If you live or work downtown, the five stations inside the loop are the closest thing Atlanta has to a public utility, and the person who runs them is about to change. MARTA announced three finalists for its permanent CEO job on Aug. 10, with the board set to name a pick on Aug. 13. The finalists are Jonathan Hunt, MARTA's interim CEO for more than a year and previously its chief legal counsel; Cleveland Ferguson III of the Jacksonville Transportation Authority; and Leroy Jones of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority.
The to-do list waiting for the winner reads like a downtown rider's complaint log: raise ridership, keep buses and trains on schedule with enough operators to do it, get the long-delayed CQ400 railcars into service, convince the public the system is safe, speed up the More MARTA program, reverse falling fare revenue, and persuade the state and federal governments to actually pay for transit. Expanding the rail and bus network sits at the bottom of that list, which is roughly where it has sat for a quarter century.
Hunt originally said he would not seek the permanent job and would stay on as legal counsel. He reversed course a few weeks ago, after MARTA drew broad praise for moving millions of people during Atlanta's FIFA World Cup matches. Keith Parker, a former MARTA CEO now advising the agency's board and executive team, said he visited three World Cup host cities and that MARTA's performance was second to none. Parker credited Hunt directly for absorbing hard questions in public, and he declined to call the race, saying all three finalists are credible and that hiring a CEO is the most important decision a board makes.
MARTA's search has been slower and quieter than its peers'. The agency started looking last August, hired the firm DSG, then lost momentum in December when the lead recruiter left for another firm; the process did not resume until February. Dallas-Fort Worth's DART, by contrast, launched its search in April, fielded more than 100 applicants, posted its three finalists publicly on July 10, held stakeholder and public meet-and-greets on July 11, and approved a contract on July 21. DART hired Nat Ford Sr., a former MARTA general manager who has led Jacksonville's transit agency for 13 years and who, according to transit insiders, would have considered coming back to Atlanta. He starts in Dallas in October. Searches are also running in Charlotte, New Orleans and Memphis, and veteran transit executives are retiring, which makes the market for experienced leaders tight.
The Dallas comparison stings in a way downtown residents feel every day. MARTA was founded in 1971 and runs 48 miles of heavy rail across 38 stations, plus 2.7 miles of streetcar and a 5-mile bus rapid transit route, carrying nearly 66 million riders in 2025 as the eighth-largest system in the country. DART was founded in 1983 and now has 93 miles of light rail and 20 miles of commuter rail, with nearly 53 million riders last year. Most of that Dallas network was built in the past 30 years. MARTA stopped expanding its rail system in 2000.
Readers commenting on the original column pushed back on the victory lap, citing the botched railcar rollout, closed Rapid A-Line platforms, and a faregate replacement now sending crews back to swap out glass. Those are the operational problems the next CEO inherits on day one. The larger job is the one downtown depends on: getting the region, the state and the federal government to treat transit as infrastructure worth funding, before congestion keeps doing what residents already report it doing, which is convincing people not to move here.
Original reporting: SaportaReport (2026-08-10)