Board representative asks for feasibility study on bringing system to county
By PAUL DONSKY, , BEN SMITH
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 12/07/06
A group of Gwinnett County leaders is pushing for an extension of MARTA's rapid rail line to the booming area, 16 years after county voters soundly rejected a plan to join the regional transit system.
Officials with the Gwinnett Village Community Improvement District, which spans the Norcross and Lilburn areas, say the issue deserves to be revisited because the county has changed dramatically since the last MARTA referendum in 1990.
Gwinnett's population has more than doubled, and its traffic problems now rival the nation's worst bottlenecks.
MARTA has long been locked out of the area's biggest suburban counties, leaving the transit system to serve only DeKalb and Fulton counties and the city of Atlanta.
But on Wednesday, the door into Gwinnett creaked open when the county's lone representative on the MARTA board, Bruce Le'Vell, asked the board to study the feasibility of an expansion into the state's second-most populous county.
The board readily agreed, voting to spend up to $50,000 on the study, provided Gwinnett match the figure. Chuck Warbington, executive director of the Gwinnett Village CID, said Wednesday his group would come up with the matching funds.
Another referendum may be years away, if it happens at all. It's a politically risky matter that calls for a 1 percent sales tax increase and has racial overtones. Gwinnett and the other suburban county's historic refusal to accept MARTA has been seen by some as a way to keep out minorities.
The 1990 vote failed by more than 2 to 1.
"It is speculative, I know," Le'Vell, a jeweler and developer from Duluth, said of the effort. "But somebody's got to pull the trigger, and I'm going to pull it."
Gwinnett has a seat on the board because the county helped fund MARTA's original engineering study. But in 1971, county residents initially voted against joining the system. MARTA's northeast rail line stops in Doraville, a few miles south of the Gwinnett County line.
Gwinnett created its own bus system several years ago, with limited local service and a handful of commuter express routes.
The 1990 plan rejected by voters envisioned a $700 million rail line extension to Gwinnett Place mall with three new stations, including a park-and-ride lot in Norcross at Jimmy Carter Boulevard and Buford Highway. MARTA's study will revisit that plan and determine whether any changes should be made.
Gwinnett has grown up, Le'Vell said, with dense pockets of development that could easily support a rail line or other form of mass transit.
Several developers have recently unveiled plans to build high-rise condominiums — a first for Gwinnett, Le'Vell noted.
Meanwhile, traffic on I-85 and other major roads has reached critical mass, he said.
"There's a need to move people through that highly dense corridor other than [with] cars," Le'Vell said.
Warbington said the MARTA study should consider whether the county might be better served by a bus rapid-transit system — a rail-like system that has limited stops and stations but uses buses, not train cars, to move passengers. The study also would examine possible funding alternatives to the MARTA sales tax, such as private investment.
"People are tired of sitting in traffic," Warbington said. "The only other options are to move or change jobs, and both of those mean changing your life."
Comments posted to an online forum showed a mixed reaction. Some cheered the news of a renewed effort to bring MARTA into Gwinnett, saying it could help alleviate traffic and provide commuters with a stress-free alternative to highway driving, while others said the county was far too spread out to support mass transit.
A few readers said they feared joining MARTA would increase crime and attract the wrong sort of people to the county.
Warbington's group is one of several community improvement district organizations in Gwinnett that were created to stop creeping urban blight from overwhelming the county's southern and western frontiers.
Once home to thriving commercial districts and upscale neighborhoods, the I-85 corridor has become increasingly populated by lower income residents, many of them immigrant newcomers, living in rental homes and apartment complexes.
Warbington's group isn't the only organization trying to bring rail transportation to Gwinnett. A group led by Gwinnett developer Emory Morsberger is lobbying the state to build a commuter rail line from Athens to Atlanta that would cut through Gwinnett. No funding has been identified for the project, estimated to cost at least $378 million.
Talk of a MARTA sales tax in Gwinnett comes at a time of great uncertainty in transportation circles — and possible competition for new sales tax revenue.
The state Legislature is expected to discuss several proposals to shore up transportation funding, including a statewide 1 percent sales tax and allowing regions to levy a sales tax.
At the same time, leaders from across the metro Atlanta region are meeting to improve the area's transit service and possibly create an umbrella transit system funded by a regional tax that could absorb some or all of MARTA's duties.
AJC
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