Please note immediately that this is all my personal opinion, but I have served on the Atl Region Board and seen things from the inside out.

First, Atlanta Region has a pretty nice relationship with Road Atlanta. We supply workers for many of their non-SCCA events (The Mitty, Petit, AMA, etc) and in return we get a nice track rental agreement and some good dates.
Keep in mind that RA is an extremely busy track thats booked pretty much every weekend of every year. Just getting 4 or 5 weekends a year there is a major score for the club.

But in this case, its not even an Atlanta Region activity we're talking about as RA staffs and runs the test days, and they've simply decided not to do so this time. Its pretty much that simple.
The region can beg and plead to always have test days in the future, but thats really all they can do. In the end its the call of Track Management.

Given what happened at Barber last year, and the result being that one of the greatest tracks in the country will now likely never see another SCCA race, the loss of a test day is child's piddle.

Finally, we've already lost one weekend this year in this division due to a lack of workers and it looks like there is going to be another one. I suspect that this is going to be a much bigger problem in the near future, and test days may become a real luxury. If we're having problems getting them for weekends, Thursdays and Fridays are going to be REAL tough, even if they are getting paid.
NASA *paid* workers (at least thats what I was told) for a Road Atlanta event in July and had a bare minimum of people out there. Actually so few that SCCA wouldn't have been able to drop the green.
This is not good news.