One man’s mission against MARTA

Efforts of Gwinnett resident, other factors could defeat transit bid.

Joe Newton is a one-man resistance movement. He’s the guy at the public meetings handing out fliers purporting to spell out “THE TRUTH ABOUT MARTA.”

He’s the one behind the increasingly popular “No MARTA in Gwinnett” Facebook page. He created martahoax.com.

“You’re not going to get what they promised you,” he said Tuesday at a panel discussion he put together in Lawrenceville.

Those who want Gwinnett County residents to vote yes in 11 days to bring MARTA to the county are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to canvass neighborhoods and purchase ads on TV.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution spoke to dozens of people from Norcross to Dacula and searched social media accounts and websites for signs of an organized opposition to the March 19 referendum, which would commit Gwinnett residents to paying a new 1 percent sales tax to fund billions of dollars in new transit projects.

The newspaper found that Newton’s efforts thus far make up just about the entirety of the organized opposition campaign— but that, when combined with several other factors, it may be all that’s needed to kill a vote that could potentially reshape the economies and quality of life of metro Atlanta’s suburbs for decades to come.

For all the demographic and political changes in Gwinnett County over the last three decades that signal increasingly positive attitudes toward transit, the county’s older, more conservative guard could still wield the most power at the ballot box — and they’re not fans of the MARTA option.

“Given what we’ve seen so far with the voting behavior, if that volume trend holds, it looks like (older, more conservative voters) are likely to have an outsize impact in this outcome,” Ryan Anderson of georgiavotes.com told the AJC this week.

‘God knows what else’

A new poll that Rosetta Stone Communications conducted Tuesday for Channel 2 Action News found that, among the 1,000 Gwinnett voters contacted for the survey, more than 51 percent were opposed to the referendum. Another 39 percent supported it. The remaining 10 percent was undecided. The margin of error was 3.1 percent.

More than 90 percent of those surveyed were over 40 years old. About two-thirds were white.

Those polled do not match the demographics of Gwinnett’s overall electorate; just 42 percent of the county’s nearly 544,000 registered voters identified themselves as white. But if early advance voting numbers are any indication, it may be more reflective of turnout for the MARTA referendum.

Through Wednesday, the 10th day of early voting, around 12,000 people had cast ballots in-person or via mail, according to data analysis performed by Anderson. More than 64 percent of those voters were white. About 82 percent of voters were 50 or older.

Loganville resident Rachel Pace was among them. She voted no Tuesday at the county elections office.

“It’s too easily accessed,” she said about potential crime on the MARTA system. “It’s too easy to get in and get out, and do what you need to do, and take what you need to take, and not be found.”

Her words echoed fears expressed during Gwinnett County’s last MARTA referendum in 1990 (and a fear that’s been largely discredited by multiple academic studies). The referendum was soundly defeated then. And while those types of worries are not uncommon among such voters, much of the opposition today seems to be based on the financial aspects of the deal.

Joe Newton, for instance, has largely focused his argument on the $5.5 billion in revenue officials have projected from the new transit-funding sales tax that would be put in place should the referendum pass. He argues that costs will be more than projected and Gwinnett will end up dipping into its general fund — and raising property taxes on homeowners — to make up the difference.

(Commission Chairman Charlotte Nash has pushed back on that assertion, saying that the county is using “very conservative” revenue projections and will “manage to the budget,” and that things like right-of-way and property acquisition could be covered by the sales tax.)

Newton also doesn’t trust MARTA in general, which has a history of fiscal management issues but has run budget surpluses for six straight years. And he doesn’t trust Gwinnett County’s assertions its pending contract with the transit agency gives it unprecedented local control.

“God knows what else they’re gonna tax us with,” he said.

And Newton’s not alone. Longtime Lawrenceville resident Dennis Keye said he learned all he needed to know about the referendum from his Facebook posts. Keye and about three dozen others folks — almost exclusively older and white — visited the historic courthouse in Lawrenceville on Tuesday night for the anti-transit panel discussion Newton organized.

They nodded and applauded with everything the panelists said.

“I for one plan on leaving Gwinnett County when this happens,” Keye said. “I do not intend to put up with this.”

‘A lot better picture’

With the opposition bloc largely coinciding with Gwinnett’s most reliable voters, the pressure is on transit supporters to convince their larger but typically less dependable group of voters to actually hit the polls.

And while supporters have recently secured MARTA endorsements from high-profile Republicans former Gov. Nathan Deal, Gwinnett Sheriff Butch Conway and Gwinnett District Attorney Danny Porter, advocacy groups know that getting out a younger, more diverse electorate is their best chance to win.

Groups like Go Gwinnett, the Sierra Club-backed “Yes to MARTA,” the New Georgia Project Action Fund and the Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials say they’re trying to do that: knocking on tens of thousands of very specific doors, sending mailers, texting instead of robo-calling.

They have little to show for their efforts thus far, however, and admit they have work to do — but say they’re not yet surprised or discouraged. There’s more than a week of early voting left and Election Day still to come.

“We are confident that diverse communities will turn out on March 19th and have their voice heard in this important vote,” said Karuna Ramachandran, the deputy director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta.

Terry said his team’s efforts were always targeted toward this week and next. Other groups have suggested they purposefully started out with a low profile to try and avoid sparking a backlash.

“After this first weekend of Saturday and Sunday voting” at satellite polling locations, Terry said, “I think you’re going to get a lot better picture of where we stand.”

That may well be true. Hamilton Mill resident Michael Beck hopes it’s not.

Beck helps run a Facebook page called “No MARTA” that has around 300 followers. The group has printed bumper stickers (which Beck was handing out Tuesday at Newton’s forum), but its efforts are restricted by a lack of funding.

A GoFundMe page he started for the effort raised $200.

“All we have is reality, which easily shows this MARTA thing is a terrible idea,” Beck said. “But sadly, reality is masked by professional propaganda.”