GRTA is looking for a better place to store and maintain its fleet of Xpress buses.
This is a dramatic turn-about for a transit service that seemed imperiled by the failure of the 2012 transportation sales tax referendum. The future is rosier, now that Gov. Nathan Deal and the Legislature have inserted money for Xpress bus operations into the state’s continuation budget.
“We feel more confident than we had before,” said GRTA Executive Director Jannine Miller.
By Maria Saporta
Published in the Atlanta Business Chronicle on Friday, August 16, 2013
Two veteran Atlanta search consultants have been selected to handle the effort to find the next superintendent for the Atlanta Public Schools.
Sam Pettway, founder of BoardWalk Consulting LLC, and Veronica Biggins, an Atlanta-based managing director of Philadelphia’s Diversified Search, were selected unanimously by the Atlanta Board of Education at its meeting late Aug. 12.
By Guest Columnist SETH MILLICAN, director of the Georgia Transportation Alliance
As we mark a year since the 2012 primary election, community and business leaders continue to assess the results of the Transportation Investment Act.
There is often a tone of chagrin in those conversations as people try to figure out why the referendum passed in only three of 12 regions and try to redefine a vision for Georgia’s transportation future.
While Georgia is fortunate that 54 counties chose to adopt the TIA and begin investing $2 billion in their local transportation infrastructure, the truth remains that as a “hub and spokes” state, Georgia’s economic success hinges largely upon the success of metro Atlanta.
How scared is the Hollywood elite of the city outside their zillion-dollar conclaves?
Really scared. If you need proof, look no further than “Elysium,” some sci-fi hokum supposedly set in the 22nd century, but actually pretty redolent of a specific sort of Lala-Land paranoia.
That is, rampant paranoia about all those people who make their comfortable gated lives possible. All those people — the cook, the chauffeur, the gardener, the pool boy, whoever— who go away after dark. Where to? Their well-cushioned employers would rather not know.
The first couple of times I was asked to write an advance obit for Bert Lance, back at the AJC several years ago, I refused to do it. There was no way, I argued, that I could be objective about him. And I certainly can’t now that he’s gone.
I owed him tremendously. When I went back to writing after several years as an editor, covering the runup to the 1988 presidential campaign, I got on the list of people Lance kept in contact with by phone on a more or less daily basis from his office in Calhoun. We had a mutual friend in John Mashek, who over the years wrote for UPI, U.S. News and World Report, and the AJC. Mashek also introduced me to Jack Germond, the legendary political writer who died the day before Lance.
All these were pols of the old school, plugged into the fine intricacies of American politics, on a first-name basis with party chairs down to the county level from across the country, and famous for their Roladexes.
By Maria Saporta
Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed held a press briefing late Friday afternoon to announce that Mount Vernon Baptist Church would sell its property for $15.5 million instead of the $20.3 million that it has been asking.
The Georgia World Congress Center has said that the most it could offer, because of state law regarding the acquisition of property, is $6.2 million.
Mount Vernon is one of two churches that would need to be acquired for the new Atlanta Falcons stadium to be built on the site south of the Georgia Dome.
Additional federal funding for a new bridge across I-75 in north Cobb County and a stormwater project along Ponce de Leon Avenue in DeKalb County were among six transportation projects approved Thursday in a proposed amendment to the region’s long-term transportation improvement program.
Simultaneously, the Atlanta Regional Commission has started the competition among local governments for the region’s estimated $29 million a year in federal funding for projects that reduce traffic congestion and improve air quality. The filing deadline is Sept. 27 for this new round of federal funding.
Collectively, the projects represent the type of recalibration that is surfacing a year after metro Atlanta voters rejected the 2012 transportation sales tax and its $8.5 billion in planned mobility improvements. In a sense, this approach shares similarities with “framework for transportation progress” outlined by the Georgia chapter of the Sierra Club.
By Maria Saporta
Georgia and Atlanta leaders welcomed what they hope will be their next Fortune 500 company headquarters to Atlanta Thursday morning.
Gov. Nathan Deal and Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed welcomed Richard Dugas Jr., the chairman, president and CEO of PulteGroup, to Atlanta at the location of its new headquarters a year from now.
PulteGroup is moving its corporate headquarters from Bloomfield Hills, Mi. in the Detroit area to the Capital City Plaza building right next to the MARTA Buckhead station.
The PulteGroup’s ranking in the 2013 Fortune 1000 list? No. 501. Oh so close.
By Maria Saporta
Published in the Atlanta Business Chronicle on Friday, August 9, 2013
Park Pride, the nonprofit advocacy organization that seeks to expand and improve green space in Atlanta, has named a new executive director — Michael Halicki.
Halicki has served as chief operating officer of the Southface Energy Institute for nearly three years and has been involved in the Atlanta environmental community for more than 15 years.
By Maria Saporta
Even Bill Shipp was amazed by the folks who showed up for his 80th birthday party at Vinings Bank on Tuesday.
There were former governors — Carl Sanders, Zell Miller, Joe Frank Harris and Roy Barnes. There was former U.S. Sen. Max Cleland, and current Georgia Attorney General Sam Olens.
There were university presidents — Dan Papp of Kennesaw State, and former presidents — Betty Siegel, also of Kennesaw. There was former UGA football coach Vince Dooley. DeKalb Schools chief Michael Thurmond. There were bank CEOs — Kessel Stelling of Synovus as well as executives from Vinings Bank.
By Maria Saporta
Mount Vernon Baptist Church received the support of two Atlanta mayors Tuesday night as it weighs its option on whether to make way for a new Falcons stadium.
Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed and former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young met with Rev. Rodney K. Turner and members of his congregation to talk about the status of negotiations with the Georgia World Congress Center Authority.
“We are all committed to continuing the ministry of this church in this community,” Young said after the meeting. “The mayor (Reed) made a commitment to work with them to continue their ministry at an improved site and circumstances.”
Before that “For Sale” sign goes in your front yard, take a good look around your home and make sure you will be showing it off to its best advantage.
A few weeks ago I was writing a column about how Georgia’s fastest growing counties are no longer in the Atlanta Metro area, and so I emailed some questions to the go-to source on subjects like that, Doug Bachtel, the University of Georgia demographer who founded the Georgia County Guide. He answered me promptly and I put some of what he had to say in the column.
Bachtel was one of those people I’ve known and depended on for decades, but always at a distance. It was a complete surprise to learn last week that he had died of complications from multiple sclerosis. Our brief email exchange must have been among the last of many thousands of exchanges he’d had with the media during his career. On just about any subject related to broad trends in the state, he was a reliable and widely quoted source of factual data for many years.
Simply to attempt a county guide in a state with of 159 of them was an act of boldness, and over time the guide, along with the Georgia Municipal Guide and Georgia Housing Guide which he also edited, has become an invaluable source of information about the state.
Everyone who travels by vehicle through metro Atlanta has an interest in the managed toll lane system the state is to build in Cobb and Cherokee counties.
The system is likely to become the model of how drivers and the communities adjacent to the toll ways will interact with Georgia’s new method of expanding highway capacity in metro Atlanta. More than 150 miles of managed lanes are planned for metro Atlanta, according to the long-range transportation plan approved by the Atlanta Regional Commission.
A lot of little steps being taken just now are to lead to a new method of highway construction and travel in metro Atlanta. Agencies including the State Road and Tollway Authority, Georgia Department of Transportation, and their private sector partners are trying to devise a new paradigm.
It’s amazing to witness the moment when a plan is no longer just a plan but a living document that is part of a community’s lifeblood.
That’s exactly what is happening in Southeast Atlanta with the 19-acre site on Glenwood Avenue — a pivotal piece of property that is pitting a traditional retail developer’s vision of the future with the vision that hundreds, if not thousands, of Atlantans have for how we should develop along the BeltLine corridor.
In the late 1990s, citizens in Midtown Atlanta showed their power when they killed plans for a parking garage at 10th and Peachtree streets (but more on that later).
When David Geller went through a divorce from his first wife in 2004, he found himself in the middle of a difficult life transition, worried about what his clients and colleagues would think of him. So he did what he always does when he feels stuck—he began to read.
After cracking open a book about the Positive Psychology Movement, he stumbled across an interesting fact about people who hit the threshold of $75,000 of income: As they get richer beyond that point they don’t necessarily get happier. Confused by the lack of correlation between wealth and happiness, David made it his mission to bridge the gap.
“I remember feeling like I was punched in the stomach,” David recalled of when he read that fact about happiness and wealth, as seen in our accompanying HD Moments video. “That Moment was really the beginning of a process that really transformed my firm.”
By Maria Saporta
U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx has been in his job for less than 40 days, and it’s no accident that one of his first stops in his new role was a trip to Atlanta on Monday.
Foxx, the former mayor of Charlotte, N.C., was a keynote speaker at the 2013 Legislative Summit of the National Conference of State Legislatures at the Georgia World Congress Center Monday morning.
But Foxx then went to a private “roundtable” meeting at the Metro Atlanta Chamber with 33 business, civic and transportation leaders from metro Atlanta and Georgia. The meeting lasted for more than an hour.
By Maria Saporta
The decision to build a new football stadium on the north or south site is heading down parallel tracks this week.
The Georgia World Congress Center and the City of Atlanta will be meeting to talk about the situation with Mount Vernon Baptist Church, which would have to be acquired for the stadium to be built on the south site.
The state and the church, according to the latest reported offers, are $14 million apart. The state had offered Mount Vernon $6.2 million while the church was asking for $20.3 million. Mount Vernon will be holding a family meeting to discuss the situation among themselves on Aug. 13.
When it comes to my time, I fear wasting it by not knowing if and when a train/bus is coming to get me to work or general life on time.
How does one spark a new tradition? Have a former Nobel Peace Prize winning President and the daughter of a Nobel Peace Prize winning civil rights leader invite you to Sunday Supper.
Former President Jimmy Carter and Bernice King, CEO of the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, invited several dozen civic leaders to the Carter Presidential Center as a kick-off event for the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington. The actual anniversary will be Aug. 28.
The event also gave a public boost to the Sunday Supper movement — an effort being launched by Points of Light, with support from Target, to get people of diverse backgrounds to come together around the dinner table to exchange ideas.
