By Maria Saporta
The theme of the Galloway School’s Speaker Series was supposed to be fearlessness.
So who better to ask that Ted Turner, Captain Courageous.
But when Turner was asked whether he was fearless, he quickly answered: “I was scared all the time. Fearlessness doesn’t make sense. You should have some fear.”
Later in the question and answer period, Turner came up with another line: “I was afraid of losing so much that I worked so hard that I won.”
Then Turner said one shouldn’t confuse
By Maria Saporta
Friday, October 1, 2010
As the dean of Atlanta’s environmentally conscientious business leaders, Ray Anderson has been a “pioneer, someone who defines tomorrow, someone who has vision.”
That’s how former Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin introduced Anderson, the recipient of the Upper Chattahoochee Riverkeeper’s 2010 River Guardian Award, at its annual Patron Appreciation Dinner on Sept. 24 at the Georgia Aquarium.
Anderson, chairman and former CEO of Interface
By Maria Saporta
Both top candidates for governor strongly support spending lottery dollars on Pre-K education programs, and they believe it’s at least as important as the popular HOPE scholarship.
The candidates addressed the “Early Education Summit” held Tuesday at Georgia Public Broadcasting.
The Pre-K program and the HOPE merit-based college scholarship were implemented after former Gov. Zell Miller was able to pass the Georgia Lottery with education as its beneficiary.
“Zell Miller said it correctly,” said former Gov. Roy Barnes, the Democratic candidate for governor. “Pre-K is more
Is it a park? Is it a drainage basin?
Amazingly it’s both.
This Historic Fourth Ward Park is taking shape south of North Avenue just west of the Beltline — one of the most incredible green projects in Atlanta’s history.
Here is a beacon of hope — we can invest infrastructure dollars — in this case water and sewer funds — into parks with water features for the public to enjoy.
If only we had had this wisdom 10 years and $4 billion ago when the city was under the gun to improve its century-old combined water and sewer system.
Environmentalists at the time — led by activist Bill Eisenhauer — urged the city to explore green solutions to meet the requirements of the federal consent decree.
The city dismissed that approach, saying it would take too long
By Maria Saporta
Friday, October 1, 2010
For dozens of nonprofit and civic organizations in metro Atlanta, AirTran Airways Inc. has been a godsend.
But there’s great community concern about whether that will continue once AirTran is acquired by Dallas-based Southwest Airlines.
Although AirTran is headquartered in Orlando, Fla., the discount carrier has treated Atlanta as a hometown. Its largest hub is here. Its largest base of employees is here. And five of its key officers call Atlanta home.
By Guest Columnist VALARIE WILSON, executive director of the Atlanta BeltLine Partnership
With so many critical needs – education, health, jobs and more – why would we as community leaders and engaged citizens focus now on parks, trails and transit? While they are nice amenities, shouldn’t we concentrate on serious problems during these challenging times?
Obesity is deadly serious – now the second leading preventable cause of death in the United States. And hypertension is the leading preventable cause of death in the world. So it is heartening that the conversation around complex and often overwhelming healthcare policy topics is shifting to focus increasingly on
By Maria Saporta
Friday, October 1, 2010
A decade ago, Joe Leonard approached Herb Kelleher to see if he might be interested in a merger of both their airlines.
At the time, Leonard was CEO of AirTran Airways Inc., and Kelleher, the founder of Southwest Airlines, was CEO of the Dallas-based airline.
In all, Leonard talked to Kelleher four times about doing
By Maria Saporta
The City of Atlanta is moving forward with plans to sell City Hall East to Jamestown Properties.
Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed broke the news at a community “town hall” meeting Thursday evening at the Inman Middle School.
“We signed a letter of intent with Jamestown this afternoon for City Hall East,” Reed told those attending the Alliance for Intown Neighbors at the tail end of the session.
The letter of intent calls for Jamestown Properties to pay the city $15.5 million for the property. The agreement will go before the Atlanta City Council for
By Maria Saporta
Friday, September 24, 2010
It was the 20th year reunion of believers. Every member of the “Atlanta Nine” was present. These were the nine Atlantans who believed that a Southern city could win the top prize in international sports — the 1996 Summer Olympic Games.
The believers met Sunday evening, Sept. 19, at STATS sports bar — itself part of Atlanta’s Olympic legacy.
By Maria Saporta
Talk about a great first day on the job.
Louis Miller started his new job as general manager of Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport Monday morning.
And almost at the exact same time, the news came out that Southwest Airlines had entered into “a definitive merger agreement” to buy AirTran Airways.
For years and years and years, those who favored increased competition at Hartsfield-Jackson have been hoping to figure out how to lure Southwest to Atlanta.
But hometown Delta Air Lines
By Maria Saporta
The Civic League for Regional Atlanta managed to get 600 citizens from all over the metro area to spend most of Saturday working on building communities.
It was the Second Annual Neighborhood Summit, which attracted a hundred more folks than last year’s Neighborhood Summit.
After just two summits, it has become one of the signature regional events of the year by capturing the involvement of mostly ordinary citizens dedicated to improving their individual communities.
Atlanta has never quite figured out how
By Guest Columnist KEVIN GREEN, executive director of the Clean Air Campaign
Since breathing is one of the great pleasures in life, we thought we would take a minute to assess how this year’s smog season has gone, how it compares to years prior and where we may be heading.
To start with the obvious, this summer has been HOT – one of the warmest Georgia summers on record. And the heat affects more than just our thermostats. Ground-level ozone is formed when pollutants mix with heat and sunlight, which is why we have a “smog season” in Georgia, the five-month period from May 1- Sept 30. As cooler temperatures and shorter days move onto the horizon, so too does the end of when we are most likely to see days of increased air pollution.
For as long as I can remember, there has been the 45 Virginia-McLynn — until Sunday.
MARTA, faced with operating deficits, implemented a host of service cuts this weekend — further streamlining our already meager public transit system.
And this time, the cuts really hit home. No more 45 Virginia-McLynn.
The 45 bus line initially followed what had been the No. 15 streetcar line — one of dozens of streetcar lines that had made Atlanta a hub of rail and transit.
That streetcar line, and later the 45, started downtown and went north along West Peachtree Street until Fifth Street where it meandered the heart of Midtown going along Argonne Avenue, 8th Street and on towards Virginia-Highland.
Back in the late 1960s, I started riding the 45 to get to Grady
By Maria Saporta
In her 11 months working on the restructuring of AIG, Paula Rosput Reynolds said she learned a great deal about what makes a company not a great place to work.
Reynolds was the keynote speaker Friday morning at the Atlanta Business Chronicle’s “Best Places to Work” breakfast at the Loews hotel in Midtown.
“People were highly siloed,” Reynolds said of her time at AIG, which began in October, 2008. “There was no transparency between the silos let alone transparency to the world. There was an
By Maria Saporta
Friday, September 17, 2010
The 2010 campaign goal for Metro Atlanta’s United Way has been set — $80.2 million.
The campaign goal will be announced officially at United Way’s campaign kickoff on Sept. 22. But 2010 Campaign Chairman John Somerhalder, CEO of AGL Resources Inc., gave a recent interview with Atlanta Business Chronicle explaining his rationale behind
By Maria Saporta
One of Atlanta’s newest Fortune 500 CEOs spent more than hour with Georgia Tech students Wednesday afternoon in a wide-ranging talk about his views towards business and life.
Bill Nuti, CEO of NCR Corp., attributed much of his success to hard work, mixed in with a bit of luck.
“I grew up in the Bronx, in the projects. I lived in a one bedroom tenement with a very hard-working mom and dad,” Nuti said. “I was the minority.”
Nuti also said he was an over-achiever who
By Maria Saporta and Ben Smith
Friday, September 17, 2010
As the new general manager of the world’s busiest airport, Louis Miller will earn less than many of his counterparts in the industry, including his predecessor — much less.
Miller’s $221,000 salary for managing day-to-day operations at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport will be $32,000 less than his former salary at Tampa International Airport. Tampa, the nation’s 27th-largest airport and the 80th-largest in the world, handles as much passenger traffic as just one of Hartsfield-Jackson’s concourses. Miller’s
When the Livable Communities Coalition was formed five years ago, metro Atlanta couldn’t contain all its growth.
The coalition was an offshoot of the Quality Growth Task Force that had been formed a year earlier by the Metro Atlanta Chamber to help figure out how the region could accommodate as many as 2 million more people by 2030 and manage all the development that the population growth would bring.
The coalition represented the coming together of about 50 member organizations all focused on growth and development issues in the Atlanta region. The goal was to help the Atlanta region grow in a sensible, sustainable way.
Among the many ideas promoted by the coalition included preservation of green space, increased density around town
By Guest Columnist FRANK MANN, senior director at Cushman & Wakefield of Georgia.
I consider myself very fortunate to have traveled a great deal throughout my adult life both for pleasure and for business. I am continually impressed and even amazed that major cities all over the world have made such strong commitments to the display of public (and in many cases private) art.
This becomes evident regardless of the city one travels to including older cities in the United States, like Chicago and New York, where many wonderful paintings and sculptures adorn their streetscapes, building lobbies and outdoor plazas and fountains. Most often parks
By Maria Saporta and Dave Williams
Friday, September 17, 2010
The next president of the Georgia Chamber of Commerce will be Chris Clark, a “public servant” who has been commissioner of the state Department of Natural Resources since November 2008.
As of Nov. 1, Clark will succeed George Israel, a former mayor of Macon who has been the business organization’s chief for the past seven years. Israel will stay on as president through the end of October.
