Category: David Pendered

The fine for overtime parking in Atlanta would be set at $35 per violation under a proposal the Atlanta City Council is to consider Wednesday during its special call meeting to debate proposed amendments to Mayor Kasim Reed’s budget plan.

The city code now provides for a fine of up $1,000, which can be imposed at the discretion of a city judge, according to legislation proposed by Councilman H. Lamar Willis, who is elected citywide.

Willis’ proposal would set the fine for overtime parking at $35 and provide for late fees. A related proposal would set a schedule of hours during which cars could be parked in metered parking zones throughout the city.

Atlantic Station has exceeded every realistic expectation of an urban renewal project.

In 1999, Atlantic Station was the dusty site of a shuttered steel mill. Today, through a tremendous public-private partnership, it is a city onto itself that’s claimed equally by the Midtown and Georgia Tech communities.

There’s no doubt that Atlantic Station has been a successful financial investment for both its initial investors and the city. That success is cited in a new city audit that recommends the Atlanta City Council enact stricter controls over Atlanta’s largest renewal program, which is administered by Invest Atlanta, the city’s redevelopment arm.

A new audit is raising questions about the management of an Atlanta program that uses millions of dollars in property taxes to induce developments including Atlantic Station. the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, and the BeltLine.

The city audit recommends the Atlanta City Council increase its oversight of the program. Invest Atlanta, the city’s development arm that administers the program, has responded that it takes issue with the recommendations and asserts its independence of council purview.

One finding in the audit, which is to be presented Monday to the city council, involves the status of $226 million now sitting in city coffers. The audit says it can find no indication of whether that money is available to be spent, or is earmarked for some use, or even if it should be returned to the governments that collected the money – the city, Atlanta public schools and Fulton County.

Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed is continuing his campaign for the Atlanta City Council to double funding for the arts, as he has proposed in the city budget that’s to be adopted June 18.

The council is slated to meet Wednesday to consider amendments to the mayor’s $537 million budget proposal and forward its recommendation to the Finance/Executive Committee. On Wednesday evening, the council is to convene at 6 p.m. for a public hearing on the tax millage rate.

Reed has embraced the 50th anniversary of the plane crash in Orly, France to renew his push for the council to include the funds he requested. Today marks the 50th anniversary of the crash in which 122 arts patrons from Atlanta perished.

Passing the referendum for the transportation sales tax will require a majority vote from an Atlanta region that elects congressmen whose political positions on transportation funding are starkly divided.

Suffice to say that this group of five Republicans and three Democrats does not often vote together. Earlier this year, they joined many of their colleagues in Congress in spliting along party lines over the reauthorization of the nation’s transportation funding program – leaving the nation with no transportation spending plan after the current one expires June 30.

But their constituents will have to come together if the transportation sales tax proposal is to prevail.

The Marietta National Cemetery is an excellent spot for a quiet reflection on this day of remembrance for those who died while in service to the nation.

A ceremony that begins around noon on every Memorial Day strikes a tender balance of past losses and future hopes. A handful of dignitaries speak, though the loudspeakers barely cast their words across the hushed crowd gathered atop a summit.

Georgia now has two national cemeteries. One is in Marietta, which was built originally for Civil War casualties and is now closed to new interments. The other is in Canton, which opened in 2006 on 775 acres donated by the late Scott Hudgens, a World War II veteran who became a leading developer in metro Atlanta.

The state authority overseeing the conversion of Fort McPherson to civilian use made plans Thursday to ask the Army to turn over most of the fort at one time, rather than turn it over in a series of smaller transfers.

Such a move would give the authority more control over the pacing of the redevelopment of most of the 488-acre fort. The property has been a military island in southwest Atlanta since Fort McPherson opened in 1885, and it will revert to civilian use following its closure last year as part of the nation’s overhaul of military bases.

The plan to seek control of most of the fort is likely to come up in conversations next week with a team of Army consultants. The group is slated to visit Atlanta to discuss the framework for the property transfer, said Jack Sprott, executive director of the state authority that’s overseeing the fort’s conversion.

It’s a small sale in terms of the overall size of Grady Health System, but this one is significant.

The authority that oversees Grady has sold an unused building and parking lot in Roswell. Proceeds from the sale will pay for community-based health care services aimed at reducing the amount of costly care people otherwise may seek at Grady’s emergency room.

This real estate sale is the latest example of the extent of change that has swept over Grady since the reorganization of the region’s largest public hospital.

Atlanta’s development authority is slated to adopt a plan to create jobs and spur economic development at about the same time Atlantans begin considering whom to elect next year as mayor and to the Atlanta City Council.

Invest Atlanta has agreed to pay consultants $265,000 to devise and deliver a plan by December. Invest Atlanta is expected to consider adopting the plan at the end of the year, or in early 2013.

The consultants’ bill will be paid by Atlanta Housing Authority, Georgia Power, Central Atlanta Progress, and Invest Atlanta. Mayor Kasim Reed serves as chairman of the board that oversees Invest Atlanta.

A spay and neuter program for animals whose future offspring may otherwise be destined for DeKalb County’s troubled animal shelter will be the beneficiary of a bowling fundraiser scheduled for Sunday afternoon in Stone Mountain.

Proceeds of the event will go toward a sterilization program in a county where more than 5,000 animals a year are euthanized, according to a report issued in February by a county task force.

DeKalb’s a kill rate was about 60 percent of the 8,500 animals handled annually at the county’s shelter, according to the report. DeKalb’s rate is higher than reported in Cobb, Fulton and Gwinnett counties, although those counties handle fewer animals.

So many big transportation proposals for metro Atlanta are in the cauldron that even some top policy makers have trouble keeping pace.

As GRTA board member John Sibley III said of one region that has two major projects planned and a study underway: “I have a problem seeing what is likely here.”

Sibley got his questions answered about the I-75 and I-575 corridor, in Cobb and Cherokee counties. However, the answers prompted his colleague, Dick Anderson, to wonder aloud about the campaign message for the July 31 sales tax for transportation.

Whether by choice or chance, state and regional transportation officials have announced a slew of new projects in the four months leading up to the July 31 vote on the proposed 1 percent sales tax for transportation.

The projects range from the regionally significant to locally symbolic – the Northwest Corridor tollway through Cobb and Cherokee counties, and the replacement of the scenic safety fence along the 17th Street Bridge in Midtown.

Two of the larger projects don’t have enough money for construction – the Northwest Corridor and MARTA’s expansion plan in DeKalb County.

However, taken as a whole, the announced projects illustrate the potential power of the government and private sector to reduce the region’s overall traffic congestion and maintain the roadway system. As individual tasks, each project offers the promise of reminding drivers, i.e., voters, how their commute can be improved by having even one of their problem areas addressed – as is promised by advocates for the transportation sales tax.

Sandy Springs has moved into the public comment phase of a redevelopment study of the Roswell Road corridor that has an interesting objective: Success.

Mayor Eva Galambos rattles off from memory two previous efforts that came to naught, the first of them in 1967. That was 38 years before the community incorporated, and occurred at a time when Sandy Springs wanted to become the retail district that instead went in 1971 to Perimeter Mall. A second study in 2002 fizzled out.

“In neither instance did we know the property owners, and in neither case did we have economic realities as part of the plan,” Galambos said Thursday. “I don’t want anymore plans that are pie-in-the-sky and not realistic.”

MARTA’s board of directors hopes that no across-the-board fare hikes or service reductions will be required to balance its budget for its next fiscal year, the executive director of the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority told her board Wednesday.

If MARTA’s board can stick to that plan, the only fare hikes that will go into effect this year, on Oct. 7, would be in three areas already slated for increases: Half-fares, up a nickle; One-way mobility pass, up 20 cents; Mobility pass, up $6. Those hikes were approved in 2010 as part of a three-year phased package.

MARTA has scheduled four public hearings on its proposed budget: Two on May 15 (Sandy Springs and Decatur); and two on May 17 (Atlanta City Hall, College Park).

The Atlanta BeltLine is in the final phase of choosing advisors to create plans to implement the BeltLine vision and to win support from state and federal officials.

The BeltLine is seeking two separate teams. One team is to devise a strategic plan that will guide the project’s development over the coming two decades. The other team will devise and execute a government affairs plan that is to include legislative and policy goals at the state and federal levels.

Teams are to be chosen and at work by early July, though consultants who want to be considered still have time to apply. The hiring of consultants to create a formal plan for funding and development is a milestone in the tenure of Brian Leary, president and CEO of Atlanta BeltLine, Inc.

Three separate proposals for major apartment developments in Atlanta indicate that landowners are setting the stage for a hoped-for recovery in the housing market.

There is no indication that construction is set to begin anytime soon, or whether the units are aimed at the rental or owner market. But the very idea of expending the effort and expense of asking the city government to approve additional dense housing developments is a testament to the belief that major investors will return to back big deals in Atlanta.

The Atlanta City Council today is slated to start the formal consideration of requests that would allow for the following three developments:

Atlanta is sitting on at least $68 million in cash, plus more than $200 million in borrowing capacity, in a program designed to foster development in blighted neighborhoods.

The cash and available debt evidently has accrued as a result of the bust in real estate development. With so few projects brought forward by the private market, the city’s program to help them – a program fueled by property taxes – has laid fallow. Few parks, sidewalks, roads or sewers have been created or even upgraded with the special fund during the downturn, even as its coffers swelled.

Mayor Kasim Reed’s administration intends to revise the program as part of its first effort to devise a citywide economic development plan. The city’s previous comprehensive economic development plan expired at the end of 2009 when its chief sponsor, former Mayor Shirley Franklin, left office.

The troubled concessions contracts at Atlanta’s airport caused the Atlanta City Council to convene in a special meeting Monday and conduct most of it behind closed doors.

After meeting in executive session with Mayor Kasim Reed, the city attorney, and at least one other official, the council emerged into public and voted to not intervene in the airport concessions contracts. The council had considered asking that current vendors remain in place for up to 90 days.

At issue is a letter Reed’s administration received April 26 from the Federal Aviation Authority. The FAA contends some vendors hired for the airport concessions program do not qualify as disadvantaged businesses, the category under which they were selected.

A gold medal won in the 1996 Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta has helped raise a reported $1 million for disaffected children in Ukraine.

The medal was sold by a Ukranian boxer in late March as part of his effort to raise money for a program he sponsors for children. The medal was immediately returned to Wladimir Klitschko, Ukraine’s world heavyweight champion, by a buyer who was not identified, according to a number of published reports.

This story about Atlanta’s link to the Olympics legacy is one of several that are beginning to gain attention as the world prepares for the 2012 Summer Olympic Games in London, which are to begin July 27 and end Aug. 12.

Deborah Scott, executive director of Georgia Stand Up, has been named a White House Champion of Change for her efforts to promote economic equity and environmental stewardship in Atlanta.

Scott’s citation on the White House page says she was named “for her innovative energy priorities and sustainable living practices making a greener community a possibility in any American city or town.”

Most recently, Scott has been in the spotlight for her work in organizing a community development plan regarding Fort McPherson. The award-winning plan aims to ensure that the entire community surrounding the fort benefit from its conversion from military to civilian use.