Atlanta has a lot of things going for it — a new $300 million aquarium, an economy that created 69,000 jobs last year, and a wealth of talent coming from its several historically black colleges and universities. But it also has problems that sound familiar to a group of civic visitors from St. Louis.

 Maria  Saporta, a columnist for the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, gave the RCGA delegation a rundown of some of the region’s challenges. They include government fragmentation (sound familiar?), an underfunded mass transit system and a difficulty raising public money for big projects. Sam Williams, president of the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, mentioned another familiar difficulty: inadequate public education.

The metro area is spread over two urban counties (Fulton and DeKalb)  with a majority of black residents, and parts of more than a dozen suburban, majority-white counties. This leads, Saporta said, to an urban-suburban split on many issues. She says there’s even a movement afoot to split Fulton County in half. The proposed north-south split would create an even more stark white-black split than what exists now.

The Metro Atlanta Rapid Transit system, or MARTA, suffers from this kind of parochialism, Saporta said. She says it’s the largest mass transit system in the U.S. with no operating support from state government. All of its funding comes from Fulton and DeKalb counties and the city of Atlanta; none comes from the strung-out suburban counties. “The region does not support MARTA even though it benefits from having MARTA,” she said. The system’s finances are stretched thin, she added, and it recently had to eliminate routes and cut service. I’ll leave it to my smart St. Louis readers to draw the parallels with Metrolink.