Category: Maria’s Metro

France and Haiti.

A tale of two countries — one rich, one poor — both connected by a French heritage and little else.

Earlier this month, International Living Magazine named France as the best place to live among 194 countries across the globe.

Countries were ranked based on cost of living, culture and leisure, economy, environment, freedom, health, infrastructure, safety and risk and climate.

“For the fifth year running, France takes first in our ‘Quality of Life Index,’” the magazine wrote. “No surprise. It’s tiresome bureaucracy and high taxes are outweighed by an unsurpassable quality of life, including the world’s best health care. France always nets high scores in most categories. But you don’t need number crunchers to tell you its ‘bon vivant’ lifestyle is special. Step off a plane and you’ll experience it first-

This could be the year when the Georgia General Assembly agrees to allow the Atlanta region to put a referendum before voters on a penny sales tax for transportation improvements.

And after years of urging the General Assembly to do just that, now I’m questioning the wisdom of passing such a bill this year.

We probably have only one opportunity to pass a new transportation funding tool for our region. So it is critically important that we make the right choices for our future transportation needs.

Here is the problem. A possible bill to allow the region to vote on a one-cent sales tax is in the works, but an integral element of that bill is a project list of what transportation improvements the region could fund.

And it’s the project list that worries me. Will it include the kind of transportation improvements that metro Atlanta will need for

An older and more subdued G. Lars Gullstedt returned to Atlanta last month to visit the place where his dreams were never fully realized.

Back in the early 1990s, Gullstedt, a Swedish developer who had turned his sights towards Atlanta, was on top of the world.

He had built a real estate empire in Sweden, and he was well on his way to transform Midtown Atlanta.

One Gullstedt monument was built in Atlanta — the 51-story building that is the home of the Four Season Hotel. When it opened in 1992, the building was a one-of-a-kind development known as the GLG Grand.

The multi-layered building, which sits on 14th Street between the Peachtrees, includes an underground parking garage, a hotel with a conference area, offices, apartments, townhomes, condominiums, an athletic club and penthouses.

Gullstedt and his wife returned as hotel guests at the Four

At Dan Graveline’s retirement party last week, the theme of those paying him tribute was the same. They all credited Graveline for his professionalism in running one the best convention centers in the United States.

Graveline is the only executive director that the Georgia World Congress Center has known in its 33-year history. He came to Atlanta after a group of state officials went on a tour of convention centers in the mid-1970s and met Graveline, who was then assistant general manager of the Los Angeles Convention Center.

In short, when searching for someone to run its new convention center, state leaders turned to a professional who understood the meeting and convention industry. That was 1976.

Now the state is facing the same challenge — selecting the ideal person to run one of the largest convention centers in the

The boys are back in charge.

While most of the focus in the recent city election focused on the dynamics of race and Atlanta’s changing demographics, gender played an equal if not more significant role.

Think about it.

We’ve gone from electing our first woman mayor in 2001 — Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin — to now having another man as mayor — Kasim Reed.

We’ve gone from having two women city council presidents back to back — Cathy Woolard followed by Lisa Borders — to now having another man in that chair — Ceasar Mitchell.

In each of those races, there were strong women contenders. In the mayor’s race, at-large City Councilwoman Mary Norwood and Borders came in second and third respectively.

The morning after of the city of Atlanta’s run-off election, I received an email from a veteran player in local government — George Berry.

Berry served under four different Atlanta mayors — Ivan Allen Jr., Sam Massell, Maynard Jackson and Andrew Young. As the city’s aviation commissioner, he oversaw the building of Atlanta’s new airport. Berry also served as commissioner of what is now the Georgia Department of Economic Development. More recently, he served as an executive of Cousins Properties until he retired a few years ago.

In short, Berry has a long memory, great insight combined with decades of exemplary public service.

So after the run-off on Dec. 1 showing that former state Sen.

Life is not fair.

That point hit home once again this week.

On Thanksgiving morning, a friend of mine became seriously ill. She recently had moved in to our guest room — needing a place to stay and wanting to help me organize my home with 25-plus years of clutter.

So Thanksgiving morning, she tells me she is having agonizing pains in her stomach and that she needs to go to the hospital.

We get in my car, and she tells me she needs to go to Grady because she has no health insurance. This does not come as a surprise. I have known she has been living on the margins of society for years.

Our community is full of heroes who dedicate their lives to making Atlanta a better place to live.

As we give thanks this week, I would like to thank all our local heroes.

The abundance of great community leaders really hit home this past week.

It began with the induction of a new shining light — Bill Bolling, founder and executive director of the Atlanta Community Food Bank for 30 years. On Monday, Bolling received the Shining Light Award from Atlanta Gas Light and WSB-Radio — placed nostalgically on Peachtree Street in front of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church.

Then on Thursday, Progressive Redevelopment Inc. — one of

Election year politics could impact the passage of a proposed sustainable building ordinance in Atlanta.

On July 6, the sustainable building ordinance was submitted to Atlanta’s city council as a way to encourage the development of greener buildings. But over the last five months, the ordinance has been stalled in the Community Development Committee.

The ordinance was held yet again at last week’s council committee meeting. The last opportunity for the bill to pass the committee this year will be Dec. 1, which just so happens to be election day for Atlanta’s run-offs.

The ordinance has to be approved by that committee before it can go to the full council for its Dec. 7 meeting, the last one of

It all will come down to the 6th district.

The outcome of the city of Atlanta’s four run-off elections on Dec. 1 will largely be determined by the voters in Midtown, Virginia-Highland, Morningside and other neighborhoods in the northeastern section of the city.

The four Atlanta contests that ended up in run-offs show the incredible diversity that now exists in our city:

In the mayor’s race, it is between City Councilwoman Mary Norwood and former state Sen. Kasim Reed; in the race for City Council — a white woman from Buckhead running against a black man from Southwest Atlanta. Norwood received 46 percent of the vote, and Reed received 36 percent.

In the city council president’s race, it is between two Atlanta

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