Category: David Pendered

The Sierra Club has named the Atlanta BeltLine as one of the best transportation projects in the country.

The BeltLine was included in the latest report of the national organization’s campaign titled, “Beyond Oil.” The campaign’s goal is to move the United States off oil in 20 years.

The Sierra Club of Georgia was among the earliest supporters of the BeltLine. During the recent campaign for a regional sales tax for transportation, the group opposed the tax – in part – because members thought the tax promoted sprawl and did not provide more money for the types of transportation options represented by the BeltLine.

MARTA intends to add more security cameras to monitor passengers in stations, as well as its own employees when they’re at various work locations.

MARTA has budgeted from $8.3 million to $10.4 million for the project, according to the advance notice to bidders. The transit system already has beefed up its camera network on vans, trains and buses.

Closed circuit TV cameras have become quite popular tools to combat crime. A growing number of public agencies have adopted them. For example, the Atlanta City Council recently voted to spend up to $2.25 million to buy and install 112 cameras, bringing the total number of Atlanta Police Department cameras to more than 760 cameras.

DeKalb County is a close-to-home example of communities across the country that are in the vice grip of hard times – DeKalb’s tax digest has plummeted and the school district is on probation.

Despite the times, DeKalb CEO Burrell Ellis is pushing ahead with an ambitious infrastructure agenda – just a month after his uncontested reelection bid in November and five months after voters rejected a proposed regional transportation sales tax.

To DeKalb’s current $1.345 billion water and sewer program, Ellis would add roads and sidewalks; an animal shelter; and police facilities. The state Legislature will be asked to approve methods of paying for the some of the projects.

DeKalb County voters may get another shot at a transportation sales tax.

DeKalb intends to ask the General Assembly in 2013 to approve a local option sales tax for a rainbow of purposes including congestion relief, according to the budget proposal released Friday by DeKalb CEO Burrell Ellis.

The proposed regional sales tax that was on the July 31 ballot was rejected by a narrow margin in DeKalb – 2 percent, or 3,279 votes out of 126,221 ballots cast. The measure may have been approved if more MARTA service had been offered in south DeKalb.

With the clock ticking on funding for Atlanta’s only region-wide bus service, GRTA is making its case with Gov. Nathan Deal and state budget writers for enough money to keep the buses on the road.

“We’re doing all we can to get assurances,” Jannine Miller, GRTA’s executive director, said Wednesday at the monthly board meeting of the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority.

The strength of Georgia’s economic recovery will be a key determinant of whether the state funds Xpress after June 2013. The bad news is that Georgia’s latest revenue figures, released Dec. 7, don’t send a clear signal about the hoped-for recovery.

The Atlanta Streetcar is to be operating within 12 months, but its builders don’t have all the property the project will require.

MARTA is getting ready to start talking to companies it wants to hire to appraise 26 parcels along the streetcar route. The parcels are needed for purposes including two streetcar stops and a roadway realignment.

There’s also new trouble with stringing the overhead power cables that will provide electricity to propel the vehicles. Power cables may have to be strung from guy wires attached to buildings, in some areas, because utility poles can’t be installed above newly discovered basements.

The politics of water in Georgia have yet to manifest at anything close to the level they reach in the arid southwest.

Yet the pot’s bubbling. One issue is the General Assembly’s intent for Georgia’s 10 regional water councils. Another is the mandated 2014 water plan update by the Metro North Georgia Water District. Not to mention reservoirs.

Boyd Austin, the Dallas mayor who chairs the water district board and supports reservoirs, said the district’s success over the past decade validates it as a role model for the other councils.

One of the latest proposals to renew a current cornerstone of Buttermilk Bottoms – a fabled, now-demolished neighborhood of hardscrabble African Americans on the edge of downtown Atlanta – is to go Hollywood.

The Atlanta Civic Center site could be redeveloped “all together to rebrand the facility as a full-service production facility and catalyze neighborhood revitalization,” according to a statement from Mayor Kasim Reed’s office.

In 2004, the previous proposal to revitalize the Civic Center was to build a live-work-play community around it. That concept now seems as long-ago as Buttermilk Bottoms, the blighted neighborhood that was demolished, in part, to make way for the Boisfeuillet Jones Civic Center in the name of urban renewal.

The community of Tucker is celebrating the season with a holiday decorations contest that’s a slice of disappearing Americana.

The contest, among downtown businesses, represents the type of community spirit that regional leaders try so hard to promote through grants and initiatives.

Tucker’s decorations contest isn’t the only one in the region – Sandy Springs will issue awards next weekend in its holiday lighting contest. Tucker’s event simply represents one of the region’s old-timey efforts to foster a sense of community spirit.

Georgia has battled the tri-state water war to an uneasy victory, and the Army Corps of Engineers has just issued a month-long delay in the start of its process to decide terms of the settlement.

This delay – which the corps announced Wednesday – comes at the beginning of a process that is expected to take years for the Corps to complete: The creation of the first manual in some 50 years to guide the management of the waters of the Chattahoochee River system.

“This process is just starting, and everybody will be weighing in up and down the basin,” Patricia Barmeyer, an environmental lawyer with King & Spalding, told the board of the Metropolitan North Georgia Water District at its meeting Thursday.

What should be the definition of success for Atlanta’s largest urban renewal program?

The answer to that question will be at the center of legislation the Atlanta City Council expects to consider in early 2013. The council is attempting to refocus, for these post-recession times, a city program that uses property taxes to spur development in blighted areas.

The city’s consultant seems to lean toward a definition of success based on progress reached in categories such as crime and poverty. The city’s auditor, whose audit triggered the city’s review, said it’s too early to say if the proposal is appropriate for Atlanta.

The future of high-speed passenger rail in the southeast is so uncertain that it is not a significant factor in the long-range master plan being devised for Atlanta’s airport, according to an airport official.

“Given that there are not firm high-speed rail plans, that is not included here,” in the airport’s master plan now being devised, said Tom Nissalke, the airport’s director of environmental and technical services.

This assumption on high-speed commuter rail, and a myriad of other forecasts that are driving the master plan, are to be presented Dec. 4 in a meeting that’s open to the public at Atlanta City Hall. The Atlanta City Council’s Transportation Committee is hosting a two-hour work session on airport related matters.

The Atlanta Streetcar appears increasingly unlikely to open in 2013, according to an update Atlanta’s public works commissioner presented Wednesday to the Transportation Committee of the Atlanta City Council.

Commissioner Richard Mendoza did not provide a direct answer to this question from Councilmember Yolanda Adrean: “When will you get the streetcar up and running?”

Mendoza said track construction will take up to 16 months after the first utility cut was made, this past summer. Just 30 percent of the requisite utility work is complete and as for its final completion date, Mendoza said: “I don’t have that information.”

This story was revised Wednesday with additional information from Carter and MARTA.

The master developer of MARTA’s Lindbergh City Center has worked out terms for a $91,000 payment it owes the transit system, MARTA officials said Tuesday.

MARTA and Carter, a major Atlanta developer, agree the money is owed and is a reconciliation of a portion of the ground lease at the Lindbergh station. Carter’s base payment in 2012 was $496,000, and the company has been paying it quarterly.

“We asked to pay in installments due to the unexpected nature of the charges,” said Scott Stringer, Carter’s executive vice president.

The million-dollar question facing more than 2 million riders a year who use the Xpress bus service is actually a multimillion-dollar question.

Will the state continue to provide funds for GRTA to maintain Xpress bus service throughout metro Atlanta?

Only Gov. Nathan Deal and the state Legislature can respond. Their final answer won’t be known until state budgets are adopted in, perhaps, March 2013.

The Final Four men’s basketball tournament in April promises to usher in an era of huge advertising wraps on downtown buildings, plus a ban on cruisers and hucksters in a proposed “public entertainment district.”

Measures to enable those outcomes are expected to sail through two Atlanta City Council committees this week and be adopted next week by the council.

The goals are to help landlords turn a profit by selling ad wraps that temporarily cover up to 40,000 square feet of the skin of a single building; to help the NCAA envision Atlanta as a great host city at least once every five years; and to help the expected 80,000 spectators enjoy their visit without feeling hassled by traffic gridlock and street hustlers.