Where were you when they announced Best Picture at the Oscars on Sunday?
I was in bed, but, showing stamina I hadn’t mustered in years —stamina, mind you, not enjoyment — I actually saw the very end. I mean, the very, very end, including, the song that Kristin Chenoweth (who is her agent; she was everywhere) and host Seth McFarlane did about the losers.
Stories about the Republican governors’ struggle with accepting the Medicaid expansion often say, as an Associated Press story did this week, that under the Affordable Care Act, “Washington pays the full cost of the expansion for the first three years, gradually phasing down to 90 percent.” This is true, but there is a little more to it, and in political terms that little is large.
To expand the explanation somewhat, from Jan. 1, 2014, to Dec. 31, 2016, the feds will pay the participating states 100 percent of their Medicaid costs. The scale-down begins in 2017 and reaches 90 percent in 2020.
What results from this is somewhat akin to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. To some GOP governors who have been vocally opposed to Obamacare, the train they’re on appears to be moving slowly enough to get through one more qualifying, one more election, maybe even having their portrait hung in the capitol before they’re compelled to concede.
A new report shows that construction activity along the Atlanta BeltLine is trending upward after a stark decline during the recession.
Fourteen projects were under construction in 2012. That compares to four projects in 2011, three in 2010, and nine in 2009. There were 31 projects being built in 2008, according to the new report from the city’s Bureau of Planning.
The concentration of development in northeast Atlanta – half the projects being built last year were in the Freedom Parkway subarea – speaks to the issue of equitable development, which is the subject of an advisory group that’s to meet Friday.
A prism of the Civil Rights Movement is on display at Emory University’s Robert W. Woodruff Library — an exhibit featuring archives from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).
The title of the exhibit is: “And the Struggle Continues: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Fight for Social Change.”
And while the exhibit is an historical retrospective of the Civil Rights organization, the title also applies to the SCLC itself — an entity that has been searching for its own post-Civil Rights Movement identity and leadership in this new millennium.
Georgia is preparing to repeal rules for radioactive waste disposal because the state is not in the business of storing such waste and has no plans to start, a state official said.
The state also intends to update its regulations of radioactive materials used for medical and industrial purposes. The revision aims to bring state rules into compliance with new federal standards.
Both measures are part of the routine maintenance of Georgia’s rules and regulations of radioactive materials, according to Jac Capp, chief of the air protection branch of Georgia’s Department of Natural Resources.
By Maria Saporta
Published in the Atlanta Business Chronicle on Friday, February 22, 2013
For Atlanta builder Dave Moody, his life’s biggest project has been rebuilding himself after having been sexually abused when he was only 10 years old.
Moody kept that secret buried for 26 years until 1992 when he finally told his wife, Karla.
But Moody wasn’t prepared for what followed — repeated anxiety and panic attacks that left him unable to breathe. After undergoing countless medical tests, through therapy he finally realized that his attacks were connected to the abuse that he had tried so hard to ignore for most of his adult life.
By Guest Columnist LAUREN JOY, an associate attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center
In 2011, many Atlantans were relieved by the court determination that water supply was an authorized purpose of Lake Lanier. Despite this “win” for Atlanta in the Tri-State Water Wars, we must continue to treat water supply as an ongoing and important issue for Atlanta and the state.
The “Water Wars” are far from over, and the best step we can take to secure and sustain our state’s water supplies is to improve our statewide water planning efforts.
I don’t even watch the whole Oscar show anymore (Feb. 24). Yet, as I wrote in the Atlanta Business Chronicle, I can’t break my addiction to trying to predict the top 6 categories.
I once had a boss/colleague who was either so obsessed with the Academy Awards or so competitive that he would insist on predicting every single category. Sorry, I just have no idea who deserves best sound editing. Nor, I’m afraid, do I much care.
Yeah, I’m a shallow Philistine who much prefers to stick to the top six groups, i.e., Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor, and Supporting Actress.
A central question facing the Atlanta City Council is how to harness the city’s influence in the proposed deal to help pay for the planned Falcons stadium.
Just this month, the city enacted a new law that seems to require the stadium’s builders to hire a certain proportion of disadvantaged and underemployed residents. Falcons President Rich McKay said the team is committed to such social objectives – and that they will be addressed.
In addition, some on the council want the new stadium to address blight in nearby neighborhoods, specifically along Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. However, Councilmember Michael Julian Bond noted that the project can’t be a panacea for, “every social ill under the sun.”
By Maria Saporta
Published in the Atlanta Business Chronicle on Friday, February 15, 2013
Subie Green, one of Atlanta’s most respected nonprofit executives, is retiring as president of the Center for the Visually Impaired at the end of June.
“It’s really time, but it was a hard, hard decision because I have loved this job so much,” said Green, who has been CVI’s top executive since May 2001.
During her tenure as president, Green oversaw an $8 million capital campaign to buy and renovate a new Midtown home for the organization that serves people who are blind or with significant visual disabilities.
In about three weeks, Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed’s staff expects to deliver to the city council the meat of the legislation that will enable the city council to vote to help fund a new Falcons stadium.
Given the level of support for the new stadium voiced by several councilmembers, its evident some of them will spend the next three weeks figuring out how to ensure that community benefits agreements are created to help city residents and the neighborhoods around. Such concerns were a major issue at the council’s four-hour work session Wednesday.
Falcons President and CEO Rich McKay assured the council several times that team owner Arthur Blank is committed to being a good civic partner. McKay emphasized that Penny McPhee, president of the Blank Foundation, will oversee that outreach effort.
A portion of Adams Park, in southwest Atlanta, has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places in recognition of attributes including its landscape design and stonework.
The recognition is a reminder of the efforts underway in many of the city parks, in addition to headline-grabbing initiatives such as the Atlanta BeltLine and Buckhead Trail.
The Adams Park designation is the result of work by the Adams Park Foundation on behalf of a park that – like Chastain Memorial Park, in Buckhead – was originally intended to attract residents to the region by offering first-class recreational amenities. The same landscape company worked on Chastain and Adams parks.
When Atlantans look around for other cities to compare theirs with, they think major league all the way. They measure their growth against Houston and Dallas. They travel to Denver and Seattle to find civic inspiration and worry that Charlotte and Nashville are gaining on them.
But as we contemplate the hotter, wetter future we discussed last week, we might be better off taking a look at Chattanooga.
Yes, Chattanooga. Seldom do we think of our neighbor across the Tennessee line as much of a competitor. When they built an aquarium, we just built a bigger one. But for nearly three decades, since a group of civic leaders got together in 1984 and committed themselves to doing something about Chattanooga’s image as the dirtiest city in America, and in the view of some the dullest, they have been eating our lunch on the playing field of liveability.
Advocates of a new football stadium are to get a chance Wednesday to try to convince members of the Atlanta City Council that the city should help build a new facility.
The work session, set for 11:30 a.m., will be the first real opportunity for councilmembers to engage the advocates. Councilmembers already have raised questions about how neighborhoods around the stadium could benefit from its construction and operation.
Without the council’s support, Atlanta’s development authority likely won’t be able to borrow enough money to help build the stadium. No funding source other than the city’s hotel/motel tax has been publicly identified to fill the gap between what the NFL and Falcons are willing to pay, and the actual cost of construction.
Metro Atlanta’s profile is changing with a dramatic growth of poverty in the suburbs.
Several recent studies point to reality challenging the perception that the poor are concentrated in the central city while the middle-income and higher-income populations are living in the suburbs.
“In Atlanta, since 2000, the number of poor people living in suburbs grew by 53 percent,” said Elizabeth Kneebone, a fellow with the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution, who was in Atlanta presenting her findings. By comparison, the number of poor people living in the City of Atlanta grew by 24 percent.
By Guest Columnist LEON EPLAN, former commissioner of the City of Atlanta’s Department of Planning and Development
As work progresses on the Atlanta Streetcar, the city has aken a giant step towards confronting its current and future traffic problems.
Construction on the entire 2.6-mile loop will continue until the day the line is open for public travel, now scheduled for spring, 2014. By then, planning for additional lines will have already begun.
Atlanta’s newest music ambassador is a hip hop artist from the Kirkwood neighborhood whose photo appeared this month on a section front of The New York Times.
At a time the region is receiving little in the way of good news coverage from media around the nation, the performer known as Future is keeping the city’s music industry in the national spotlight.
Future’s photo appeared this month in The New York Times with a 1,000-word story about Atlanta’s ever-changing hip hop scene. On March 2, Future will appear as a headline act in the 20th annual 9 Mile Music Festival, at Miami’s Virginia Key Beach – a beach where blacks could gather during the segregation era.
The most significant proposal in decades to reform MARTA is sailing through the legislative process at the state Capitol and could be up for a vote in the House as early as next week.
So far, no serious objections to the proposal have been raised in public by MARTA or the three governments that control MARTA – Atlanta, and Fulton and DeKalb counties, though union has voiced concerns. The sponsor said the bill intends to help MARTA serve its current and future riders.
“I hope that the bill is received in the way it is intended – and that is to improve MARTA’S financial conditions so that we can, hopefully, see some future expansion of the system,” said Rep. Mike Jacobs (R-Brookhaven), who chairs the MARTA oversight committee.
We all know those commercials for the miracle pill that’ll cure what ails you.
Some actor is lying around barely able to pet the dog. Then a handful or so of pills later, he or she is up and about, tossing Frisbees on the beach, embracing everything good and healthy.
But as we vicariously enjoy life as a day at the beach, the narrator’s voice gets just a shade more business-like. What follows is an endless litany of potential side effects. Everything, it seems, from difficulty sleeping to your arm falling off.
By Maria Saporta
Published in the Atlanta Business Chronicle on Friday, February 8, 2013
The Chastain Park Conservancy wants to create an extraordinary space for play.
The conservancy is undergoing a$2.5 million capital campaign to transform its current half-acre, nondescript playground into a 6-acre hillside with green space and a 3-acre active play area for all ages.
“It’s a pretty sad little playground right now,” said Jay Smith, vice chairman of the Conservancy who is leading the fundraising effort. “And it is the only playground in a city park within a five-mile radius. It needs to be replaced.”
