Along with the New Year came a new head for the Atlanta Regional Commission, Tad Leithead of Cobb County. Leithead, a nine-year veteran of that body, is the first "citizen member" to head the ARC, meaning he is the first elected as chair who does not also serve as an elected city or county official.

Leithead has big shoes to fill, following in the footsteps of Cobb Board of Commissioners Chairman Sam Olens, who headed the ARC for five years but did not seek re-election.

Former Cousins Properties exec Leithead, 54, has spent most of his long Cobb career both developing property and working to enhance the county's transportation network as a driving force in the Cumberland Improvement District. That experience should serve him well in his new job and give him the broad perspective needed.

Leithead comes into office noting that the time for talking about congestion relief is over and that it's time to start turning dirt.

"We've been studying and planning for ten years. It's time for us to do something," he told the MDJ. "As Sam Olens says, it's time for us to move dirt.

"Let's identify projects we can build and, by God, build them. We're going to start building projects because we need them in this region. They're affecting our economic development."

The state's foot-dragging on transportation improvements is not only making congestion worse, but costing taxpayers money, he said.

"Between 2000 and 2006, the ARC had $2.6 billion worth of funded and approved projects. Of that $2.6 billion, we actually built $600 million. $2 billion were put on the back-burner. Those $2 billion in projects are still in the transportation improvement program, but now, because of cost increases, they cost $6 billion. So, we've been letting inflation and delay and planning sneak up on us and it's gotten in the way of building stuff that actually fixes traffic."

The other big issue facing the region - some would even argue that it is the biggest issue - is assuring an adequate supply of water.

"Even though traffic is an issue to us every day, the real challenge to our vitality in the next 10, 20 years is water."

"One, we need to maintain and capture more of the water that falls out of the sky. I've heard a statistic that 50 trillion gallons of water falls on Georgia a year. Of that, we only retain one. But it's very difficult in this environment to get a permit to build a reservoir. You see that in Cobb County and when we do try to build a reservoir, Alabama tries to sue us. So one is to capture that water and hold it for our use.

"Two is conserve. You can't conserve your way out of a drought, but we need to have conservation of our precious resource front and center in the minds of people that live in this region."

"Three, coming up with a water-management plan through the Corps (of Engineers), through the federal government, that allows us to protect the resource when the water does go into Lake Lanier and the other resources, that allows us to maintain that and protect at a reasonable level for our use. All three of those have to be in our strategy for water."

Leithead has no easy task ahead, but is confident and well-prepared.

"I think Cobb and Atlanta's best days are in front of us. If I believed that our best days were behind us, I wouldn't be stepping up to chair the ARC," he said. After all, "there's no reason to be captain of a sinking ship."

We're more than confident that there won't be any "sinking" going on anytime soon.