Tensions flare between MARTA and City Council members at transportation committee meeting

MARTA CEO Collie Greenwood aimed to present a picture of forward momentum for Atlanta’s transit agency at a meeting of the City Council’s transportation committee on Wednesday, but elected officials had a lot of questions following the More MARTA audit released last week. 

After addressing the transit agency’s issues with the audit methodology during MARTA’s presentation to the transportation committee, Greenwood wouldn’t answer specific follow-up questions about the enhanced bus service and documentation for accounting practices posed by members of the city council. 

He insisted that MARTA needs more time to address their grievances with the audit, released Aug. 19, “page-by-page,” and that private conversations between MARTA leadership and Mayor Andre Dickens’ administration — not a public meeting — would be the preferred venue for a detailed discussion.

“It’s not about honesty,” Greenwood said. “We’ve never been dishonest in terms of how we’re spending.”

He emphasized that the audit found “no malfeasance, no wrongdoing, no fatal flaw, no corruption, none of that. We should start by acknowledging that,” describing the $70 million as an “administrative true-up of the available funds” to ensure the correct amount is allocated to More MARTA expansion projects. 

“There is no check to be written,” Greenwood responded when asked about how much he believes MARTA owes the city.

Multiple members of the transportation committee worried that the evidence of mismanagement of funds for the transit expansion program Atlantans approved back in 2016 makes it more difficult to deliver the improvements that voters were promised. 

“That’s the concern I’ve got — is just that we’re going to burn up all these [More MARTA Atlanta] funds to where the projects are going to be in jeopardy. And that’s the music we have to face together, both the city and MARTA,” Councilmember Alex Wan said. “The formula will be what the formula is. The dollar amount will be what the dollar amount is, but the concerns and the perceptions out there are real, and I think they are justified — no matter if it’s $1, $10, or $70 million.”

More answers, more questions

A tense exchange between Council President Doug Shipman and Greenwood that eventually had to be called back into order by committee chair Byron Amos did clarify some questions raised by the auditor’s report and the recent pause on the Five Points Station renovation.  

The current list of More MARTA projects has not been approved through the Mayor’s office and the intergovernmental agreement (IGA) process, Greenwood confirmed. MARTA is still focused on the nine projects designated as Tier 1 in the yet-to-be-adopted list, but understands that until it is officially approved, the agency is responsible for delivering all 17 of the projects on the previous list, he said. 

Greenwood also shared that the decision about how to move forward with the Five Points project requires input from Mayor Dickens at this stage but that deviating from the current plan and contract agreements will depend on approvals by the MARTA board of directors. 

Concerns around accounting practices were met with less transparency. Shipman asked if More MARTA expenditures have been calculated separately from the agency’s overall finances and handled manually in Excel spreadsheets, as the audit suggests.

“You’ll get our flat-out response to that when we’ve had time to properly unpack it,” Greenwood said. 

Shipman also pressed the MARTA CEO on whether the organization is able to recreate today the calculations it used to charge More MARTA for enhanced bus service in FY 2017-2019 — the years MARTA publicly and immediately took issue with when the audit results were published.

“I can tell you that they’re working on that. I don’t know if they’ve come to it or not,” Greenwood said, once again requesting more time and private conversations. 

Shipman pointed out that this question about the calculations in those years was raised by city council members back in 2022. 

“You may have had two days to respond to this particular report, but you have had 18 months to respond to the fundamental question,” Shipman said.

Greenwood tried to spin this line of questioning as an attempt by the city to get out of paying for the bus service it asked for in those years. It’s not like we “snuck that level of service onto the city” unwillingly, he said. 

“I am simply trying to understand the stream of decisions and calculations that were made that led to a very large bill being charged to More MARTA for what continues to seem like service that was not delivered,” Shipman said. 

Politics and progress

MARTA’s leadership seems to want to portray city council members as grandstanding for the sake of political theater rather than engaging in any real problem-solving.  

“MARTA will continue to rise above politics and deliver on projects that move our region forward. That’s what our customers care about, and that’s where our focus will remain,” MARTA spokeswoman Stephany Fisher shared in an emailed statement about the meeting.

For those who have been part of the years-long discussions about local public transit, this framing falls flat. 

“MARTA’s response to the audit reflects their posture for much of the last two years, which is stubbornness and denial,” Councilmember Amir Farokhi, who has served on the transportation committee since 2018 but was not present for Wednesday’s meeting, said. “They’ve still not provided a legitimate alternative to the concerns that have been raised. Frustration one is what appears to have been misallocated More MARTA funds. Frustration two, which I think most Atlantans feel, is we haven’t seen transit expansion that voters wanted when they passed the More MARTA tax.”

MARTA has spent $100.5 million since 2019 on capital projects through the More MARTA program, according to the presentation Greenwood shared with council members on Wednesday. That total includes $29 million for the Summerhill BRT line — the only project in construction phase — $17.5 million on the Five Points Station transformation, and $8.1 million for the streetcar projects. More than 20 percent of that total More MARTA spending has gone toward program planning, management, and communication, according to the presentation. 

“You want us to believe we can move mountains when the low-hanging fruit is not being taken care of,” Amos said after city council members voiced concerns about relatively simple issues like station naming, restroom access, and bike lanes.

MARTA CEO Greenwood and new CFO Kevin Hurley, who was previously the agency’s treasurer, are now trying to answer questions about decisions that were made by their predecessors. The revolving door of leadership at MARTA poses its own challenges to continuity and accountability, but the defensiveness on display at Wednesday’s meeting certainly does not help in providing transparency to MARTA riders and Atlanta voters. 

“What did you expect?” Amos said to Greenwood, frustrated by the lack of preparation. 

“It speaks to leadership and credibility. The Mayor is representing the city of Atlanta, you’re representing MARTA, but when you’re talking to this body, we’re representing the people who are calling us constantly, asking about projects. And they don’t care which pot of money it’s in [or] whether it’s a ‘true-up,’” he said. 

Mayor Dickens and many serving city council members were elected on platforms that prioritized expanding transit in Atlanta. It does not benefit city officials or residents to criticize MARTA without cause. 

“I know this is an unsavory and tension-filled process, but it’s necessary to ensure that promises are kept,” Farokhi said. “MARTA and the city need each other, and I’m hoping we can get to a point of clarity here and move forward for expanding and maintaining transit in the city.” 

MARTA should be prepared to respond to the questions Greenwood was unable to answer during the Wednesday discussion at the city council finance committee meeting on Sept. 25, Amos said.

“Absolutely, we’ll see you in September,” Greenwood replied.