It has practically become an annual rite at MARTA. Officials beat the drum each year while the General Assembly is in session, insisting that the state remove restrictions on the penny sales tax contributed by the taxpayers of Fulton and DeKalb counties for the transit system.
State law requires that 50 percent of sales tax funds for MARTA be used for operations and the other half for capital projects and maintenance. The General Assembly has suspended this requirement, known as the “50-50 split,” through June 2013, when it is currently scheduled to be restored. Recognizing the ongoing downturn in the economy, the Legislature is likely to suspend this requirement another three years, through June 2016, in next year’s legislative session.
However, we should not pretend that the 50-50 split serves no purpose. Its purpose is to prevent MARTA from spending all of its sales tax revenue on personnel and salaries to the exclusion of adequately maintaining its extensive infrastructure.
Critics complain that the Legislature has no business regulating MARTA. After all, these critics remind us, the state does not fund MARTA with any appropriation in the state budget.
But consider this: the City of Atlanta, the Fulton County Commission and the DeKalb County Government also appropriate nothing to MARTA. It is the payers of the sales tax and to a lesser extent, the fare-payers, who keep MARTA afloat.
MARTA is and always has been a state authority, one created by the General Assembly in 1965 to enable voters in up to six jurisdictions – the City of Atlanta, and Fulton, DeKalb, Cobb, Gwinnett and Clayton counties – to decide whether they would like to participate in funding a transit agency and purchasing a bus system already operating in the City of Atlanta. In the end, only the voters in the City of Atlanta and Fulton and DeKalb counties approved joining MARTA.
At the time, allowing the sales tax for MARTA was a big step. Until 1965, the State of Georgia collected sales tax revenue only for state coffers. The General Assembly had not allowed counties or cities to tax themselves for road projects, parks, school improvements or even property tax relief. The state laws that made it possible to levy local SPLOSTs and other local sales taxes like DeKalb County’s Homestead Option Sales Tax (HOST) were enacted sometime thereafter.
MARTA’s very existence was made possible by the General Assembly when it essentially created an exception to then-existing state law to allow a sales tax to be collected in several metro jurisdictions for a localized purpose.
Georgia lawmakers let the creation of MARTA happen only with state oversight. This meant the creation of a state authority with board members that included state officials and the creation of a state legislative oversight committee or MARTOC.
Let’s not kid ourselves that MARTA does not need independent oversight. It is an agency that takes in hundreds of millions of dollars of our tax dollars annually. Yet none of its board members are directly accountable to the taxpayers. They are not elected by the citizens who pay the extra penny to help keep MARTA running.
Having created MARTA, the General Assembly has a duty to serve as a watchdog for the citizens who pay for MARTA. Regardless of what the critics say, this role of the state government will not be marginalized.
At the same time, it is important to periodically revisit and retool the accountability mechanisms such as the 50-50 split that govern MARTA’s fiscal affairs. For this task, a partnership between the state, MARTA and other stakeholders is welcome.
Posted by Mike Jacobs 
