MARTA board members discussed the future of the Five Points Station renovation, an inquiry into alternative funding options, and an exception to the agency’s ethics code at the meeting on Thursday, Nov. 14.
“MARTA and Mayor Dickens have agreed to move forward with the originally planned Five Points transformation project,” MARTA CEO Collie Greenwood said in his presentation to board members. “We are very, very pleased with the outcome of those discussions.”
The $230 million project has been on hold since July due to opposition that the renovations would require closing MARTA’s most frequented station and the only intersection of its north-south and east-west lines for up to four years.
“The agreement does include a specific modification to allow for ongoing pedestrian access and bus access to Five Points on the Forsyth St. side of the station during construction, and that includes customer access to station elevators and escalators,” Greenwood said.
MARTA is now working to expedite building permits, and the transit agency will share more details about construction timelines and station access “as soon as we can,” he said.
The MARTA board also voted to make an exception to the agency’s ethics code to allow former chief of staff Melissa Mullinax to take a position with infrastructure firm HNTB, which has multi-million dollar contracts for MARTA projects including a $3.5 million contract for the South DeKalb Transit Hub awarded on Oct. 10.
The MARTA ethics rules prohibit companies with active contracts from hiring former MARTA employees for a six-month period after they leave the transit agency — a measure intended to keep MARTA employees from moving to a position with a vendor and manipulating the contract process. Violating that rule would require HNTB to terminate current contracts with MARTA and re-apply for contracts after that six-month period.
“To do that would be detrimental to the authority at this point,” Chief Legal Counsel Peter Andrews said.
The ethics code allows the board to enact a waiver to make an exception to this rule, and the MARTA board has voted to do so about six times over the last handful of years, according to Andrews.
Several board members expressed concern about a lack of context on this matter before making a formal decision, but the MARTA board ultimately voted to approve the waiver.
Project funding and transparency
Over the summer, MARTA decided to explore alternative funding sources — outside of the local sales tax and federal dollars — to help support the agency’s expansion efforts and created a board subcommittee to research the options.
“The current MARTA penny sales tax is consumed supporting operations and state of good repair for the existing system and is insufficient to support expanding or enhancing MARTA’s service,” MARTA CFO Kevin Hurley said.
With the population of metro Atlanta projected to grow by 2 million people over the next 25 years, MARTA needs to “identify and explore sources of supplementary sources of funding for future expansion,” he said.
The subcommittee is examining as many as 10 potential funding options and will deliver a full report by the end of June 2025. Currently, the working group is collecting data about transit projects in other regions that have used two or more types of alternative funding or financing.
The team has already collected about 60 percent through collecting all of this information, which includes project and program type, the status of the project, project costs, funding sources, and financing mechanisms, project timelines, required approvals, equity objectives, best practices, and key takeaways.
This data, along with selection criteria based on MARTA’s priorities, will help determine which options could be most useful for transit projects in Atlanta. Next, the subcommittee will assess how those funding sources might work for MARTA in a collection of potential project scenarios. The scenario modeling is expected to be complete by March 2025.
MARTA is also developing a project snapshot tool to share progress updates on the transit agency’s website.
“The intent of the dashboard is to create a public-facing tool for updates regarding MARTA’s capital projects, exhibiting project scope, stages or phases, locations, budgets, and spending,” LaTeeka Washington, assistant general manager of MARTA’s centralized program management office, said.
The information will come from MARTA’s financial record-keeping system in Oracle and will be updated at the end of each month, Washington said.
Once the dashboard goes through final reviews, it will be accessible in the Projects Overview section of MARTA’s website.
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