran Millar, a Dunwoody Republican. He has announced an effort to abolish MARTA as an independent agency and put it under the control of the state Department of Transportation. Unlike similar efforts in the past, Millar’s proposal is not intended as a punitive step or as a way to posture against Atlanta. Instead, he sees it as way to facilitate MARTA’s incorporation into a true regional system that operates beyond DeKalb and Fulton counties.

Millar’s idea may be less important than where it comes from. As a rule, Republican legislators in metro Atlanta have tended to resist transit as a solution to the region’s problems. They oppose state involvement or assistance in transit, but they also tend to distrust calls for giving the region the authority to solve those problems on its own.

Taken together, those three “no’s” — no to transit, no to state subsidies, no to regional authority — slam the door on just about every possible solution to Atlanta’s congestion problems.

Millar, however, suggests that may be changing.

“I’m a lifelong Republican, and as Republicans we have not addressed our transportation problems,” he said Monday. “Of course, the Democrats didn’t do it either, but this is our chance and we better take it.”

This legislative session will be Sonny Perdue’s last as governor, Millar pointed out, and it offers Perdue a final chance to be remembered as the leader who found a transportation solution.

In another telling sign of the seriousness of the crisis, neither MARTA general manager Beverly Scott nor board chairman Michael Walls oppose the general thrust of Millar’s effort, although both express qualms about some of its specifics. They, too, understand that dramatic changes are going to be required and soon.

“It’s not like the water issue,” Millar said. “We don’t have three years to do something. We have to do something now.”