ABSTRACT
Atlanta's business elites further exacerbated the racial divide between city and state by adopting as Atlanta's slogan a line attributed to Mayor William Hartsfield: "A city too busy to hate". Some Atlanta residents contended that Republican governor Sonny Perdue, a businessman from rural middle Georgia, had rigged the statewide sales tax referendum process so that Atlanta's expected request for transit funding would fail. Based in Atlanta, the Georgia chapter of the Sierra Club maintained that the transportation projects would promote sprawl to a degree that outweighed the transit funding. Tempers of many constituencies boiled after the roundtable did not elect Atlanta's mayor to serve on the five-member executive committee that was to short-list projects. The Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC) is the metropolitan planning organization for Atlanta and is responsible for regional planning in a 10-county area, as well as collecting air quality data for 10 adjoining counties.
