MARTA picks site of maintenance shop

Building will fulfill promise to voters in Clayton County.

Six years after launching operations in Clayton County, MARTA is taking its fifirst tangible steps toward the creation of a multipurpose operations and maintenance facility.

The transit agency’s board earlier this week agreed to purchase about 31 acres on Old Dixie Road in Forest Park to build a proposed a 105,000- square- foot building that MARTA has said it hopes to have built by 2026. Once operational, it will create about 350 jobs.

“This is a culmination and a milestone in a conversation that goes back six, seven years at this point,” said Robert Ashe, a MARTA board member and former chairman.

The facility was key in convincing the Clayton Commission, which initially supported a half- penny sales tax referendum for MARTA, to push for a full penny because of the promise of economic development from the transit agency.

The maintenance facility is part of a broader push by MARTA to beef up its operations in Clayton County. The agency is planning“mobility hubs” that will make it easier to transfer to difffffffffffferen tb us routes within the county, new bus benches and shelters at around 30 locations and a commuter rail service around the end of the decade.

MARTA received a $13 million U.S. Department of Transportation grant last August for the new maintenance facility, which the agency said is needed to make it easier to service or repair buses in Clayton and south Fulton counties.

The agency will need the city of Forest Park to sign offff on the deal at its meeting on Monday. MARTA, which said it will disclose the purchase price of the property at the meeting, said it did not know what it would do with buildings that are already on the two sites that make up the 31- acre parcel.