MARTA's ready... but is Gwinnett County?

Jack Snyder of Norcross says he is a man on a mission. He will get MARTA into Gwinnett County. MARTA is not averse. And parts of the Gwinnett business community think it’s worth a look. But between those thoughts and serious transit in the state’s second-most-populous county is a gap that only political will can bridge.
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? Snyder first declared his quest to the all-GOP, five-member Gwinnett County Commission this year with a speech lasting all of two minutes, introducing himself and his organization, Gwinnett Needs Mass Transit.
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? Snyder gives a couple of reasons why Gwinnett needs robust transit.
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? For one, there's traffic. But there is also the fact that the county's population is nearing 900,000 people. And a lot of those folks are transplants, not the people who rejected MARTA in 1990.
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? Snyder, who has launched a GoFundMe page to support the effort, himself has lived in Florida and Pennsylvania. New folks, he said, “are coming from areas that have concentrated mass transit and don’t want to be forced to use their vehicles … they’re accustomed to it and that’s what they’re looking for.” In addition, he said, lack of transit is starting to hinder employees and employers from linking up with each other.
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? “From our perspective we just think it would be a real logical addition to the region,” said MARTA COO Richard Krisak. “The millennial, the young folks, like my kids, they don’t really want to have a car. We’re seeing more and more with that population segment, takes transit as a choice, not as a necessity.”
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? Yes, Gwinnett buses link to the Doraville MARTA station and ferry between the county and Downtown Atlanta at rush hours. But that’s not saying too much.
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? ??? “The transit we have in Gwinnett is just not an option for 99 percent of Gwinnettians,” said Kellie Austin, with the southwest Gwinnett Chamber of Commerce. It works where Gwinnett borders north Fulton and north DeKalb. The lack of rail transit and connectivity is contributing to a fear that Gwinnett might be left without a seat at the metro region’s economic development table.
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? Another business group, the Gwinnett Village Community Improvement District, which sits on both sides of I-85 just inside the county, are just finishing the analysis of some 4,000 answers to the recent Gr8 Exchange survey on transportation. Joel Wascher, the CID’s communications director, says he thinks there’s a fair amount of support for options. 
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? But for Gwinnett to join MARTA, it would have to pay up.
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? DeKalb and Fulton have long charged a 1-percent sales tax for MARTA, which received no state funds for operating the network’s buses and rail. Clayton County hopped on MARTA in 2014, after voters approved their own countywide sales tax.
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? The county had also showed an interest in transit expansion that Gwinnett officials have yet to match. The southside county paid for its own study of where potential expansions — bus and possibly rail — should go and how many riders they would have. The referendum also had strong, though not unanimous, support among county commissioners.
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? Before MARTA spends any money or time modeling or mapping where practical bus, light rail or heavy rail lines might lie, it needs to know it has a pretty good chance of getting a Gwinnett referendum.
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? “There’s been no official dialog” between MARTA and Gwinnett, Krisak said.
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? Meanwhile, Gwinnett is busy asking its voters for a penny for education this year, and perhaps another for other infrastructure next year.
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? The commission decides what’s on the ballot. A county spokesman said Chair Charlotte Nash was working, then on vacation last week, so could not talk to Creative Loafing. But Nash did tell the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in April this year that MARTA would be divisive and she “is not ready to say we’re going to tear this community apart by calling a referendum on that.” 
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? About 63 percent of likely voters in Gwinnett would like to see MARTA expand into their county, according to a March poll by the Gwinnett Chamber of Commerce. But only 50 percent would approve the penny for it, according to the same poll. With a margin of error of 4.4 percent, that’s no guaranteed majority.
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? MARTA has some things going for it that the transit system didn’t have the last time Gwinnett voters were asked if they’d like transit, said Miriam Konrad, senior lecturer in sociology at Georgia State University and author of “Transporting Atlanta: The Mode of Mobility Under Construction.”
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? MARTA can boast of profitable operations, and, due to a change in state law, it is freer to spend on big capital-intensive builds without going through a slow, politicized process under the gold dome, Konrad pointed out.
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? But any Gwinnett expansion depends on political will there.
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? “No matter how forward-thinking MARTA is, it can only go as far as it’s allowed to go,” she said.