Think locally, act regionally

Developing a regional consciousness

This is a text adaptation of CNN's Special Report, "Where We Live," which will air Sunday, October 1 at 10 p.m. EDT.

ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- "If you try to look toward downtown Atlanta, you can see ... it's not clear. You know, and you really can't tell that it's not clear when you're in it all the time. You don't realize it when you're driving by all this dirty, smoggy, horrible-smelling air," traffic reporter "Captain" Herb Emory says, flying high above the city in his helicopter.

In the 1990s, Atlanta, Georgia, was the fastest growing metropolitan area in the country, says real estate developer and consultant Christopher Leinberger.

But as Emory described and Leinberger explains, "By the end of the '90s [Atlanta] found itself in the most egregious sprawl-induced air polluted environment that the country has ever seen."

"I know the air's worse. When I first moved here I didn't have asthma and then in '93 I was diagnosed with asthma," Liz Punch, a resident of suburban Atlanta, explains. "It drives me crazy when I'm riding in the car with him (husband Brad) because I always use the recirculate button on my air conditioner and he always uses the fresh air and I can tell when I get in his car and he's got the fresh air on because I can smell the fumes."

The pollution was so bad that Atlanta had violated the federal Clean Air Act. In 1998, the U.S. government cut off funding for any new road building -- an act that put quality-of-life issues on Georgia's political radar.

Democrat Roy Barnes was elected governor in 1998, promising to clean up Atlanta's traffic and air problems. After taking office, he pushed the legislature to create a powerful regional super-agency, the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority (GRTA).

"GRTA was born out of crisis," Barnes explains. "GRTA is a coordinating agency of the 80 governments that exist in the Atlanta region. There are 80 different governments that exist -- city, counties and otherwise. ... Problems in a growth area do not just stop at a city line or a county line and there was no one agency that could say, 'Listen, you have to get together in your planning. If you don't, by the way, then you could lose state funds.'"

GRTA has authority to force regional plans upon local governments. But Catherine Ross, a former urban planning professor Barnes appointed as GRTA's executive director, says she hopes the agency never has to use that power.

"The real hope is that we've developed something that we call a regional consciousness that says, 'We care about air quality, we care about a sustainable economy, we care about quality of life and wanting to be the kind of place where people want to live, companies want to continue to locate,'" Ross explains. "You hope you never have to get to the point of recommending that you withhold funds for doing something that's in the best interest of the region and I would argue ultimately in the best interest of the counties."

But not everyone is so optimistic about GRTA. "I think that someday, somebody will challenge GRTA," says Wayne Hill, chairman of the Gwinnett County Commission.

With a population of more than half a million now, Gwinnett County, located northeast of Atlanta, was one of the fastest growing counties in the nation during the 1980s. Hill says he's not sure GRTA's power is legal.

"I think it will be a constitutional issue. Most of the commissioners that I hear all over the state say, 'You know, we have, the constitution guarantees us that we have powers to deal with certain things at the local level,'" Hill says. "And I think everybody will tell you that most things are better that are dealt with at the local level."

But for managed growth advocates such as Cherokee County Commission Chair Emily Lemcke, GRTA offers political cover.

"I think GRTA is a lifesaver to elected officials in the region because there are times for the long-term public good [when] elected officials have to make very difficult decisions and they're afraid to buck the current political climate for a long-term benefit," Lemcke explains.

One of those difficult decisions GRTA could make would be to impose public transportation in Cherokee County -- even if residents such as the Punch family oppose it.

"One of the reasons we moved here was because we felt like mass transit would never come to Cherokee County," says Liz Punch. "I think that mass transit makes areas accessible for lower income families that could not otherwise come out here because they don't have transportation."

"It is true that the lower on the socioeconomic scale you get, generally, the higher the crime rate is and two things unfortunately do go hand in hand together. And there's nothing you can do about that," Liz Punch's husband, Brad, says.

Though GRTA was born out of an air quality crisis, its creation brings up other issues, such as white flight into the suburbs. Atlanta's rise to prosperity left some neighborhoods, including the mostly-black inner city, behind.

Ross equates this economic segregation to another kind of segregation.

"Oh, I think there's a racial dimension to it. There's a fear that somehow transit means lower property value," Ross says. "Those are the issues that you're going to have to confront. Which is one of the things that historically we've said, that you have to worry about providing secure environments for travelers."

"Probably the best thing we should do with our bus systems is we should put a label as you enter: 'This bus is for losers only,'" Leinberger says. "In our society, people that take transit are considered losers at least in most of our towns and we've given them a pretty poor existence, lousy service and it's because we have, you know, shifted our public funding priorities so heavily to roads."

But Barnes admits, "We're not trying to get everybody out of the automobile."

"We realize that the freedom that makes you a Georgian and American gives you the right to drive an automobile. However, it should be a choice made. You should be able to have a choice," the governor says. "In other words if you want to ride mass transit so you don't have to sit in traffic, it should be available to you. Is everybody gonna leave a car? No."

There are signs some suburban attitudes are changing. This summer, Clayton County, near Atlanta's huge Hartsfield International Airport, approved its first bus system. GRTA did not have to use its authority to impose it, but it will help pay for and run the system. The move is GRTA's first tangible step toward reducing congestion and cleaning up Atlanta's dirty air.

"The issues of Atlanta are the issues of every metropolitan area in this country," Leinberger explains. "Not only did they reach that point of common discontent a lot faster than most places did, they're also attempting to grapple with the solutions a lot more intensely ... if it's happening in Atlanta now, it'll be happening in your town very shortly. So it's a good town to learn from."

NEXT: Dealing with disposable development-->

PART I: Where we live

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