Category: David Pendered

Waters in north Georgia are cited in half the entries in “Georgia’s Dirty Dozen,” a list of 12 offenses to the state’s waters compiled by the Georgia Water Coalition.

The report cites five specific waters in north Georgia that are troubled, and includes a sixth, which is a project in Gov. Nathan Deal’s Governor’s Water Supply Program.

Water advocates used the report’s release to criticize Georgia for environmental protection efforts it characterized as weak. The comments echo some made of President Obama’s interest and current focus on the environment.

The western segment of a highway proposal generally known as the Outer Perimeter is needed to handle freight traffic heading to and from the state port in Savannah, the executive director of the Georgia Ports Authority said Wednesday.

“I absolutely think it’s needed,” Curtis Foltz told the board that oversees the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority. Foltz’ comment came in response to questions after he delivered a routine ports update to GRTA.

Two GRTA board members pondered, after Foltz’ presentation, whether metro Atlanta’s highway system is able to accommodate ports-related freight traffic if cargo increases at forecast rates.

Atlanta again is at the forefront of the nation’s deliberation of civil rights issues.

First it was the airport, and hearings ordered by the FAA to decertify four Atlanta-based businesses from a federal affirmative action program – including a firm that involves the widow and daughter of former Mayor Maynard Jackson.

Add last week’s decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to review the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The law was enacted soon after Atlantans – including Martin Luther King, Jr. and John Lewis – participated in the Selma marches.

As the state moves ahead with plans to build water reservoirs, Atlanta is proceeding with efforts to make better use of rainwater that falls over the city.

On Nov. 27, if all goes as planned, the city’s long-awaited proposal to improve the management of storm water is to get its first hearing by the Utilities Committee of the Atlanta City Council. Advocates hope the council will enact it early next year and Mayor Kasim Reed will sign the legislation.

It is the back story from bicycle-crash survivor Jim Durrett that underscores this year’s PACE Awards, by which the Clean Air Campaign honors top commute programs.

Durrett won the PACE category of GDOT Leadership Award for his use of influence as a community leader to promote clean-air commutes. Later Wednesday, in the just-released edition of the Buckhead CID’s newsletter, Durrett’s column in the Executive Director’s slot began with this compelling sentence:

“Maybe you’ve heard, but I recently went airborne. Unfortunately, it was not in a fun aeronautical way, but in a ‘flew of my bicycle while going 34 mph’ way. You can read the whole story of my accident on our blog.”

Mack Wilbourn, a longtime concessionaire at Atlanta’s airport, is to hear within a month if he has become too wealthy for his firm to remain certified as a disadvantaged business enterprise.

Wilbourn’s lawyers spent almost three hours Thursday fighting a ruling by the Federal Aviation Authority, which has determined Wilbourn is too rich for his firm, Mack II, to receive preferential treatment as a DBE. The DBE certification helped Mack II in last year’s competition for lucrative concessions contracts at Atlanta’s airport. The Atlanta City Council authorized the contracts in January.

Wilbourn emerged from the closed-door hearing and declined comment repeatedly as he walked 50 feet to a bank of elevators and stepped into one. Hearings for three other companies that the FAA has ruled ineligible for DBE preferences for concessions contracts they received are scheduled Nov. 14-20.

Editor’s Note: This story has been updated with comments from the Georgia Building Authority.

Georgia has suspended indefinitely its effort to sell the old Atlanta Farmers Market near the BeltLine in southwest Atlanta.

The state cancelled a bid opening for the farmers market that was set for Wednesday afternoon. Bids were due Oct. 26 and the market expressed no interest in the 16.4 acres with 10 buildings and a shed. The cancelled deal is a blow to hopes that redevelopment is coming anytime soon to a gritty industrial area near Murphy Triangle along the BeltLine.

This is the second time in two weeks the state has had to stall the proposed sale of high-interest parcels in Atlanta. The planned bid opening for the historic Olympia building, at Five Points, was delayed for a month or two. A spokesman with the Georgia Building Authority said Oct. 22 that more time was needed to finalize negotiations with Coca-Cola over their sign on the rooftop.

Wyc Orr, a board member of Common Cause of Georgia, is raising questions about the legality of negotiations over a new football stadium and urging for more public involvement in the planned public payments for the proposed $1 billion-plus facility.

In a piece titled, “Open roofed, closed doors,” Orr writes that if news reports are to be believed: “The negotiations, back-and-forth positions, trade-offs, terms and potential agreements have been conducted with only the barest pretense of opportunity for significant input from the public.”

Orr says taxpayers should press the issue with their state lawmakers, who likely will be asked in the 2013 legislative session to authorize a $100 million increase in the borrowing capacity of the Georgia World Congress Center. The increase is likely to be portrayed as the final straw to completing the deal to start construction, he notes.

The Atlanta Regional Commission will use a new $150,000 grant from national donors to help four communities create programs intended to make it easier for aging residents to stay in their homes.

The money will enable ARC staffers to work with two neighborhoods in Clayton County, Morrow, Tucker, and Avondale Estates. The goal is to come up with ideas for local governments to adopt that improve infrastructure, programs and policies that support the ARC’s Lifelong Communities initiatives.

ARC has long been focused on the region’s aging population, and ARC Chairman Tad Leithead gave the subject special attention at the ARC’s State of the Region breakfast in October. Leithead included seniors in his vision for the future.

An Atlanta airport concessionaire who hosted a $1 million fundraiser for President Obama – at his $1.2 million home in Midtown – is to appear before state officials next week to defend against a federal decision that he is too wealthy for his firm to qualify as a disadvantaged business enterprise.

Mack Wilbourn owns one of the four companies, all of which have airport concessions contracts, that federal authorities have determined are ineligible for a federal preference program intended to bolster small businesses.

Federal authorities contend the companies’ DBE certification may have given them an unfair scoring advantage in the competition for city contracts to run restaurants and sell beverages at the airport. Food and drink is a lucrative business at the world’s busiest passenger airport because passengers have little to do but eat and drink between flights.

The Atlanta City Council is poised to consider terminating a $6.6 million contract at Atlanta’s airport that last year was awarded to an associate of Mayor Kasim Reed.

Meanwhile, the state Transportation Department has scheduled a hearing for Nov. 8 on another airport contract – this one for a lucrative vending concession. The Federal Aviation Administration ordered GDOT to conduct hearings into whether long-time airport concessionaire Mack Wilbourn, and three other vendors, qualify for preferential treatment as disadvantaged business enterprise. The FAA has determined the four owners do not qualify as DBEs.

The council’s Transportation Committee is slated to hear Wednesday a resolution to cut the city’s contract with A-National Limousine Service, Inc. Councilwoman Felicia Moore sponsored the measure that also calls for initiating the process of hiring another company to help airport travelers find ground transportation.

As presidential candidates spar over the value of the green economy, a toilet manufacturer in metro Atlanta is garnering acclaim for its green business practices from across the political spectrum.

Toto USA has received commendations from the EPA during the most recent Bush administration; then-Gov. Sonny Perdue; the Brookings Institute; Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed, and – this month – the Chattahoochee Riverkeeper. The awards recognize Toto’s environmentally friendly bathroom fixtures and sustainable manufacturing practices.

Bill Strang, senior vice president of Toto’s operations in the Americas, is fond of a catchphrase he employs to sum up Toto’s comprehensive approach to waste management: “There is no silver bullet, but there is silver buckshot.”

Despite the relative wealth of schools systems in metro Atlanta, they have not fared much better than the rest of Georgia over the past decade in terms of maintaining their number of teachers and school days, and classroom sizes, a new report shows.

The non-profit Georgia Budget and Policy Institute reports a pattern of what it calls “troubling trends” in funding for the state education system. And the trouble didn’t start with the recession: State cuts in per pupil spending began in 2002 and, since then, spending has fallen by 17.6 percent in inflation-adjusted spending, GBPI reports.

The report clarifies at least part of the challenge facing the five-year strategic plan unveiled in June by the Metro Atlanta Chamber. The plan, Forward Atlanta, says the region must “reinvigorate Pre K through college education” in order to become a “world-class, 21st century metro.”

Atlanta’s development arm has created a loan program that aims to entice buyers to purchase or refinance a home in the city, where persistently falling prices have made homes both affordable to new buyers and hard to refinance for existing owners.

Invest Atlanta’s new “Home Atlanta 4.0” program is available, in certain neighborhoods, for homes with a purchase price of up to $374,268. The limit on household incomes is $87,400 for one person, and $112,350 for a family of three or more.

The new program provides 30-year, fixed-rate private mortgages to buyers, in addition to a 5 percent grant to help the buyer cover costs associated with downpayment and closing, according to a statement from Invest Atlanta.

Consider just one aspect of the challenge facing the Georgia Tech study that aims to retool Northside Drive into an urban boulevard that both anchors and promotes the development of Midtown and Downtown:

MARTA doesn’t provide regular bus service on Northside between I-75 and I-20, which is the area encompassed by the study. The region’s largest transit system hasn’t identified anywhere along this stretch of Northside that warrants north-south bus service.

That one fact represents many of the challenges for the Tech study. Northside remains a road to destinations that are located away from Northside Drive, rather than as a route to places that are destinations onto themselves.

Public interest in a fresh Georgia Tech study of the Northside Drive corridor in Midtown is being fueled by the proposed sale of state-owned land at Atlantic Station that was purchased as the site of a major transit station to serve northwest metro Atlanta.

The 6.5-acre site was put on the block by the State Road and Tollway Authority, according to several officials who spoke Monday. Gov. Nathan Deal serves as SRTA’s chair. SRTA bought the site when then-Gov. Roy Barnes envisioned it as a transfer hub for future buses to and from Cobb County, commuter rail service, and possibly an Amtrak station.

Tech’s study of Northside Drive may already have influenced city policy. Moments before preliminary results were presented Monday to a crowded room, Atlanta’s transportation planner, Josh Mello, announced the city has decided to include Northside Drive as a transit corridor in the soon-to-be-concluded update of the comprehensive transportation program, Connect Atlanta.