Fifty years ago, CARTA board member E.Y. Chapin said he didn’t know how the transportation agency could keep going with climbing deficits and suggested “an orderly phaseout.”
The Chattanooga Area Regional Transportation Authority was expected to lose $1.2 million in the fiscal year that ended June 30, 1976, but that deficit was expected to soar to nearly $3 million by 1980.
An October 1975 editorial in the Chattanooga Free Press said this: “Nobody suggested that CARTA was going to run in the black. It had to be subsidized. It got federal aid and it got money from the municipalities served.
“But it would not be realistic to keep going the way CARTA is going without considering alternatives. The losses running into the millions are a burden on the taxpayers.”
A November 1976 editorial in the Chattanooga Times had a different view: “It follows, then, that CARTA cannot expect to become a profit-making enterprise for quite some time, if ever. That apparently horrifies some people but it shouldn’t. CARTA is a public service, not a business, and while it should be operated with business-like efficiency, it is essential to provide a service to the people who depend on it.”