By Elliott Brack, editor and publisher | It was a terrific blow to the Gwinnett economy recently when WestRock Company announced that it was moving its company home office from its Thrasher Street location in Norcross to Sandy Springs. With this announcement some 800 jobs will be lost to Gwinnett County.
It was worse than that. WestRock, the former Rock-Tenn Corp. which has been headquartered in Norcross since the 1960s, is a Fortune 500 Company. You don’t easily replace firms of this size, nor of their prestige. The company said it would keep its IT and back-office functions in two Gwinnett buildings in Norcross and Duluth. You remember that Gwinnett lost another Fortune 500 company, NCR, a few years back. Neither was good for the county.
The reason WestRock gave for the move was to ensure that its employees had access to rapid transit, and easy access to Hartsfield-Jackson Airport. The company also said access to mass transit would boost its chance of attracting young employees who want the option of riding transit to work.
Unfortunately, the lack of mass transit in Gwinnett County is no closer now than it was 5-10 years ago, at least for concrete plans for its implementation. However, there has been a major change, we feel, in the way Gwinnettians look upon mass transit. With the influx of 550,000 residents since the last MARTA vote in 1990, many of these new residents are questioning why Gwinnett doesn’t have mass transit. They recognize the benefits it will bring them individually, and also understand how it will bring Gwinnett into the modern era.
We’ve heard many of these new residents lament: “We can’t understand why Gwinnett hasn’t adopted the concept of rapid transit.”
Put simply, the leadership of Gwinnett County has yet to see the urgency of moving toward bringing alternative forms of transportation to the county.
Even in her state-of-the-county address last week, Chairman Charlotte Nash seemed to rank mass transit way down the list or improvements. She said: “The County needs to explore new ways to improve mobility – including transit. We can’t stop improving our road network, but expanded transit options must also be part of any long-term solution.”
There was no tone of urgency in this statement. Recognize that even if the county would vote tomorrow for the implementation of mass transit, it would probably take 10 years for it to be a fully-functioning system. You don’t build, or finance, such an option overnight. And the final action is to sell this concept to the voters.
The leadership of Gwinnett County needs to move to a high-level of planning for mass transit. Options need to be already under study, so that perhaps by the 2018 General Election, voters would have a chance to voice their choice for mass transit.
Chairman Nash mentioned in her recent address the state-of-the-art water treatment system Gwinnett County has. We are a world leader in this concept.
We need to apply that same engineering effort to bring forth plans to make a Gwinnett County mass transit system to the proposal stage. We need to hire the world’s best engineers, and begin moving to make the studies so that we can feel confident we have moved in the right direction when it is presented to the voters.
To delay is to see further erosion of our corporate community, and to deny our citizens the mass transit option they want.
The key word is “Urgency.” We look to that concept being on Gwinnett’s immediate agenda.
- Have a comment? Send to: elliott@brack.net
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