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The companies selected by Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed’s administration to run the food and beverage concessions at the airport were made public today.
One of the proposed winners that is not now listed as a tenant at the airport is Atlanta Restaurant Partners, LLC, a local firm whose agent is listed on state incorporation papers as Daniel Halpern. Reed appointed Halpern to the Atlanta Housing Authority, where he helped engineer the planned departure of its CEO, Renee Glover.
Munson’s final bequest was the latest resurrection of the memory of Noah Harris, who epitomized the passion for the red and black, and a commitment to do what he could to make a difference.
By Maria Saporta
Friday, December 9, 2011
Because of the economic climate, the National Center for Civil and Human Rights will be built in phases rather than at one time.
The center’s board recently met and made two decisions — to go forward with the project with the money it has in hand and to have a business plan that will make the facility 100 percent self-sustaining the day it opens.
Who knew? Georgia’s freshwater turtles are commercially exploited.
Georgia’s turtles evidently are being caught and shipped to Asia, where they become food or medicine or pets. Now the state is poised to curtail the commercial trade in a product that recently was valued at $65 a pound, for dried turtle parts.
Please watch our one-minute video preview of “Moments,” our new weekly glimpse into the men and women whose own personal moments have changed metro Atlanta: http://goo.gl/uc5h0
Two former mayors, Sam Massell and Shirley Franklin, former Georgia Tech graduate student Ryan Gravel who envisioned the Beltline, radio personality Clark Howard – and many others who aren’t so famous – will share their insights into a time when everything changed in their lives. The videos will last only a minute, but we’ll place them into context with an adjoining column.
By Maria Saporta
An agreement to cancel plans for a new coal plant in Blakely, Ga. could mark the end of traditional coal plants in Georgia and even the United States.
LS Power, a New Jersey-based power company, announced Monday that it was halting a 10-year effort to build the Longleaf Energy Station in Blakely.
The decision came after a decade-long opposition campaign by the Sierra Club, Friends of the Chattahoochee and GreenLaw against building the plant.
By Maria Saporta
EarthShare of Georgia, which has been building employee-based giving campaigns for environmental organizations, recently announced that it has added three new groups to benefit from their fundraising in 2012.
The three groups are:
· the Flint Riverkeeper, which aims to restore and preserve habitat, water quality and flow of the Flint River for future generations and dependent wildlife;
The two most populous counties in Georgia — Fulton and Gwinnett — are each taking steps to fine tune their economic development strategies.
At a time when Georgia’s prosperity has been declining compared to the rest of the nation and when it has been struggling with how to redefine itself in the new economy, both Fulton and Gwinnett are responding in kind.
By Guest Columnist BRIAN GIST, a senior attorney and transportation specialist for the Southern Environmental Law Center
Since they opened this October, the public’s response to the high-occupancy toll lanes on I-85 has been pervasive, vocal and angry.
Commuters complain that the lanes are expensive for those choosing to use them and that they have worsened driving conditions for those who choose not to use them.
By David Pendered
Time is running out for Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed’s administration to present the City Council with a list of proposed winners for 152 pending food, beverage and retail contracts at Atlanta’s airport.
The recommendations must be delivered this week if the council is to mull them over the winter holiday. The council begins its annual two-week vacation at the close of business on Friday, Dec. 16.
According to Jean-Luc Godard, “The cinema is truth 24 frames per second.”
According to Martin Scorsese and his wondrous new film “Hugo,” the cinema is dreams 24 frames per second.
Not, perhaps, what you’d expect from the man famous for such down-and-dirty pictures as “Taxi Driver,” “Mean Streets” and “Goodfellas.”
But it is absolutely true of “Hugo,” Scorsese’s astonishing valentine to cinema that’s also the best Film 101 you could ever imagine (or dream of…?)
By Maria Saporta
Elected leaders in the Atlanta region are becoming increasingly concerned in the direction of a Regional Transit Governance Task Force established by Gov. Nathan Deal.
“There’s no question that the state is still struggling with wanting to control everything,” said Mike Bodker, mayor of Johns Creek, adding that “you have every right to control what you pay for.”
The Atlanta City Council and Atlanta Board of Education have agreed to meet Dec. 12 to discuss the future of the city’s public school system and its facilities.
The upcoming meeting, the second in two months, is further indication of concern among city leaders for the city’s school system as it seeks to recover from the CRCT cheating scandal and an enrollment far below the system’s capacity.
By Maria Saporta
Friday, December 2, 2011
The high-profile boutique law firm of Dillard & Galloway is dissolving as real estate attorney Doug Dillard and two other partners are joining the firm of Weissman, Nowack, Curry & Wilco.
At the same time, Dillard’s law partner for 28 years — Woody Galloway — is forming the Galloway Law Group, which
By David Pendered
The tipping point for some Riverkeepers was the death in May of 33,000 fish in the Ogeechee River, a shallow waterway that drains more than 5,500 square miles of sand hills and coastal plain into Ossabaw Sound, south of Savannah.
That incident propelled the Riverkeepers to call Tuesday on the appointed board members who oversee the Department of Natural Resources to provide the political backbone to protect the state’s rivers, creeks and wetlands. That includes securing adequate funding from the Legislature to enforce environmental rules and laws.
When I was an editor of my weekly paper in college, I was invited by Staige Blackford, the editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, to join a lively morning coffee group. You never knew what the gathered professors or writers were going to discuss each morning, but you knew the conversation was going to be interesting.
When SaportaReport launches our Thought Leadership pages in January, readers of this website will be able to join a lively discussion on a wide variety of subjects over the course of 2012.
Next year’s transportation sales tax referendum appears to be the only hope for addressing any of the challenges facing Georgia’s economic development.
The sales tax would raise a projected $18.6 billion over a decade if voters in each of the state’s 12 transportation districts approve the tax in July. To put that in perspective, the state’s current budget is about $16 billion and Gov. Nathan Deal has asked his agency heads for 2 percent cuts for FY 2013, in light of economic forecasts.
By Maria Saporta
It’s time for Atlanta to lead again.
That was the message that Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed delivered Monday at a Commerce Club speech. The mayor thanked the audience of mostly Commerce Club members for their support of the city, but he clearly was trying to re-energize Atlantans to believe in the city once again.
The numbers are sobering.
Georgia’s boom days are becoming a distant memory. For decades, Georgia’s growth had far outpaced the nation’s growth rate. But that changed in the past decade, and economic forecasters predict this downward trend to continue in the coming decade.
Those numbers bring us to the hard truth.
Atlantans are known for volunteering, but be careful when you help others.
You may instead end up helping change your own heart and mind. That’s what happened to a pair of volunteers who pitched in for the AIDS epidemic in the early 1990s.
The epidemic provoked an epidemic of fear, prejudice and isolation, and profound change in volunteers as well.
