Category: Maria’s Metro

It all comes down to this.

A regional transportation sales tax in metro Atlanta will not pass unless MARTA and transit are treated fairly.

And there’s no way MARTA and transit will be treated fairly unless House Bill 277 fixed of its anti-MARTA flaws or unless a regional transit governance bill is passed in this legislative session.

Legislative leaders have said there’s no way they will reopen HB 277 this session.

So that really leaves only one option. Pass a regional transit governance bill during this legislative session.

Let me explain my reasoning.

Since when has planning become a dirty word?

An effort is underway in the Georgia legislature to remove a state requirement on local governments to develop comprehensive plans for their communities.

If passed, this legislation — Senate Bill 86 — could send Georgia back decades to a time when growth could occur in a totally haphazard way with few guideposts on what is the best way to grow a community.

Unfortunately, two organizations that should know better — the Georgia Municipal Association and the Association County Commissioners of Georgia — have endorsed this legislation, presumably pushed by some of their members who would rather not have

When Georgia’s former labor commissioner Michael Thurmond announced on Feb. 7 that he was joining the law firm of Butler, Wooten & Fryhofer, my first thought was that one of our greatest public servants was withdrawing from the arena.

Fortunately, I was mistaken.

In a lengthy interview, Thurmond made it clear that he has not finished working to put people back to work.

In fact, Thurmond is still convinced that his successful “Georgia Works” programs can and should be taken to the national stage.

Soul searching. That describes Atlanta today.

Recently, several local leaders have questioned whether we’ve lost our moxie, whether our best days are behind us, whether we have lost our aspirational zest.

Watching the Super Bowl in Dallas did bring back memories of the two times when the Super Bowl was played in Atlanta.

My former colleague at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Bill Torpy, wrote a thoughtful story of our current mindset in Sunday’s paper.

In 1994, we had just built the Georgia Dome, and we were two years away from hosting

Second in a two-part series. Last week: Despite drawbacks, top Georgia leaders pushing idea of new metro reservoirs.

As metro Atlanta and Georgia jointly try to steer their way through our water woes, let’s keep one thing in mind. There are good reservoirs and there are bad reservoirs.

Increasingly, reservoirs are being viewed as a centerpiece of Georgia’s long-term water solution. Long-term because developing major new regional reservoirs is a 10-year to 15-year endeavor. That means there’s no way they could help us meet the impending July, 2012 deadline looming over our

First in a two-part series. Check this space next week for part two.

All too often, group think takes over.

And today’s group think is about reservoirs. There’s a growing urgency that metro Atlanta needs to build new reservoirs to secure its future water supply as well as position itself for new economic growth.

In just the last couple of weeks, newly-elected Gov. Nathan Deal, Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed and Sam Williams, president of the Metro Atlanta Chamber have endorsed the idea of building new reservoirs in Georgia.

But as in most cases of group think, it’s critically

Happy New Year!

It will be easy to say good-bye to 2010 — a year that tested our perseverance, faith and inner strength. The economy was sluggish and there was a general sense of malaise — to use a word often associated with our own President Jimmy Carter.

A new year always brings optimism — that we can start anew, that we can wipe the slate clean and that the speedometer goes back to zeroes. As someone who loves numbers, I can’t help but take joy in the fact that the year started with a four-of-a-kind — 1-1-11.

Looking ahead, it appears as though the economy is beginning to purr and that we will be able to reach a level of comfort and

Special offer to SaportaReport readers — a pair of tickets to the Cirque de Soleil’s Ovo. A pair of tickets will be given to two people who write the best comments at the end of this post. See details below.

Call me a Cirque de Soleil aficionado.

When the first Cirque came to Atlanta in 1991, it was a completely novel experience. My mother, who was then executive director of the Alliance Francaise d’Atlanta, quickly became involved because the French Canadian circus was looking for as many Atlanta friends as possible.

We were invited to the opening show and the post opening night reception when we were able to mingle with all the performers and partake in this new phenomenon of an animal-less circus.

Second to the governor, the most important position in state government should be commissioner of the Georgia Department of Economic Development.

Ideally, the commissioner would be a seasoned economic development professional who is a master salesman of Georgia. And that person would work hand-in-hand with the governor in trying to grow the state’s economy.

So it was a bit surprising this past week when Gov.-elect Nathan Deal picked Chris Cummiskey, a former staffer for U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson and former state House Speaker Glenn Richardson as his economic development commissioner.

With this appointment, it exposes a dangerous trend — turning that job into a political rather than a professional post.

For those who want to know exactly how House Bill 277 will impact MARTA,

I received the following message from the “Save MARTA” group’s Brian Baj.

It is the most comprehensive review of how the proposed regional transportation sales tax would help MARTA and how it would hurt MARTA.

The recap starts with MARTA’s 2010 legislative agenda, which included three priorities:

1. the elimination of the 50/50 capital and operations split of the existing one-cent MARTA sales tax;

2. providing a short-term funding bridge in the form of bonds; and

3. providing long-term transportation funding, including funds to

Hardly a sadder sight exists than the stump of a tree that has just been cut down.

Unfortunately in Atlanta, that’s a sight that we’ve seen over and over again.

Just this week, several trees were cut down along Marietta Street downtown right near Five Points.

Atlanta native Bill Todd sent me an email titled: “Outrage.” “They are cutting down healthy trees on Marietta Street. Oaks!”

Immediately I started asking around. How could the city have allowed trees to be cut down in the public right of way?

The definitive answer came back from Jennifer Ball, vice president of planning for Central Atlanta Progress.

“The median is being enhanced and the trees replaced as part of the Marietta Street – Centennial Olympic Park Drive

Call it a gift made out of guilt.

This past week, Cox Enterprises donated the former downtown headquarters of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution to the City of Atlanta, a gift valued at $50 million.

Until earlier this year, the Atlanta Journal and the Atlanta Constitution had been based in the center of the city and the center of region for more than 100 years. In their entire history, the newspapers had been located within a couple of blocks of Atlanta’s zero milepost.

So when the powers that be decided to move the Atlanta Journal-Constitution to a suburban office building located outside the city limits and north of I-285, it made a statement. The newspapers were deserting the city’s center in more ways than one.

This is a hard column for me to write because I spent 27 years

It boggles my mind.

Why would folks in this state complain about the City of Atlanta receiving a $47.6 million grant from the federal government for a $72 million streetcar that will connect Centennial Olympic Park with the historic King District?

This is the best transit news that metro Atlanta has received in years, if not decades. Earlier this year, we were bemoaning the fact that Georgia had been totally bypassed by the first round of federal transportation grants.

But last month, thanks to a thoughtful application, at long last, we will be re-investing in rail — a mode of transportation that holds the key to transforming our communities into thriving places to live, work and play.

The Atlanta Streetcar is just the beginning. Once the line begins operating in a couple of years, the region will be smitten

It was an unplanned reunion.

Eighteen years ago, as best any of us can remember, a small group of us decided to start an Atlanta Press Club debate committee.

It was a bit of motley crew: longtime political writer Bill Shipp, who had been with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and had left to start Shipp’s Georgia; Atlanta Journal editorial writer Dick Williams; Denis O’Hayer, then with WGST news radio; John Pruitt, then with WXIA-TV; and myself.

As I remember, we met at WXIA one evening to talk about how the Atlanta Press Club could start organizing political debates. I believe someone may have brought some beer (but that might be my memory playing tricks with me).

And so it began. We quickly teamed up with Georgia Public Broadcasting (then GPTV) that was open to broadcasting our debates.

We started out in a relatively modest way — doing debates just

It was the perfect song for this past week.

The song? “The Beauty of Grey.”

The band? Live.

This is not a black and white world
You can’t afford to believe in your side
This is not a black and white world
To be alive
I say the colors must swirl
And I believe that maybe today
We will all get to appreciate
The beauty of grey

Ed Kowalczyk, the lead singer of the now-disbanded Live and is now embarking a solo career, played Sunday night at the Park Tavern at Piedmont Park. It was the final night of this year’s 99x Unplugged in the Park concert series. He played many of Live’s top hits, including: “The Beauty of Grey.”

Before playing that song, Kowalczyk said he was still proud of

An affordable housing dream dating back 15 years is now facing foreclosure on Nov. 2.

The historic Imperial Hotel — a place where the poorest among us have lived since December 1996 — is the latest victim of the recession.

Progressive Redevelopment Inc., which renovated the Imperial Hotel into 120 single-room occupancy residences for the poor, can no longer pay the bills on the property.

“We are out of gas,” said Bruce Gunter, PRI’s president, adding that the non-profit has invested $150,000 of its own funds in the project. “We had a big increase in costs and a decrease in revenues. All of a sudden, we were in a world of hurt.”

The Imperial Hotel, now 99 years old, had been vacant for about 15 years when PRI bought the building for $1 million in 1995. It spent $9 million to restore the property, which was opened six months after the 1996 Summer Olympic Games.

Is it a park? Is it a drainage basin?

Amazingly it’s both.

This Historic Fourth Ward Park is taking shape south of North Avenue just west of the Beltline — one of the most incredible green projects in Atlanta’s history.

Here is a beacon of hope — we can invest infrastructure dollars — in this case water and sewer funds — into parks with water features for the public to enjoy.

If only we had had this wisdom 10 years and $4 billion ago when the city was under the gun to improve its century-old combined water and sewer system.

Environmentalists at the time — led by activist Bill Eisenhauer — urged the city to explore green solutions to meet the requirements of the federal consent decree.

The city dismissed that approach, saying it would take too long

For as long as I can remember, there has been the 45 Virginia-McLynn — until Sunday.

MARTA, faced with operating deficits, implemented a host of service cuts this weekend — further streamlining our already meager public transit system.

And this time, the cuts really hit home. No more 45 Virginia-McLynn.

The 45 bus line initially followed what had been the No. 15 streetcar line — one of dozens of streetcar lines that had made Atlanta a hub of rail and transit.

That streetcar line, and later the 45, started downtown and went north along West Peachtree Street until Fifth Street where it meandered the heart of Midtown going along Argonne Avenue, 8th Street and on towards Virginia-Highland.

Back in the late 1960s, I started riding the 45 to get to Grady

When the Livable Communities Coalition was formed five years ago, metro Atlanta couldn’t contain all its growth.

The coalition was an offshoot of the Quality Growth Task Force that had been formed a year earlier by the Metro Atlanta Chamber to help figure out how the region could accommodate as many as 2 million more people by 2030 and manage all the development that the population growth would bring.

The coalition represented the coming together of about 50 member organizations all focused on growth and development issues in the Atlanta region. The goal was to help the Atlanta region grow in a sensible, sustainable way.

Among the many ideas promoted by the coalition included preservation of green space, increased density around town

WARNING: To people who want voters to pass the regional transportation sales tax: Fix the inequities towards MARTA.

A regional sales tax will not pass without enthusiastic support from people living in the City of Atlanta, Fulton and DeKalb counties. But if the language now included in House Bill 277 is not changed, residents in the MARTA counties will realize that the regional sales tax is not in their best interest.

For nearly 40 years, people living in Atlanta, Fulton and DeKalb have been investing billions of dollars in a one-cent sales tax to establish the MARTA bus and rail system — the back bone of all transit services in the region.

HB 277 does call for an additional penny sales transportation tax for the 10-county region (of which as little as 15 percent or