After the regional transportation sales tax lost in nine of the state’s 12 regions on July 31, it was convenient to say that regionalism can’t work in a divided Georgia.
But actually the opposite is true. Regionalism is the only logical way for Georgia to address its future development and transportation plans.
Consider this. Because of its 159 counties and hundreds of cities, Georgia has found it nearly impossible to develop coherent plans for all those communities.
By Maria Saporta
Published in the Atlanta Business Chronicle on Friday, November 9, 2012
A glass ceiling has been broken by women serving on the boards of Georgia’s public companies.
For the first time ever, more than 10 percent of all the board seats at the companies are held by women. That translates to 106 of the 1,017 total board seats — or 10.4 percent. In 2011, it was 9.6 percent. By comparison, in 2001 that percentage was only 5.5 percent.
Denzel Washington’s new film, “Flight” isn’t about the non-stop Atlanta-to-Denver sort of flight. It’s about the frenzied flight from reality that every addict takes with every snort and swallow.
Washington does play a pilot — cocky Capt. “Whip” Whitaker, who can fly anything with wings and a cockpit.
Even when he’s coked to the gills and coasting on some well-spiked orange juice.
By Guest Columnist DAVE PETERSON, co-founder of Atlanta-based global consulting company North Highland
All people, particularly children, need art and cultural experiences. Children need arts and culture because it promotes brain development. Adults and families need them as a way to lift themselves from the weights and measures of today’s reality.
Cities and communities need arts and culture to promote quality of life and enhance economic development. Through those artistic and cultural experiences, we all connect ourselves to the world around us in different ways and are better off for it personally and financially.
As the state moves ahead with plans to build water reservoirs, Atlanta is proceeding with efforts to make better use of rainwater that falls over the city.
On Nov. 27, if all goes as planned, the city’s long-awaited proposal to improve the management of storm water is to get its first hearing by the Utilities Committee of the Atlanta City Council. Advocates hope the council will enact it early next year and Mayor Kasim Reed will sign the legislation.
It is the back story from bicycle-crash survivor Jim Durrett that underscores this year’s PACE Awards, by which the Clean Air Campaign honors top commute programs.
Durrett won the PACE category of GDOT Leadership Award for his use of influence as a community leader to promote clean-air commutes. Later Wednesday, in the just-released edition of the Buckhead CID’s newsletter, Durrett’s column in the Executive Director’s slot began with this compelling sentence:
“Maybe you’ve heard, but I recently went airborne. Unfortunately, it was not in a fun aeronautical way, but in a ‘flew of my bicycle while going 34 mph’ way. You can read the whole story of my accident on our blog.”
Mack Wilbourn, a longtime concessionaire at Atlanta’s airport, is to hear within a month if he has become too wealthy for his firm to remain certified as a disadvantaged business enterprise.
Wilbourn’s lawyers spent almost three hours Thursday fighting a ruling by the Federal Aviation Authority, which has determined Wilbourn is too rich for his firm, Mack II, to receive preferential treatment as a DBE. The DBE certification helped Mack II in last year’s competition for lucrative concessions contracts at Atlanta’s airport. The Atlanta City Council authorized the contracts in January.
Wilbourn emerged from the closed-door hearing and declined comment repeatedly as he walked 50 feet to a bank of elevators and stepped into one. Hearings for three other companies that the FAA has ruled ineligible for DBE preferences for concessions contracts they received are scheduled Nov. 14-20.
“ARITHmetic.”
Republicans will have a lot to sort out over the coming weeks and months, but as they mull over their loss in the Presidential and U.S. Senate races and ponder where they go from here, Bill Clinton’s derisive retort in his virtuoso performance at the Democratic National Convention last September should echo loudly in their minds. A failure to grapple with arithmetic was, at so many levels, the key to the problems which came down on the GOP Tuesday night.
Partisans hold out hope for their candidates until the bitter end, but in politics you seldom see an election in which so many of the pros ignored the math for as long as they did in this one. Karl Rove’s Tuesday night “meltdown” on Fox was only the last and most public manifestation. (And by the way, it probably wouldn’t have happened if Fox, perhaps attempting to salvage something from a miserable night, hadn’t put itself out there to be first to call Ohio.)
Published in the Atlanta Business Chronicle on Friday, November 2, 2012
JP Morgan Chase and the Brookings Institute have teamed up on an initiative to help cities become more globally competitive.
The Global Cities Initiative, a $10 million, five-year program, will be coming to Atlanta on March 19 and 20. It is one of five cities that will be part of the initiative in 2013. The other cities are Houston (May 14-15), Dallas (May 16), Denver (June 25-26) and Mexico City (Nov. 11-15).
Editor’s Note: This story has been updated with comments from the Georgia Building Authority.
Georgia has suspended indefinitely its effort to sell the old Atlanta Farmers Market near the BeltLine in southwest Atlanta.
The state cancelled a bid opening for the farmers market that was set for Wednesday afternoon. Bids were due Oct. 26 and the market expressed no interest in the 16.4 acres with 10 buildings and a shed. The cancelled deal is a blow to hopes that redevelopment is coming anytime soon to a gritty industrial area near Murphy Triangle along the BeltLine.
This is the second time in two weeks the state has had to stall the proposed sale of high-interest parcels in Atlanta. The planned bid opening for the historic Olympia building, at Five Points, was delayed for a month or two. A spokesman with the Georgia Building Authority said Oct. 22 that more time was needed to finalize negotiations with Coca-Cola over their sign on the rooftop.
Wyc Orr, a board member of Common Cause of Georgia, is raising questions about the legality of negotiations over a new football stadium and urging for more public involvement in the planned public payments for the proposed $1 billion-plus facility.
In a piece titled, “Open roofed, closed doors,” Orr writes that if news reports are to be believed: “The negotiations, back-and-forth positions, trade-offs, terms and potential agreements have been conducted with only the barest pretense of opportunity for significant input from the public.”
Orr says taxpayers should press the issue with their state lawmakers, who likely will be asked in the 2013 legislative session to authorize a $100 million increase in the borrowing capacity of the Georgia World Congress Center. The increase is likely to be portrayed as the final straw to completing the deal to start construction, he notes.
In a request for proposals that are due Wednesday, the Atlanta BeltLine has spelled out an aggressive schedule for building a link from the newly opened Eastside Trail to the Ponce City Market project.
The winning vendor is to start work in December and the project is to be let for construction by May 2014. The bike/ped project may be ready for use when Ponce City Market throws its doors open Ponce de Leon Avenue in 2014 as a vibrant live-work-play development in a resurrected Sears, Roebuck warehouse that’s said to be the largest brick building in the South.
This hot pace for the BeltLine occurs as the board that oversees Atlanta’s largest urban renewal project seeks a president/CEO to replace Brian Leary, whom the board ousted in August. The BeltLine board has called a special meeting Tuesday morning to discuss the recruitment process for its chief executive.
Old Walt Whitman got it right. As messy as this one is likely to be, as many as have already voted before the polls open Tuesday, Election Day remains our “powerfulest scene and show,” more majestic in its way than our greatest natural wonders.
The heart of it, he thought, was not in the chosen but the choosing, and that’s a good way to look at things when you’re writing about an election this close, the day before it’s over.
First about close. Not only is the presidential election close enough for it to be conceivable the next winter storm could hit the East Coast before the winner is known, but there are some nail-biters in this comfortably red state as well.
By Maria Saporta
Published in the Atlanta Business Chronicle on Friday, November 2, 2012
Breaking the cycle of generational poverty in metro Atlanta will depend on reducing the number of teenage pregnancies and providing early education for children in need.
Those are a couple of the findings in a new Atlanta Women’s Foundation research study that was done by The Schapiro Group after a year of comprehensive analysis, interviews and voter polls.
By Guest Columnist DAVID GELLER, founder and CEO of GV Financial Advisors
It might be hard to distinguish the barks from the boo’s at the University of Georgia these days. Not many football fans or alumni ever want to hear the name Jim Donnan again.
The former football coach was fired in 2000 after a less-than-stellar four-year career with the Georgia Bulldogs. After a large payout from the school, on top of the already high salary he made, Donnan became a commentator for ESPN. Now, he faces civil and potentially criminal charges from the Securities and Exchange Commission (the other “SEC”) for allegedly participating in a Ponzi scheme.
So what happened?
It was an unusual forum to ask: “Whatever happened to leadership?”
The occasion was a gathering of more than 20 years of alumni from the Regional Leadership Institute — a one-week immersion to get up-and-coming leaders to think regionally.
The Atlanta Regional Commission started the Regional Leadership Institute back in 1991 as the brainchild of then-executive director Harry West and former Gov. George Busbee.
The Atlanta Regional Commission will use a new $150,000 grant from national donors to help four communities create programs intended to make it easier for aging residents to stay in their homes.
The money will enable ARC staffers to work with two neighborhoods in Clayton County, Morrow, Tucker, and Avondale Estates. The goal is to come up with ideas for local governments to adopt that improve infrastructure, programs and policies that support the ARC’s Lifelong Communities initiatives.
ARC has long been focused on the region’s aging population, and ARC Chairman Tad Leithead gave the subject special attention at the ARC’s State of the Region breakfast in October. Leithead included seniors in his vision for the future.
I’ve been hoping SEVEN PSYCHOPATHS would stick around for another week for one reason and one reason only.
I want to bash the hell out of it.
It has and here goes…
“Seven Psychopaths” belongs to a genre I like to think of as “Quentin said he loved the script, but he’s booked solid through 2014.”
I picture it being screened in front of a bunch of giggly slightly-coked baby moguls who saw “Pulp Fiction” when they were about 12. They are sons of privilege who wish they could be tough guys. And they can…vicariously…in jumped-up movies like this. Especially one that wraps itself around Hollywood insider jokes.
By Maria Saporta
Published in the Atlanta Business Chronicle on Friday, November 2, 2012
Georgia is still one of the most important nonprofit centers in the country, according to the 2012 Philanthropy 400 list, which shows that five of the nation’s top 20 charities are based in the state.
The Chronicle of Philanthropy has been putting together this list for 21 years — measuring the amount that each charity receives in private donations. A total of 16 of the nation’s top 400 charities are based in Georgia.
An Atlanta airport concessionaire who hosted a $1 million fundraiser for President Obama – at his $1.2 million home in Midtown – is to appear before state officials next week to defend against a federal decision that he is too wealthy for his firm to qualify as a disadvantaged business enterprise.
Mack Wilbourn owns one of the four companies, all of which have airport concessions contracts, that federal authorities have determined are ineligible for a federal preference program intended to bolster small businesses.
Federal authorities contend the companies’ DBE certification may have given them an unfair scoring advantage in the competition for city contracts to run restaurants and sell beverages at the airport. Food and drink is a lucrative business at the world’s busiest passenger airport because passengers have little to do but eat and drink between flights.
