T-SPLOST loss a learning experience

Officials now say heartbreak ‘start of great things.’

Four years ago, a Presbyterian pastor pled for a disjointed metro Atlanta to come together. Joanna Adams pulled wisdom from Paul the Apostle to an Olympic gold medalist, trying to show how camaraderie and forgiveness could mend gashes some thought permanent.

“I wish there had been less rancor, especially in the final days leading up to the vote, but when a lot is at stake, passions run deep,” she wrote.

That might seem like a strange way to talk about a sales tax referendum, said Lee Biola, president of Citizens for Progressive Transit. But if you voted in the summer of 2012 on the regional transportation referendum known as T-SPLOST, he said, you’d know that she was right on target.

Voters roundly rejected the $7.2 billion, 10-year transportation plan. Since then, transportation officials say they’ve learned from their mistakes and made gains in areas where progress once looked impossible.

“It was heartbreaking,” Biola said. “But it was actually the start of great things.”

One of those great things — Clayton County.

The transportation referendum had included $101 million to bring bus service back to the county after it was canceled in March 2010. Without those dollars, the future of public transit in Clayton looked bleak.

But that changed in 2014, when Clayton residents voted by a landslide 74 percent margin to pay a 1 percent sales tax and join MARTA. It was MARTA’s largest funding commitment in metro Atlanta in more than three decades.

While stories like Clayton may be a good sign, some say it’s a short return on T-SPLOST’s backbone — a united regional transportation system.

If the regional transportation plan had passed, it would have tied metro Atlanta to a 10-county investment.

Now projects are getting done at an accelerated rate, but they’re confined to certain areas or counties.

That’s only so sustainable, said Alyssa Davis with Advance Atlanta. Adding train lines or expanding highways is a serious investment and that has a regional or state price tag, not a local one, she said.

Still, Davis said that doesn’t mean the dream is dead.

“I think we will [get there] because it’s a necessity for us to be successful,” she said. “I just think it may take longer and be a little more difficult, but honestly I’m hopeful and optimistic.”

Whether people were for or against it, the T-SPLOST got transportation conversations started on a scale they hadn’t seen before, Biola said.

It made citizens ask questions that were essential then and still are as metro Atlanta moves forward, Biola said. “It made you think about what kind of community you are and what kind of community you want to be.”