By Maria Saporta
Friday, March 2, 2012
JPMorgan Chase & Co. could not be more pleased with how its partnership with the King Center has turned out.
Since last April, JPMorgan has been working on the King Center Imaging Project — digitizing all the center’s archival materials, including speeches and papers of Martin Luther King Jr., and making them available on a new website: www.thekingcenter.org/archive.
The name of the game these days is competitiveness.
Many Georgia leaders are asking how can we create the most competitive economy in the United States, if not the world.
Gov. Nathan Deal, the Georgia Chamber of Commerce and Georgia Department of Economic Development launched a Competitiveness Initiative in 2011.
Emory Morsberger is still having incredible days, and now they are spent nurturing the Stone Mountain Community Improvement District.
In less than a year, the region’s newest CID has made demonstrable improvements to the quality of life and streetscapes in a teetering area along the Gwinnett/DeKalb county line.
But the vision of this CID goes beyond creating streets that are pretty and secure. It’s about creating jobs.
“Our goal is to create 2,000 jobs in the CID,” Morsberger said. “Our first priority has been to secure it and clean it up, and then we’re going to fill it up. We have 2 million square feet of vacant space in an industrial area that has 10 million square feet. Once we fill it up, we’ll create 2,000 jobs.”
If you’ve seen Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed give a speech over the past couple of years, you’ve probably heard his pitch about how important the deepening of the Savannah River is to Atlanta’s future.
For Reed, deepening the Port of Savannah’s channel to accommodate the larger ships soon to be coming through the Panama Canal is key to the development of the region, and thereby to the future health of our city.
If the mayor is correct, events took a fateful turn last week. Reed and other supporters of the Savannah harbor-deepening project now find themselves hostage to something with which they are ill-prepared to cope, namely, politics in South Carolina.
This is really the story of a sort of three-legged sack race, prompted by the Panama Canal expansion to be completed in 2014, and the lure of the riches to be gained by accommodating the larger container ships coming in its wake.
By Guest Columnist JOHN SIBLEY, senior policy fellow at Southface Energy Institute and former president of the Georgia Conservancy
Have you gotten used to thinking you have no choice on your power bill? We can’t choose our power company, so most of us pay the bill without looking past the total amount due – without even thinking about the amount paid for each kilowatt-hour or whether we have better choices.
For some odd reason, the folks in North Carolina think they are able to build a deep water port that could rival Charleston or Savannah for the massive vessels expected to sail through the expanded Panama Canal.
The Old North State even issued last week a draft copy of its governor-sponsored study into the possible project: “North Carolina Maritime Strategy.” Public comment sessions continue this week.
This possible port development is barely mentioned in Georgia, where the public discourse is of competition between Charleston and Savannah. Sometimes there’s a nod to a potential ocean port in Jasper County, S.C., which could complement the Savannah port along the shared river.
Yet North Carolina bears watching – the state is a fierce contender that already is a regional leader in areas including scientific research and development, banking and finance, transit and tourism.
By Maria Saporta
Friday, February 24, 2012
Rome-based Berry College has received an anonymous $10 million challenge gift to help provide at least 80 new full-time scholarships for students who combine their studies with work on campus.
We need to talk about “We Need to Talk about Kevin.”
Because, having lost its best shot at an Oscar when its star, Tilda Swinton, wasn’t nominated in the best actress category, it’s likely the film will slip in and out of town without much notice.
Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed has funded the entire campaign for the extension of the 1 percent sales tax to pay for sewer upgrades with a $50,000 loan from his 2010 inaugural committee, according to campaign finance disclosures.
Reed’s inaugural committee has provided the only contributions received by the MOST campaign, according to a disclosure filed Feb. 24 with the Georgia Government Transparency and Campaign Finance Commission. Of the loaned sum, the campaign has spent $30,000 on polling and $5,000 on media – all of it with two firms located outside of Georgia.
The Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce is hosting at least three campaign materials on its website in advance of the March 6 referendum. One file is a letter signed by three former mayors (Shirley Franklin, Sam Massell, and Andrew Young) urging readers to support the campaign and contribute to it. Two other files are fact-based documents about the purpose of the MOST and its use in the federally mandated $4 billion sewer upgrade.
Two upcoming forums will provide information to small and minority companies seeking contracts to design and build projects in Atlanta to be funded with proceeds of the proposed 1 percent sales tax for transportation.
Presenters will talk about the procurement processes to be used to award contracts for planned transportation projects in Atlanta, MARTA, DeKalb and Fulton counties. Registration for the session Wednesday is closed, but openings remain for the March 6 event.
The forums occur as the state Legislature debates a proposal to redefine small business as it relates to state purchasing contracts. House Bill 863 would change the size of a small business, for purposes of competing for a state contract, from 100 employees to 500 employees.
Over the next year, MARTA expects to spend up to $700,000 maintaining its train tracks, grinding them into proper shape and otherwise ensuring they will safely carry trains.
The amount may not seem terribly huge for a system with a total annual budget this year of more than $740 million. The project also seems to be an expense that could be deferred in the expectation that it could be funded with MARTA’s portion of the proposed 1 percent sales tax for transportation, which will be on the ballot July 31.
Except, proceeds of the sales tax could not be used for the rail maintenance project, a top MARTA official said. And the reality of the need for routine maintenance, in and of itself, speaks to the ongoing challenge of maintaining and operating the system – especially in an era of MARTA’s own declining local sales tax revenues and the uncertainty of federal funding for transit nationwide.
It should be so simple.
Establishing a regional transit governance structure and tweaking the MARTA Act to make the transit system more functional should be no brainers.
But when sound ideas are placed in the hands of some members of the General Assembly they somehow become distorted, convoluted and warped with political baggage.
Then when people and institutions object to proposed bills have been drafted with flawed thinking rather than common sense, those bills often just die on the vine and nothing gets done.
To see ourselves as others see us: That, presumably was the idea behind a mostly pointless but nevertheless fascinating poll which asked Americans to rate the 50 states in the way polls more often ask about politicians or new auto models.
Georgia came out with a net favorable/unfavorable margin of plus 11, tied with New York. Only 15 states have lower margins, but take heart. A Republican entering the GOP presidential field right now would kill for 31-20 favorable/unfavorable poll numbers.
The survey, conducted by Public Policy Polling of Raleigh, N.C., found several of the top vacation destinations were the most favored states. Hawaii was by far the most popular with a net favorable of 44, followed by Colorado (+35), Tennessee (+34), South Dakota (+34) and Virginia (+32).
By Maria Saporta
Friday, February 24, 2012
The Atlanta-based King Center — a nonprofit that has experienced a multitude of management changes over the years — now is under the oversight of Terry Giles, who was made interim custodian of the Center by a Fulton County Superior Court judge on Jan. 31.
The proposed five-mile trail to be built alongside and beneath Ga. 400 moves into its final planning phase this week.
If all goes as scheduled, design work that begins at this time will lead to construction starting in mid 2013, according to Denise Starling, the executive director of Livable Buckhead, Inc. Livable Buckhead is the chief organizer of the $10 million trail that is to stretch from a cemetery off Loridans Drive in North Buckhead to the planned Peachtree Creek spur of the BeltLine, near MARTA’s Lindbergh Station.
The Buckhead trail is not directly affiliated with the BeltLine. But the two projects are complementary, and are to constitute the largest expansion of greenspace now underway in any U.S. city, according to Trust for Public Land.
By Guest Columnist JERE WOOD, mayor of the City of Roswell
Metro Atlanta needs more than a one-cent transportation sales tax to recover from the recession and regain its position in a competitive world. We need to work together as a region, not independently, to meet our transportation, water and other regional challenges.
To act as a unified region, we need leaders with the authority to speak for the region.
Who has the authority to speak for metro Atlanta?
Note to Readers: This column was written and posted before Sunday night’s Oscars. Eleanor only missed one prediction — Meryl Streep did win best actress. Maria
What can I say about the Academy Awards that hasn’t already been said?
Perhaps this: I have been watching the televised Oscar show as part of my job description for well over 30 years. I’ve noticed these differences.
– The Red Carpet has basically become more important than who wins what. One hears “Who are you wearing” more often than “And the winner is…”
By Maria Saporta
Friday, February 17, 2012
Michael Polk has been president and CEO of Newell Rubbermaid Inc. only since July, but already he is putting his mark on the Atlanta-based company.
Newell Rubbermaid invited up to 250 of its top executives from around the world for its annual convention to Atlanta during the week of Feb. 13 to Feb. 16. But instead of going to a golf resort, Polk decided to spend their first “team-building” day volunteering at the Carrie Steele-Pitts Home for abused and abandoned children.
The proposed privatization of Gwinnett County’s airport is a local matter in which the state won’t intervene, according to the state official who oversees aviation for the state Department of Transportation.
Gwinnett residents and leaders have wrestled for years with the question of what to do with Briscoe Field, located along Ga. 316 about two miles northeast of Lawrenceville. At the heart of the issue is a debate over whether to allow commercial passenger service – and the impact that would have on neighborhoods near the airport.
Speaking Tuesday to the Rotary Club of Gwinnett County, Carol Comer said the state has no role in deciding or recommending the future of the airport. Comer directs GDOT’s Intermodal Division, which oversees systems including aviation, transit, rail, ports and waterways.
It turns out that more than $18 billion really doesn’t go as far as it used to.
That’s the amount to be raised within the next decade if voters in July approve the 1 percent sales tax for transportation in each of Georgia’s 12 special tax districts. Even that amount didn’t provide for the majority of road, transit and airport projects initially proposed.
Nor does the sum begin to make a dent in the $18 billion to $20 billion list of upgrades that must be made to the state’s freight handling systems – its highways, railroads, Savannah seaport and airports in Atlanta and Albany, according to a new report from the Georgia Department of Transportation.
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