Category: Maria’s Metro

By Maria Saporta

There’s something about roof-tops that I find irresistible.

Maybe it goes back to when my father, an architect who taught site inspection courses at Georgia Tech, would take me and my sister to construction sites.

Or maybe it’s because my mother would take me and my sister to Europe every other summer, and we always sought special vistas where we could get a view of the cities around us.

In Paris, it would be on the top of Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower. In Salonica, Greece, we would go to the top of the mountain overlooking the city reaching out to the Mediterranean Sea. We would also walk up the stair to the top of the historic White Tower that defines the pedestrian walkway

If it weren’t so sad, it would be funny.

Georgia is being ridiculed in Washington for failing to move forward with transit and rail. In fact, Georgia is moving in reverse.

How else can one interpret the reorganization of the Georgia Department of Transportation, being proposed by Commissioner Vance Smith, that will downgrade its “Intermodal” Division (which includes transit) into a program under the Engineering Division.

It was only a year ago when GDOT created the Intermodal Division as a way to demonstrate its commitment to transit. But that commitment appears to have been short-lived.

Next, we’ve got State Rep. Fran Millar (R-Dunwoody) proposing a state takeover of MARTA, the largest transit agency in the Southeast, and putting it under the control of GDOT.

The Atlanta elections of 2009 will go down in history as turning point for our city.

This is our generation’s version of the 1969 election when for voters broke rank and defeated the candidate of the business community in favor of Sam Massell, a Jewish businessman.

Up until Massell’s election, it had been customary for the mayor of the city of Atlanta to become an honorary member of the Piedmont Driving Club. But that offer was not extended to Massell.

And by 1973, when Atlanta’s first black mayor — Maynard Jackson — was elected, the transition was complete. The predominantly white business community no longer had a hold

Sometimes it feels as though Atlanta is living two different realities.

Our schizophrenia is surfacing during this mayoral election, and it’s not a healthy situation for our city or the next mayor.

Take last Wednesday. The top four mayoral candidates were part of a forum at the Temple. Listening to them, you would have thought the city has been at the brink of disaster for the past eight years and that it’s all doom and gloom. (In all fairness, City Council President Lisa Borders was far less negative than the others).

Then on Thursday, the Council for Quality Growth held its annual Four Pillars Award where it was honoring Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin for her distinguished leadership of the city for the past eight years.

It’s not like me to go to a horror movie at the Plaza Theatre at 11 on a Friday night.

In fact, it’s not like me to go to horror movies at all.

But there I was on Friday night going to see “The Commune,” an independent psychological thriller written and directed by Elisabeth Fies. The horror movie festival crowd was mixed in with the eclectic “Rocky Horror Picture Show” crowd, who were going to see the cult classic in the larger downstairs theater.

I was there for only one reason — to see Adrian Lee, who starred in “The Commune” as an earthy, twisted stepmother called Rhea.

Adrian and I met at Grady High School when we were both entering 8th grade. It was through Adrian that I met Francie

What a week.

It started off with U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood telling Georgia that it needs to get its act together when it comes to high-speed rail and transit.

Although LaHood didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know, it’s always reaffirming to have the most powerful transportation official in the country tell state leaders that they’ve been asleep at the switch.

“There has to be a commitment by state government that transit is important,” LaHood, one of the key Republicans in President Barack Obama’s administration, said in an interview with Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Jay Bookman.

As we all know, the state of Georgia does not invest in MARTA,

When making the case for future investment in Atlanta’s cultural institutions, Joe Bankoff brings out the pictures.

Bankoff, president of the Woodruff Arts Center, shows a picture of MIdtown in 1968 soon after the $8 million Memorial Arts Center building was developed along Peachtree Street between 15th and 16th streets.

The photo shows the arts center located in a low-rise community surrounded by low-rise buildings and single-family homes. The first high-rise in the community came a year later — the first Colony Square tower.

And then Bankoff shows off his photos of Midtown today. It shows a cluster of skyscrapers all encircling the Woodruff Arts

The Atlanta region is really a mosaic of neighborhoods.

That was the underlying theme of the first annual Regional Neighborhood Summit held on Saturday at the Loudermilk Conference Center and put on by the Civic League for Regional Atlanta.

Surprisingly, nearly 500 people came on a beautiful Saturday to spend several hours indoors to meet their counterparts from throughout the region and exchange ideas on how to improve their communities.

“Where the action is these days is at the local neighborhood level and at the regional level,” said Myles Greene Smith, executive director of the Civic League. “We are trying to get

Just when you think it can’t get any worse…

For years, metro Atlanta has been seeking new funding for transportation. The last couple of years, the Atlanta region has been begging the state legislature for the right to pass a one-cent sales tax on itself to tackle its transportation problems.
But for the last two years, a proposed transportation funding bill has died in the last few hours of the session. This past session, it failed because the Senate favored a regional approach while the House favored a statewide sales tax, and the two houses couldn’t resolve their differences.

Such inaction infuriated metro Atlanta’s leaders. The business community even went so far as telling legislators that if they

For the past couple of months, I’ve been talking to the top candidates for Atlanta mayor about my concern that this could be the most divisive mayoral campaign in the past three decades.

I thought that a likely run-off election that is almost sure to include City Councilwoman Mary Norwood, who is white, and any of her opponents, all of whom are all black; that race would raise its ugly head.

Little did I expect that a major racial blow-up would happen several months before the general election on Nov. 3.

But that’s what happened this week when a position statement

Sometimes being a journalist is a frustrating experience.

The goal is to find the answers to questions until a story makes sense.

But it’s not always easy getting answers. And even when answers are provided, some stories still leave more questions than answers.

Such a story is the recent news that the Atlanta Journal-Constitution is leaving downtown, its home for more than140 years, to move to a Dunwoody office building at 223 Perimeter Center Parkway, the former Southeast headquarters for Macy’s

Finding the right transportation solution for metro Atlanta is getting harder by the day.

Take what former Gov. Roy Barnes told real estate agents last week. (I actually emailed the governor to make sure he was quoted accurately. Yes he was).

As Political Insider Jim Galloway reported in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Barnes said that MARTA should be preserved, but not expanded. Instead, the state should shift to a network of elevated light-rail lines that would run above metro Atlanta’s interstate system.

What has happened to our “smart growth” governor?

Without a doubt, metro Atlanta is the economic propeller for the state of Georgia.

When metro Atlanta suffers, so does the rest of the state.

But, for reasons that defy logic, there is a lack of appreciation for the positive impact that Georgia’s metropolis has on the rest of the state.

One would think that the state of Georgia would do everything it could to make sure that its economic engine was running as efficiently as possible. But whether it be economic development investment or traffic issues or water resources, metro Atlanta often finds itself at a disadvantage.

Recently, I had lunch with Taylor Glover, president of Turner Enterprises.

It didn’t’ take long for us to start talking about the environment and energy. Glover began drawing some wavy lines on the paper tablecloth at Ted’s Montana Grill.

In the past, the earth has relied on solids for energy — the burning of wood and coal. As time has passed, the world has turned more to liquids for its energy — primarily oil and petroleum products. The problem with those energy sources is that they contribute to pollution and to climate change.

In short, those are unsustainable sources of energy.

How far we have fallen.

Today Georgia finds itself in the weakest political position it has ever been at the national level, at least for the last six decades.

Currently, there is virtually no direct link to the party in power at the White House, the U.S. House of Representatives or the U.S. Senate. And Georgia is at risk of being left out in the political cold when it comes to power and influence.

Take the battle over the $1.75 billion appropriation for new F-22 fighter jets. Both U.S. senators from Georgia — Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson — had placed the continued

It’s been pretty easy to blame the state legislature for the lack of progress on regional transportation issues and MARTA during the last session.

But part of the problem rests within the region. There has been a lack of consensus among local governments and their delegation of senators and representatives on how to proceed on key regional issues.

A significant meeting took place last week at Fulton County that hopes to change that backdrop.

The meeting included top elected leaders from the city of

After six months in office as CEO of DeKalb County, Burrell Ellis finds himself uniquely positioned to build stategic relationships with Washington D.C. and the Atlanta region.

It is those relationships that Ellis hopes will help DeKalb County weather the stormy economy and be prepared for a stable recovery.

Ellis has been working on his relationship with the federal government through the National Association of Counties, an organization he joined when he was a DeKalb County commissioner.

Two strikes. One more and we’re out.

Atlanta has struck out twice with internationally-acclaimed Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava.

First, it was the 17th Street bridge connecting Spring Street with Atlantic Station. Calatrava had designed a bridge that would have been a fanciful and graceful gateway to our city. Instead of a Calatrava bridge, we got a low-budget, DOT-concrete span painted yellow.

Second, it was the new concert hall for the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Calatrava had designed a hall that appeared able to take flight in between the highrise buildings on 14th Street between Peachtree and West Peachtree streets.

When the $300 million design was unveiled, it was called Atlanta’s next signature postcard. Instead, it will end up in the file of unbuilt designs.

Governance.

Even in the best of times, finding the right governance to address a problem in a fair and representative way is a tricky task.

It is just that exercise that the Atlanta Regional Transit Implementation Board has been wrestling with for the past several months.

What would be the most balanced way to oversee transit development in the 12-county Atlanta region, if and when a new funding source is passed.

The effort has been a valiant one. County commission chairs have been working with MARTA, the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority (GRTA), the Georgia Department of Transportation, the governor’s office and the Atlanta Regional Commission to design a governance board to implement a regional transit system.

For as long as I can remember, there’s always been tension between Atlanta and the rest of the state.

Some call it the two Georgias. Others say there are three, four or five Georgias. Whatever the number, it’s become increasingly apparent that these great divides are pulling our state apart — creating a disjointed and acrimonious environment that hurts every corner of Georgia.

Those divides were even more glaring in this past legislative session when different political agendas resulted in little getting done for either metro Atlanta or the rest of Georgia.

As a result several key business and civic leaders are strategizing about a big idea to unify the state through a multimillion dollar, multi-year initiative.