Maria Saporta, executive editor, is a longtime Atlanta business, civic and urban affairs journalist with a deep knowledge of our city, our region and state. From 2008 to 2020, she wrote weekly columns and news stories for the Atlanta Business Chronicle. Prior to that, she spent 27 years with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, becoming its business columnist in 1991. Maria received her Master’s degree in urban studies from Georgia State and her Bachelor’s degree in journalism from Boston University. Maria was born in Atlanta to European parents and has two young adult children. She launched SaportaReport in February 2009.
Growing up, our family’s favorite holiday celebration was New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day.
Because of our Jewish heritage, we didn’t really celebrate Christmas (even though we almost always had a tree in our home, and some years we’d go to the Catholic church on Christmas Eve to hear Christmas carols).
And because we were non-practicing Jews, we really didn’t celebrate
By Maria Saporta
Friday, December 30, 2011
On his first day as the new president and CEO of Boys & Girls Clubs of America on Jan. 2, Jim Clark will be in Hartford, Conn. — the site of the founding of the organization in 1860.
And on his second day on the job, Clark will visit the A. Worley Brown Club in Norcross, a demonstration of how important metro Atlanta is to the nation’s top nonprofit youth organization — a title it has held for 16 consecutive years.
By Maria Saporta
The Civic League for Regional Atlanta will have a new chairman as of Jan. 1 — Robert Inman “Trey” Ragsdale III.
Ragsdale manages government and community relations for Kaiser Permanente. He also has been involved in a variety of government, business and civic groups in metro Atlanta including the Bank of North Georgia, the Children’s Museum of Atlanta, People to People International as well as several chambers of commerce.
By Maria Saporta
One of Atlanta’s longest serving cultural leaders will be retiring at the end of the year.
Jane Leavey, executive director of the Breman Jewish Heritage and Holocaust Museum, will retire Dec. 31 after 28 years in the role.
Leavey, who had been an employee of the Atlanta Jewish Federation (now renamed the Jewish Federation of Greater Atlanta), saw the need for an archives and history museum that focused on the settlement and presence of Jews in Atlanta.
So much is on hold as the Atlanta region looks forward to the vote on the passage of the one penny regional transportation sales tax.
As currently envisioned, the transportation sales tax will be on the July 31, 2012 ballot — and community leaders are working as hard as they can to help make sure it will pass.
But one popular concept — a fractional sales tax that would be dedicated funding for counties to invest in the arts, economic development and quality of life initiatives — is being tabled until after the transportation sales tax vote.
By Maria Saporta
Friday, December 16, 2011
When Delta Air Lines Inc. recently hired Tad Hutcheson to be its new vice president of community affairs, it sent a welcome message to Atlanta and its key markets — the airline is strengthening its civic commitment.
Hutcheson recently resigned as vice president of marketing and sales of AirTran Airways, where he had been for nearly 15 years and become the discount carrier’s key person in Atlanta.
By Maria Saporta
Longtime Atlanta business leader, Joe Bankoff, will retire on May 31, 2012 as president and CEO of the Woodruff Arts Center — the largest cultural organization in the state.
Bankoff has been leading the center — which includes the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, the High Museum of Art, the Alliance Theatre and Young Audiences — since September, 2006.
“I have found the opportunity to serve in this role to be the most exciting, the most exhausting, the most rewarding and the most challenging job I’ve ever done,” Bankoff said in an interview.
By Maria Saporta
Few folks in town the name of the Atlanta woman executive who oversees a business that generates $110 billion in revenues and more than 500,000 employees.
The woman? Rosalind Brewer, president of Wal-Mart East (a territory that stretches from Maine to Puerto Rico and includes about 1,600 stores) and executive vice president of Wal-Mart Stores Inc.
Brewer was the keynote speaker at the
Dear Readers,
What a year it has been for SaportaReport.
Spending this past week in Mexico has given me an opportunity to reflect on all the developments that have taken place this past year. It also has given me a fresh perspective on where we’re headed as we enter a new year.
saportareport.com actually was launched in February, 2009 — about six months after I had accepted a buyout
By Maria Saporta
Friday, December 16, 2011
When Lawrence Schall first saw the Gothic-style campus of Oglethorpe University in 2005, he thought to himself: “This is what colleges ought to look like.”
Indeed, today Oglethorpe University has found a successful niche as a private liberal arts college in an urban setting. It is exceeding just about every measure of academic achievement and financial security among its peer institutions.
By Maria Saporta
One of Atlanta’s most important leaders, who is an unsung hero in his hometown, is finally getting the recognition he deserves.
William H. Foege will receive Georgia Tech’s 2012 Ivan Allen Jr. Prize for Social Courage award for his leadership in global health.
Among Foege’s numerous contributions include his leadership in the possible eradication of smallpox and other diseases worldwide.
By Maria Saporta
One of Atlanta’s premier African-American-owned companies — Atlanta Life Financial Group — has named former Georgia Gov. Roy Barnes to its board.
Barnes, who is joining his first corporate board since he left office in 2003, will be the only non-black board member of the diversified financial services company. At the time this article was posted, I could not determine whether Barnes was the first white person to serve on Atlanta Life’s board.
By Maria Saporta
Friday, December 9, 2011
Because of the economic climate, the National Center for Civil and Human Rights will be built in phases rather than at one time.
The center’s board recently met and made two decisions — to go forward with the project with the money it has in hand and to have a business plan that will make the facility 100 percent self-sustaining the day it opens.
By Maria Saporta
An agreement to cancel plans for a new coal plant in Blakely, Ga. could mark the end of traditional coal plants in Georgia and even the United States.
LS Power, a New Jersey-based power company, announced Monday that it was halting a 10-year effort to build the Longleaf Energy Station in Blakely.
The decision came after a decade-long opposition campaign by the Sierra Club, Friends of the Chattahoochee and GreenLaw against building the plant.
By Maria Saporta
EarthShare of Georgia, which has been building employee-based giving campaigns for environmental organizations, recently announced that it has added three new groups to benefit from their fundraising in 2012.
The three groups are:
· the Flint Riverkeeper, which aims to restore and preserve habitat, water quality and flow of the Flint River for future generations and dependent wildlife;
The two most populous counties in Georgia — Fulton and Gwinnett — are each taking steps to fine tune their economic development strategies.
At a time when Georgia’s prosperity has been declining compared to the rest of the nation and when it has been struggling with how to redefine itself in the new economy, both Fulton and Gwinnett are responding in kind.
By Maria Saporta
Elected leaders in the Atlanta region are becoming increasingly concerned in the direction of a Regional Transit Governance Task Force established by Gov. Nathan Deal.
“There’s no question that the state is still struggling with wanting to control everything,” said Mike Bodker, mayor of Johns Creek, adding that “you have every right to control what you pay for.”
By Maria Saporta
Friday, December 2, 2011
The high-profile boutique law firm of Dillard & Galloway is dissolving as real estate attorney Doug Dillard and two other partners are joining the firm of Weissman, Nowack, Curry & Wilco.
At the same time, Dillard’s law partner for 28 years — Woody Galloway — is forming the Galloway Law Group, which
By Maria Saporta
It’s time for Atlanta to lead again.
That was the message that Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed delivered Monday at a Commerce Club speech. The mayor thanked the audience of mostly Commerce Club members for their support of the city, but he clearly was trying to re-energize Atlantans to believe in the city once again.
The numbers are sobering.
Georgia’s boom days are becoming a distant memory. For decades, Georgia’s growth had far outpaced the nation’s growth rate. But that changed in the past decade, and economic forecasters predict this downward trend to continue in the coming decade.
Those numbers bring us to the hard truth.
