The MARTA board of directors voted at its Aug. 13 meeting to make Jonathan Hunt the agency's permanent general manager and CEO, ending a national search and removing the interim tag he had carried since August 2025. For downtown Atlanta, where Five Points, Peachtree Center, Georgia State, Garnett and Dome/GWCC handle the daily load of commuters, students, convention crowds and stadium traffic, the vote settles who sets the agency's direction for the next several years.
Hunt is a MARTA insider. He joined the authority in 2014 and spent more than a decade in its legal department, serving as chief of corporate law and real estate, deputy chief counsel and chief legal counsel before being elevated to interim GM/CEO. Before MARTA, he was a senior assistant city attorney for Atlanta handling aviation matters for Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, practiced law at Dentons and Baker & Hostetler, and worked as a project engineer for Gilbane Building Co.
A search committee cut the field to three finalists, all from the mass transit industry. Alongside Hunt were Cleveland Ferguson III, executive vice president and chief administrative officer of the Jacksonville Transportation Authority, and Leroy Jones, executive vice president and chief operating officer of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, a role he took in 2025. Board chair Jennifer Ide called the choice one of the most consequential decisions the board would make and said the region deserved a rigorous process, adding that she was proud of the national search and the caliber of the finalists it produced.
Ide pointed to Hunt's handling of the FIFA World Cup as a deciding factor. Mercedes-Benz Stadium hosted eight matches from June 15 to July 15, and MARTA reported moving 4.7 million riders across the 35 days of events in metro Atlanta with no major crimes reported. Six hundred MARTA ambassadors and 100 multilingual FIFA volunteers worked the system, giving directions and handing out water, sunscreen and first aid. "He will say it is the result of a lot of people, but it was the Jonathan show," Ide said, adding that the board believes Hunt has MARTA headed in the right direction.
Hunt inherits real problems. Six violent attacks have occurred at MARTA stations or aboard trains so far in 2026, two of them fatal, including the June stabbing death of a 66-year-old woman on a train bound for Oakland City station. That incident prompted U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy to order a Federal Transit Administration investigation in early June. A new fleet of rail cars that was supposed to be running in time for the World Cup still has not been put into service. Hunt said he is committed to building back trust in MARTA, work he said the agency has already made progress toward.
Original reporting: Rough Draft Atlanta (2026-08-13)
