By Dave Williams and Maria Saporta
Friday, May 4, 2012
A nonprofit foundation, formed to raise money to support the work of Georgia’s cash-strapped natural resources agency, is showing its first results — two years after the General Assembly approved the initiative.
Three separate proposals for major apartment developments in Atlanta indicate that landowners are setting the stage for a hoped-for recovery in the housing market.
There is no indication that construction is set to begin anytime soon, or whether the units are aimed at the rental or owner market. But the very idea of expending the effort and expense of asking the city government to approve additional dense housing developments is a testament to the belief that major investors will return to back big deals in Atlanta.
The Atlanta City Council today is slated to start the formal consideration of requests that would allow for the following three developments:
By Guest Columnist MATT CASEMAN, executive director of Georgia Rural Health Association, which is based in Sandersville
These are the facts:
* If you suffer a traumatic injury in rural Georgia as opposed to a metropolitan area, you are more likely to die.
* Seven counties in Georgia do not have a family physician; 65 counties do not have a pediatrician; 67 counties do not have a general surgeon; 68 counties do not have an OB/GYN; and 115 counties do not have a neurologist.
By Maria Saporta
Friday, May 4, 2012
The downtown home of Atlanta Life Financial Group may soon be owned by Georgia State University.
Georgia State University will seek approval from the Georgia Board of Regents at its May 8 meeting to purchase both the Atlanta Life property and the building that houses The Integral Group LLC development firm for $10 million, according to Kerry Heyward, GSU’s attorney who oversees real estate transactions for the university.
By Maria Saporta
The official ribbon-cutting for the new Maynard H. Jackson Jr. International Terminal on Thursday evening spanned the generations of Atlanta leadership — with the city’s first African-American mayor as the central figure.
Jackson was literally a larger-than-life human being. As the youngest person to have ever been elected mayor of Atlanta in 1973, Jackson also represented a pivotal shift in power and influence in the city.
The Damsel in the most distress during Whit Stillman’s arch new comedy, “Damsels in Distress,” was undoubtedly me.
Precious and self-consciously hyper-verbal, “Damsels” takes place in some time-out-of-mind (read, timeless, I guess?) leafy college known as Seven Oaks (the Seven Sisters meet the Kentucky Oaks?)
By Maria Saporta
Friday, April 27, 2012
A special person was missing from four of Atlanta’s big public company annual meetings on April 23 and April 24 — Wilton Looney.
The first meeting on April 23 was at Genuine Parts — a company where Looney served as CEO from 1961 to 1990. Looney, 92, who remains as a director emeritus, is only one of four CEOs who has led the company since its founding in 1928.
By Maria Saporta
Bus or rail? I-75 or U.S. 41?
Those are just two of the questions that are being asked on how to connect Cobb County with the Arts Center MARTA Station.
A program was held Monday evening at the Woodruff Arts Center where representatives from Cobb County and the City of Atlanta talked about the proposed alternatives that exist to serve people traveling along the northwest corridor.
Atlanta is sitting on at least $68 million in cash, plus more than $200 million in borrowing capacity, in a program designed to foster development in blighted neighborhoods.
The cash and available debt evidently has accrued as a result of the bust in real estate development. With so few projects brought forward by the private market, the city’s program to help them – a program fueled by property taxes – has laid fallow. Few parks, sidewalks, roads or sewers have been created or even upgraded with the special fund during the downturn, even as its coffers swelled.
Mayor Kasim Reed’s administration intends to revise the program as part of its first effort to devise a citywide economic development plan. The city’s previous comprehensive economic development plan expired at the end of 2009 when its chief sponsor, former Mayor Shirley Franklin, left office.
The troubled concessions contracts at Atlanta’s airport caused the Atlanta City Council to convene in a special meeting Monday and conduct most of it behind closed doors.
After meeting in executive session with Mayor Kasim Reed, the city attorney, and at least one other official, the council emerged into public and voted to not intervene in the airport concessions contracts. The council had considered asking that current vendors remain in place for up to 90 days.
At issue is a letter Reed’s administration received April 26 from the Federal Aviation Authority. The FAA contends some vendors hired for the airport concessions program do not qualify as disadvantaged businesses, the category under which they were selected.
By Maria Saporta
One of the groups pushing for passage of the one-percent regional transportation sales tax — Citizens for Transportation Mobility — has “registered disappointment and dismay” with the Sierra Club’s Georgia Chapter decision to oppose the tax.
“We find it highly unusual that an organization charged with preserving and protecting our environment would oppose a transportation investment that has the potential to do exactly that,” Che Watkins, campaign manager for CTM, said in a statement. “The regional transportation referendum holds more promise of relieving congestion and reducing air pollution than any plan in decades.”
Advice from afar — show MARTA some love.
When the 2012 LINK delegation of metro Atlanta leaders recently visited the communities of Baltimore, Washington, D.C. and Arlington, Va., the group was repeatedly told that it needed to invest more in public transit — especially its signature system of MARTA.
“You have not embraced MARTA,” Chris Leinberger, a developer who is a senior policy advisor for the Brookings Institution and is quite familiar with the Atlanta market. “Your companies have not embraced MARTA.”
Bo Jackson was driving urgently down New Providence Road in Alpharetta on the foggy, rainy election night of November 7, 2006, hoping and praying his – and any parent’s – worst nightmare was not about to unfold before his eyes.
Bo’s Moment wasn’t when his son Parker died; it occurred months afterwards. “I was forced with a decision and a choice,” he says in our accompanying Moments video, filmed at Parker’s grave. “How was I gonna react to this tragedy? Was I gonna to let it bury me or was I going to rise above it?”
The most protracted presidential campaign departure I can recall before the present example was Wesley Clark’s in 2004, and that was only because the general got cold feet halfway down an elevator in Memphis heading toward his withdrawal speech after the Tennessee Democratic Primary. As a result he made the press corps take an extra bus ride to Little Rock the next day before he faced the inevitable.
That was nothing compared to Newt, of course. In what he may well consider to be a template for how future unsuccessful candidates should structure their goodbyes, Gingrich let it be known a week in advance that he’d be officially leaving the campaign on Tuesday, and then – you’ve got to love this guy – postponed the announcement until Wednesday.
By Maria Saporta
The Georgia Chapter of the Sierra Club, after being on the fence for months, is announcing its opposition to the July 31 vote for a regional transportation sales tax (also called the T-SPLOST).
Colleen Kiernan, director of the Sierra Club’s Georgia Chapter, said in a release that the $6.14 billion list of projects would primarily generate more sprawl rather than encourage more sustainable development patterns in metro Atlanta.
The disco era took a lot of secrets with it, because no cell phones or pocket cameras were around to record the evidence of today. Today, Atlanta’s most infamous disco is back after 25 years – resurrected through a bright mural in Buckhead and a new book of 1980s photos that weren’t too risqué to publish.
Documented in “Limelight … in a sixtieth of a second,” are the nearly naked patrons of the club’s “Bare as You Dare Night… the skimpy loincloths of Jungle Night … the live female mannequins stretched out on a buffet table, covered with whipped cream.
“Indulgence. Excessive. Flamboyant,” said mural artist Dax, when asked to describe the disco era through his palette of neon colors.
“It was a very artistic, creative time,” club photographer Guy D’Alema said. “It’s interesting that art is now paying tribute back to the club. It’s come full circle.”
By Guest Columnist JOHN O’CALLAGHAN, president and CEO of Atlanta Neighborhood Development Partnership Inc.
Metro Atlanta is reeling from five years of record foreclosure filings. Home sales have fallen to 1996 levels – the biggest decline in the country. Once-strong communities are riddled by blight associated with the pile-up of vacant homes.
Since 2006, metro Atlanta (10-county) has experienced nearly 530,000 foreclosure filings, has seen a 37 percent drop in home prices, and has lost 51,600 jobs in construction.
A gold medal won in the 1996 Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta has helped raise a reported $1 million for disaffected children in Ukraine.
The medal was sold by a Ukranian boxer in late March as part of his effort to raise money for a program he sponsors for children. The medal was immediately returned to Wladimir Klitschko, Ukraine’s world heavyweight champion, by a buyer who was not identified, according to a number of published reports.
This story about Atlanta’s link to the Olympics legacy is one of several that are beginning to gain attention as the world prepares for the 2012 Summer Olympic Games in London, which are to begin July 27 and end Aug. 12.
By Maria Saporta
Friday, April 27, 2012
Washington, D.C. — Metro Atlanta leaders witnessed firsthand how a city has stimulated its economy by investing in transit, sidewalks, bicycle facilities and smart growth development patterns.
By Maria Saporta
It was another big day for Dr. William Foege — one of Atlanta’s best kept secrets.
On Thursday, Foege was named by President Barack Obama as one of the 13 recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.
On the same day, Foege participated in the dedication of the building expansion of the Decatur-based Task Force for Global Health, an organization he co-founded in 1984 and served as its CEO.
