Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens says he’s focused on implementing transit plans

The Atlanta region has had plans to expand transit for decades and decades.

Now we have another opportunity to move forward with rail transit with the Atlanta City Council voting unanimously to implement light rail on the 22-mile Beltline corridor.

We also have Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens, in an exclusive interview with SaportaReport after the quarterly meeting of the influential Atlanta Committee for Progress, speak of a much closer relationship between the City of Atlanta and MARTA and Jonathan Hunt, who was named MARTA’s general manager in August.

Dickens made a point to say it’s time to move beyond just planning for transit.

“Now it’s time to go down the path of actually implementing these things,” Dickens said.

It’s refreshing to hear our mayor, who also is chair of the Atlanta Regional Commission, talk about transit implementation.

For decades, I’ve advocated for more rail transit in our city and our region. Over the years, I’ve had my hopes raised and dashed repeatedly.

I’m still haunted by the words of the late Jack Stephens, a former deputy general manager of MARTA who moved to Florida in 2003 to take a leadership role with the South Florida Regional Transportation Authority.

We were on the annual LINK trip in the spring of 2006 exploring regional issues in Miami and South Florida, hearing from then-Gov. Jeb Bush and Stephens about regionalism and transit.

“The problem in Atlanta is that you have no one making decisions and implementing them,” Stephens said. “You do a lot of planning. You spend millions and millions and millions of dollars on studies and visioning. At some point, somebody has to take the bull by the horns and do something.”

I can still hear Jack Stephens saying: “Just do something.”

MARTA has not expanded its rail network since December 2000, more than 25 years ago. The Atlanta Streetcar is the only rail we’ve built, and it was a public-private joint venture. The problem is we never fully implemented the streetcar network, which would have connected much of our central city.

We had vision. But we didn’t implement.

Then came More MARTA. City of Atlanta voters overwhelmingly passed a half-penny MARTA sales tax in November 2016, just shy of a decade. That half penny is in addition to the one-penny MARTA sales tax that Atlantans have been paying since MARTA’s inception.

The More MARTA plan included several Beltline rail corridor projects — beginning with the Eastside trail, light rail along Campbellton Road as well as light rail along the Clifton Corridor beginning at the Lindbergh MARTA station.

Many of those projects, unfortunately, have been converted to bus rapid transit (BRT) rather than rail, to save money upfront. Ten years later, we have little to show for our More MARTA dollars.

But there is good news.

Just after Jonathan Hunt was named MARTA’s general manager, the transit agency announced that the City of Atlanta and the transit agency had reached a $52 million settlement on More MARTA dollars — a feud that had been going on for more than two years when Collie Greenwood was the general manager.

Mayor Dickens confirmed the settlement was an example of the closer relationship between MARTA and the city.

“Working with Jonathan Hunt is already much better than working with Collie,” Dickens said in the Sept. 18 interview with SaportaReport. “Just to be extremely frank, printable if you want to: he cares, and he gets it. He rolls up his sleeves, and he doesn’t hold on to old norms.”

The mayor went on to say the city was happy the More MARTA dispute had been settled.

“That was a clear indication that you know he’s ready to rock and roll,” the mayor said. “We’re now moving forward on projects that we’ve been talking about — the Campbellton Road BRT, we’re really pushing forward on that and making sure we close out things related to Summerhill BRT.”

The mayor also complimented the transit agency on its renovation of the Five Points MARTA station.

“MARTA is moving forward,” Dickens said. “We’re getting their project management teams and leadership together… so I feel better than I felt in a long time about where we are with MARTA. We are in a partnership that is going to produce results.”

The city, however, has taken a stance that it needs to have a line of sight of how it will pay to build Beltline rail along the 22-mile corridor and how to pay for maintenance and operations.

That does give me pause. Answering all those questions for a project that could take decades to build could become another excuse to do nothing. I would love for us to have a timeline with phases and a commitment to implement the vision as funding becomes available, be it an extension of the Beltline Tax Implementation District or state and federal funding under new administrations.

Also, at Atlanta Streets Alive on Sept. 27, the Atlanta Department of Transportation had a booth asking for people to give input on the city’s Comprehensive Transportation plans. Rail transit was barely mentioned.

I go back to the 2006 South Florida LINK trip.

Gov. Bush spoke of Florida’s Transportation Regional Incentive Program that provided funds for regional solutions to transit issues. The program called for an investment of $2 billion over six years in transit, with half coming from the state and half as a local match.

“Money makes it a little easier for regionalism to occur,” Bush said.

Then-Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin, who was on the South Florida LINK trip, chimed in.

“The governor here clearly is playing the pivotal role in terms of regional planning by providing state incentives,” Franklin said. “I have every reason to believe that (then) Gov. Sonny Perdue would be interested in a similar initiative given that the state of Georgia is growing and will grow with or without a plan. And without a plan, we are our own worst enemy.”

The South Florida Regional Transportation Authority was providing commuter rail in the tri-county Miami area, and Jack Stephens told Atlanta leaders at the time that South Florida was way ahead of Georgia in its approach to mass transit. Florida does not restrict its use of state motor fuel tax revenues to roads and bridges so it can invest in transit.

“Without state support, we could not have commuter rail,” Stephens said.

Unfortunately, the state of Georgia has never been a true partner in building rail transit within the state or within the Atlanta metro area.

Although the pace of growth in the Atlanta region has slowed, traffic has not. More and more people tell me the traffic could have them leave the city and the region.

Take Cathy Woolard. When she was president of the Atlanta City Council, she pushed Mayor Franklin to implement the Beltline vision proposed by then-Georgia Tech student Ryan Gravel, who called for passenger rail along the corridor. Franklin then created both the Atlanta Beltline Partnership and Atlanta Beltline Inc., and she fought hard for the Beltline TAD to help pay for the project.

Now Woolard has left Atlanta for North Carolina, where there’s less “soul-sucking” traffic. She often expressed frustration about the lack of movement to build rail along the Beltline.

We are in crisis mode right now that’s been decades in the making. We haven’t built the transit infrastructure we need to keep up with the people who live and work here.

And the message Jack Stephens preached to Atlantans in 2006 — “Just do something” — still haunts me.