MARTA gets battered by Jill Chambers for 4,258th time
September 15, 2009 at 12:12 pm by Thomas Wheatley in NewsAh, MARTA oversight committee meetings. They must be really fun for transit officials, ya know?
According to Atlanta Unfiltered’s Jim Walls and the AJC’s Ariel Hart, yesterday’s meeting of the state committee tasked with overseeing how MARTA spends public dollars was the usual “berate-the-transit-agency-to-which-we-contribute-little-if-anything.”
States Rep. Jill Chambers, R-Dunwoody, who chairs the committee and has a reputation for ripping into MARTA, lit into transit honchos for their consulting deals. (Last week she picked up a 2010 opponent for her North DeKalb seat in Elena Parent. So she might not have been too happy.)
[Chambers] criticized MARTA for authorizing some $250,000 for headhunters to find outside talent. MARTA CEO Beverly Scott said part of that was an effort to hire a new safety manager following the escalator failure at stations on New Year’s Eve 2007.
Stoner objected to the meeting’s tone, and said agency officials were being “berated.” That led to an exchange where Stoner said Chambers had given him inaccurate information, prompting Chambers to cut off his microphone. “You’re going to cut me off? You’re going to cut me off?” Stoner asked. Chambers responded, “Mm hmm,” and Stoner replied, “Then I can speak a lot louder than this, Madam Chair,” and continued his complaint without his microphone.
“I can save you $400,000 right now,” Chambers told GM Beverly Scott. “As MARTOC chairman, I will not do business … or allow myself to be lobbied by anyone hired by this authority and paid with tax money.”
Chambers said she’d heard that MARTA wanted to hire lobbyists who could reach House Rules Chairman Earl Ehrhart and Ways and Means chairman Larry O’Neal. Earlier, she said about a half-dozen lobbyists hoping to secure the MARTA job were in attendance at today’s MARTOC meeting.
Scott denied that any specific legislators would be targeted. She said MARTA, which employed two lobbyists in the 2009 legislative session, was “outclassed [and] outmaneuvered” by other interests with larger lobbying corps.
…
Several state agencies employ more lobbyists than MARTA does, Stoner said. And, he noted, “We have a public monopoly named Georgia Power which hired 70 people to lobby in the last session to lobby us with ratepayer money.”
Scott said MARTA ideally should have four or five lobbyists to educate the General Assembly about the agency: “There are many legislators, they just don’t know MARTA, they don’t have any clue.”
Check out the full reports for other details about yesterday’s meeting, including how MARTA’s faring with those risky financial leasing deals signed years ago with AIG, arguably one of the most successful companies ever on Earth.
September 15th, 2009 at 2:25 pm
Marta is a disgusting, inefficient and expensive blight on our city. If I performed my job as poorly as Marta, I’d be fired.
I love public transportation… in other cities.
This has nothing to do with money, and everything to do with service (or lack there of).
Marta trains doesn’t go anywhere, they leave you with swamp ass when you use it to go to the airport, and did I mention smells awful. Do the homeless use the elevators as a bathroom?
September 15th, 2009 at 2:46 pm
m, did you just claim that ‘MARTA doesn’t go anywhere’ while revealing that you took MARTA to the airport — a very important somewhere — in the same paragraph? That’s awesome. Your material is very funny. Please post more.
September 15th, 2009 at 3:08 pm
It’s also funny, up to a point, that “m” loves public transportation in other cities……where the systems receive state funding! MARTA remains the only big city transit system not to receive state funding – just state regulation.
“m” is also just wrong: I have ridden transit systems all over the world, and MARTA remains one of the cleanest. What makes MARTA inferior to the transit systems in New York, London, Paris, Washington, etc. is that those systems have been built out, over many decades, to cover the whole city and much of the metro area. MARTA, in contrast, stopped construction after little more than 20 years. One reason is that several counties voted not to participate. So we have people saying they don’t want MARTA in their county “because it doesn’t go anywhere”!!!
September 15th, 2009 at 4:26 pm
MARTA rail serves almost all of Atlanta’s major business districts (downtown, midtown, central buckhead, perimeter) as well as most tourist, sports, and shopping destinations (with the Braves shuttle being equivalent to a rail line and the Zoo being the largest tourist destination lacking rail service). MARTA rail does not serve as many residential areas as it could, although hundreds of thousands of people use it to commute to work daily. It does not serve the distant suburbs
I frequently hear that MARTA has poor leadership, and I don’t know much about its management. But I do know that it does a good job of running its rail lines. The trains come frequently (at least during rush hour) and they are clean and generally pleasant.
September 15th, 2009 at 7:08 pm
I only moved here a month ago, but I’m very satisfied with MARTA. The stations are clean, and the trains have always been reliable for me. My only complaints are that I wish the headways were shorter at night (a problems caused by a lack of state funds), and that I wish the stations were designed more for pedestrians and less for cars (but developments like Lindbergh show hope for fixing that). I’ll admit that I’ve never tried a bus.
September 16th, 2009 at 9:48 am
I encourage people to vote for her opponent, Elena Parent, who is wildly more qualified than Ms. Chambers.
This isn’t a Republican v. Democrat issue. This is a competency issue.
September 16th, 2009 at 11:51 am
I regularly use MARTA rail, and give it pretty good marks. It’s late on occasion (usually when it rains), but I’d rather wait in a station than wait in gridlock traffic.
It’s major problem is funding, of course: We have legislators who say no to transit, then go home and boast to their constituents that they drew the line on tossing money at that wasteful transit system for “those people” in big, bad Atlanta. A pity.
If MARTA wanted to streamline, it could make its police force a division of the APD. I am not waiting for that to happen.
September 16th, 2009 at 2:55 pm
I rode MARTA exclusively for a full year and never had any problems. It took me where ever I needed to go and if you plan your routes in advance, you can get there on time. In fact, I prefer MARTA to having to face the idiots that drive (or should I say don’t know how to) in Atlanta.
October 2nd, 2009 at 2:43 pm
All the MARTA haters need to read the following letter to the editor published 9/15 in the AJC.
In the letter, a family of out-of-state visitors praises MARTA and its employees for convenience and high quality of service during their stay in Atlanta over Labor Day.
http://www.ajc.com/opinion/readers-write-9-16-139338.html
As for me, I’ve lived in Atlanta for ten years and have always found MARTA to be a dependable and convenient alternative to sitting in gridlock traffic. My only complaint is that MARTA hasn’t opened any new rail stations since North Springs opened in 2000.
October 2nd, 2009 at 2:46 pm
Correction, the letter appeared in the 9/16 AJC.
October 2nd, 2009 at 3:01 pm
MARTA operates effectively, but I don’t know how efficiently it is operated. Are the finances a joke? I don’t know.
I do know that I like using the rail, especially to the airport.