Category: Guest Column

By Guest Columnist SPENCE ROSENFELD, founder and president of Arborguard Tree Specialists

Maybe I was particularly vulnerable to the irresistable nature of trees. From a very young age I just had to climb them. Later I built a treehouse and lived among the branches of a giant Black Cherry for most of my High School summers. In college I decided my career would be to work with people and trees.

Finally, I took the bold step of starting a special kind of tree care business designed to bring people and trees close together. Looking back now at nearly 60 years of age, I feel like one of the most fortunate people in the

By Guest Columnist JOHN AHMANN, executive director of the Atlanta Committee for Progress and owner of a public policy communications firm.

With the transition of the City of Atlanta’s Mayor and City Council just around the corner, what can we expect to find as our newly elected leaders turn their focus from running for office to running the City?

These new leaders will walk in the door armed with not only accurate information about the City’s cash flows and projected revenues and expenses for the coming fiscal year, but for the first time, financial projections for the next five years. Catching up with technology investments the private sector made years ago, the City recently completed the launch of an enterprise resource planning system. Akin to the quantum leap

By Guest Columnist MADELYN R. ADAMS, executive director of the East Lake Foundation

This week, golf fans all over the nation will focus their attention on Atlanta. Our own East Lake Golf Club will once again host THE TOUR Championship presented by Coca-Cola, the season-ending tournament for the PGA TOUR’s top 30 players.

While television viewers watch the world’s best golfers compete, they may also catch a glimpse of the neighborhood surrounding the historic golf club. They might notice East Lake’s new housing options, gleaming charter school and award-winning public golf course. What they may not know, though, is that there’s a lot more to East Lake than new buildings and green fairways.

Not all that long ago, the stories coming out of East

By Guest Columnist AUDREY PETERMAN, president and co-founder of Earthwise Productions Inc., a consulting and publishing company. For 13 years, Audrey and her husband, Frank, have published the travel and environmental periodical: “Pickup & Go.”

“There is so much that can, and must be accomplished when we know what is happening to our environment and its direct impact on each of our lives. No one person, group or organization can bring about complete awareness and comprehensive change alone. . .”

That statement was made in 2006 in a letter sent to me, and my husband Frank by the Rev. Gerald Durley, a prominent Atlanta pastor.

Rev. Durley was explaining what inspired him to become “a missionary for the environment” after seeing

By Guest Columnist JEREMY C. GARLINGTON, an Atlanta-based leadership consultant and publisher of “The Garlington Report.”

Call it the summer of racially tinged brew-ha-has.

The first featured a new president, a cop from Cambridge, Mass and an angry Harvard professor drinking beers in the Rose Garden and presenting an iconic image of a “teachable moment.”

After a sip or two, all seemed well again.

The local installment, which to date represents a “non-teachable moment,” is an incendiary memo that threatens to blow the cover off of Atlanta’s mayoral

By Guest Columnist HARRY WEST, professor of Practice for Georgia Tech’s Center for Quality Growth and Regional Development.

Appropriately so, both the term and measurement “shovel ready” has been applied to the selection of projects funded in the first round of federal stimulus spending. Getting the program underway with projects that could be implemented quickly had to be a priority.

As additional projects and programs are taken into account, time is available to consider other measurements in establishing selection priority. I am compelled to advocate funding the steps necessary to bring other needed projects to the point of being “shovel ready”.

By Guest Columnist CHARLEY ENGLISH, director of the Georgia Emergency Management Agency and Homeland Security

Thirty percent of your employees don’t show up for work one day. What would you do? Would you close for business? Try to make it with a skeleton staff? And how would either of these choices impact your bottom line? Now imagine that those same employees – or more – were unable to get to work for three days or more.

It’s a scenario that most business owners don’t think will happen to them, and, if you are fortunate, it won’t. But it’s an understatement to say that when a tornado struck downtown Atlanta in March 2008 that people were a bit surprised. Most had never expected a tornado to follow a path down some of the city’s major thoroughfares. But that’s exactly what happened.

By Guest Columnist JOHN SIBLEY, program director of the Southeast Energy Efficiency Alliance and former president of the Georgia Conservancy

Last week, the Georgia Public Service Commission, by unanimous vote, tripled the amount of solar power in Georgia Power’s green energy program. This very positive action enables developers of solar energy to take advantage of federal stimulus incentives that must be claimed in the next several months. The state’s solar industry just got a big booster shot.

The PSC’s action also helps Georgia get ready for pending federal policies. It’s a near certainty that federal legislation will require utilities to sell more renewable energy.

By Guest Columnist STEVE VOGEL, president of the Georgia Association of Railroad Passengers

It’s like trying to jump on a train that’s already pulling out of the station.

Georgia is seeking a share of $8 billion in federal stimulus money earmarked for the development of a national high-speed passenger train network. At first glance, it might look like there’s a good chance of getting some of that money. Georgia is on two of the proposed corridors: the Southeast Corridor from Washington, D.C. to Florida, and the Gulf Coast Corridor from Atlanta to Houston.

But here’s the problem: There’s a long line of states trying to climb aboard this train, and Georgia is at the end of the ticket line, asking for a free ride.

By Guest Columnist MATTHEW HICKS, associate legislative director for the Association County Commissioners of Georgia on economic development and transportation policy.

In 2003, a goal was set by those working on the BeltLine to have transit started on the corridor within ten years. It was a lofty target considering that every day brought obstacles and looming doubts about the overall project’s viability.

Yet every hurdle was overcome and soon problems

By Guest Columnist KIM ANDERSON, CEO of Families First

Virtually every measure of individual success begins with a loving and supportive family. Yet on any given day, approximately 13,000 children in Georgia’s foster care system have lost the family connections essential for them to succeed in life.

The national and state trends are grim: 60 percent of children placed into foster care are there because of neglect, 10 percent because of physical abuse and 8 percent are victims of sexual abuse.

By Guest Columnist JIM MARAN, president and CEO of the Gwinnett Chamber of Commerce

In Jim Collins best-selling book Good to Great, he says visionary companies don’t ask “How well are we doing?” or “How can we do well?” or “How well do we have to perform to meet the competition?”

According to Collins, they institutionalize this question as a way of life–a habit of mind and action. Superb execution and performance naturally come to the

By Guest Columnist DICK ANDERSON, executive director of the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority.

When Gov. Sonny Perdue asked me over a year ago to join his administration and take look at our transportation challenges from an executive perspective, I am not exactly sure what I expected to encounter.

I had experienced congestion as a daily commuter and heard about our funding challenges, but my experience in transportation was limited to being a flagman and mower operator for Kentucky Department of Transportation during college summers.

What I found was a set of business problems very similar to ones we faced at BellSouth, where I worked for 28 years.

Our transportation network (highways, rail, transit, ports), much like the telecommunications network, is a shared network used for many different purposes. Capital for investment in the network is always a scarce resource. Success demands a clear, targeted strategy for improved performance that includes a focus on execution and measurable results.

By Guest Columnist RAY CHRISTMAN, retired CEO of the FHLBank of Atlanta who
currently is involved in a variety of housing/banking-related consulting and civic activities, including the Peachtree Corridor Partnership, the ULI Terwilliger Center for Workforce Housing, and the Livable Communities Coalition.

While there are reasons to be optimistic that an economic recovery is beginning to take hold, both locally and nationally, the housing industry remains mired in a deep depression.

Despite the conventional wisdom that housing will rebound ahead of other sectors, it’s possible that the industry’s comeback will be protracted and anemic and, indeed, will be a drag on the overall recovery.

Moreover, it’s a sure bet that as the economy stabilizes, the housing industry – and the mortgage financing system that supports it – will function much differently than they have in the recent past.

It has become painfully obvious that the problems facing the housing and banking systems are deeply intertwined. And the changes affecting these symbiotic sectors aren’t merely cyclical, but are structural in nature, and will have long-lasting effects.

By Guest Columnist MIKE DOBBINS: a Georgia Tech professor of architecture and planning who also served as the city of Atlanta’s commissioner of planning, development and neighborhood conservation from 1996 to 2002. Dobbins also is author of a new book: ‘Urban Design and People.

The long way around might turn out to be the shortest – and the best. Maybe the state’s transportation program ought to first be based on a statewide strategy.

Then it ought to focus on where people do their most traveling – in and around cities and towns, where more and more of the state’s population lives; where congestion is highest and air quality lowest; in centers large and small, most of which have some kind of a transit system; places where a growing majority of the people – and thus votes – are concentrated, even in rural counties.

Markets are changing, and many of the state’s towns have historic and cultural charms that haven’t yet been destroyed, the kinds of bones that can attract the flesh of growing markets for closer in living, working, and shopping. These are features that most all of the state’s towns and cities share.

By Guest Columnist JAMES OXENDINE, CEO of the Oxendine Group, a public policy consulting firm specializing in economic and transit-oriented development

Muhtar Kent, President and CEO of the Coca Cola Company, recently suggested “the current global economic crisis gripping much of the world is not, in fact, an insurmountable setback for local leaders but rather an opportunity to be seized.”

Today, Atlanta’s leadership is ardently searching for an opportunity to solve our transportation issues and jump start our economy. Indeed, some proposed changes in Federal transit policy present just such an opportunity.

The Obama administration has recently allocated $13 billion dollars for a national high speed rail initiative which has Atlanta centered at the confluence of two major corridors.

By Guest Columnist MICHAEL ROBISON, founder, chairman and CEO of Atlanta-based Lanier Parking Holdings.

I grew up attending Atlanta public schools, so I can appreciate the value of renovating aging schools and building new ones. At Morningside Elementary, I recall distractions such as peeling paint, noisy plumbing, and sweltering late summer heat due to a lack of central air conditioning.

So there would seem to be cause for celebration two years ago when 80 percent of voters supported extending the extra one-penny sales tax “for educational purposes” for another five years.

The problem is the Atlanta Public Schools Special Option Local Sales Tax (SPLOST), first approved in 1997, has sent the system more than $1 billion, and it should have long since solved the capital needs at Morningside and everywhere else. For that amount, APS literally could have torn down every building in the school system and rebuilt them.

By Guest Columnist JIM GEIGER, CEO of Cbeyond who serves
on the boards of the Points of Light Institute (formerly HandsOn Network), Marist School and Southern Methodist Cox School of Business.

I’m a proud business owner and entrepreneur, but I know the world is bigger than me and bigger than my business. I must give back to the communities in which my business operates and encourage my employees to do the same.

Because I believe volunteerism is essential, I built my company on that foundation.

When we founded Cbeyond 10 years ago, we strived to create a culture that supported our entrepreneurial spirit, reflected our passion for volunteer service and supported employees’ personal volunteer interests.

By Guest Columnist JANICE MCKENZIE-CRAYTON, president and CEO of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Metro Atlanta

For the last several years, I have had the opportunity to talk with and also hire a number of professionals who have made the decision to transition out of corporate America and into my world of non-profit management.

Many exchanges begin with, “I want to give back and make a difference. I am ready to get out of the rat race.” The economic climate and changes in social norms have instigated a fascinating migration of corporate executives to the public sector.

This phenomenon is having an interesting and for the most part positive impact on the non-profit sector. Subject matter experts with years of invaluable training and varied experiences are migrating to the non-profit world, excited and passionate about helping the community while being truly valued by the organizations they

By Guest Columnist CATHERINE ROSS, director of the Center for Qaulity Growth and Harry West Professor at Georgia Tech

They came from all over the southeast and New York. They came because they heard our infrastructure was wearing out. They came because they are concerned about preserving our competitive advantage, and the quality of life in the south eastern United States.

They came because they know we have arrived at a time when we must build a new economy, one that is responsive to opportunities in the global marketplace and sufficient to assure employment and a continued high quality of life for Americans.