By Maria Saporta
Published in the Atlanta Business Chronicle on Friday, April 26, 2013
Leadership changes at the Atlanta office of law firm Greenberg Traurig LLP will position Ernest Greer into an influential global role without him leaving town.
Greer has been promoted to vice president and is now among eight officers of the Miami-based firm with 1,750 lawyers in 36 offices. Six of those offices are overseas.
Atlanta is known as a center of global health activity. We are anchored in a state with a strong agricultural base, as well.
What do these two things have in common?
Transportation for America, a Washington, D.C.-based organization pushing for 21st century transportation infrastructure improvements across the country, recently announced nineteen states have put forth plans — some have already failed to pass — to raise revenue for transportation projects.
Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley successfully lobbied the state’s General Assembly to pass a 20- cent increase to the gas tax phased in through year 2016. In the future, the gas tax will be indexed for inflation. Dubbed the Maryland Transportation Infrastructure Investment Act, the legislation will also impose a 3 percent sales tax on gasoline purchases. The two revenue models are expected to raise $4.4 billion over six years.
Georgia’s efforts to quench metro Atlanta’s thirst include a $1 billion proposal to pump water from one aquifer to another and then release it into the Flint River in times of drought.
On Tuesday, the board of Department of Natural Resources is to consider a request for permission to drill an experimental well near Albany to see if the plan is feasible. A committee of the board approved the proposal Monday.
Advocates contend the practice would preserve the amount of water retained in Lake Lanier, while increasing the flow in the Flint River and the river it helps form – the Apalachicola River. Critics disagree, including the Flint Riverkeeper and Georgia Rivers.
As a personal and catastrophic injury attorney, Andy Cash had grown accustomed to hearing sudden, life-changing events from his clients. His law firm represents individuals and families who have experienced devastating injuries in accidents. Despite his well-developed professional empathy, the news he learned in July 2004 about his own three-year old son, Gavin, was very difficult to bear.
Then, in October 2011, at age eight, Andy’s youngest son, Liam, was diagnosed with T1D – just as his brother had been seven years before. The news was once again shocking and life-altering for the entire family.
By the time Howard had gone into a nursing home and his son and daughter-in-law had returned from the West Coast to take care of his affairs, the mail bulged from the mailbox every day, often overflowing in stacks 10 inches thick.
For a man of his limited means, Howard always gave generously to political and religious causes, but in the last year or so before he became unable to care for himself, the amounts of the checks he wrote began to increase. Correspondingly, so did the volume of mail, until his home became the postal equivalent of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice.
The family discovered that in that last year he wrote some 5,000 checks, for a total of about $70,000. His son estimates the total for all his sunset years to be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
By Maria Saporta
The firm of 360 Architecture moved one step closer to designing the new stadium for the Atlanta Falcons.
The Georgia World Congress Center Authority’s Stadium Development Committee unanimously voted Monday afternoon to recommend 360 to the full board when it meets Tuesday afternoon. At that time, the board will be given a full set of the negotiated terms of the agreement that GWCCA has reached with 360.
Before the vote, William Johnson, senior principal with 360 Architecture, made a presentation to the committee where he unveiled a couple of different concepts of how the retractable roof on the new stadium could work.
Atlanta’s potential as a fountain for global health and development has bubbled up again with advancements in clean water and sanitation.
Whether it be from the academic and civic sectors or whether it be from the corporate and entrepreneurial sectors, innovative solutions are being explored and implemented by Atlanta-based institutions and leaders.
Take the Coca-Cola Co’s 2013 Annual Meeting held on April 23 at the Cobb Galleria.
Coca-Cola Chairman and CEO Muhtar Kent spent a good portion of the annual meeting introducing a new partnership between the company and inventor Dean Kamen to establish EkoCenters that can provide 1,000 liters of sterile drinking water in impoverished communities.
By Maria Saporta
Atlanta-based MAP International is providing medical relief for Syrian refugees displaced by its Civil War.
MAP International, a global health organization is working in concert with Integral Alliance of Christian relief agencies, which is based in England. More than 1.4 million refugees have fled Syria, seeking safety in camps along the border in Lebanon and Jordan.
MAP is providing emergency health kits filled with enough medicines to treat 10,000 people for three months. Reports indicate that refugees are suffering from illnesses due to the cramped conditions within the camps. Refugees are also beginning to suffer from malnutrition and are afflicted with trauma resulting from war injuries, according to a MAP International press release.
Fritz the rescue dog got shooed from last week’s DeKalb County Board of Commissioners meeting, marking yet another bad day for homeless animals in DeKalb and the humans who are rabid for an $8 million new county shelter.
Fritz was rescued by a group that helps find homes for animals from the existing shelter near I-285 and Memorial Drive. A citizens task force in early 2012 called the facility a filthy, smelly, bug- and rat-infested, understaffed “chamber of horrors.” Out of every ten animals that go there, seven die. It has the highest “kill rate” of any animal shelter in metro Atlanta, the task force reported.
“Animals are suffering and dying in a horrible, horrible condition in our shelter,” said activist Heidi Pollyea to the board. “If you have a minute to go down there I think you’d say, ‘Let’s get busy. Let’s get this approved.” We have the opportunity today to make a difference. Please do not delay. This cannot wait.”
By Maria Saporta
Atlantans celebrated the 65th anniversary of Israel’s Independence Day Sunday evening at the Temple — braving a steady rain to mark the significant date in history.
The event was organized by Israeli Consul General Opher Aviran, who welcomed Georgia Attorney General Sam Olens and Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed as honorary guests. Peter Berg, senior rabbi of the Temple, gave his introductory welcome. But it was Aviran’s event.
“In 1948, we were only 800,000 people,” Aviran told the crowd of more than 200 people who attended the reception celebrating Israel’s Independence Day. “Now we are 8 million.”
By Amy Wenk and Maria Saporta
Published in the Atlanta Business Chronicle on Friday, April 26, 2013
Conversation is kicking around again about scoring a Major League Soccer team for Atlanta.
Atlanta Falcons owner Arthur Blank has long wanted to bring an MLS franchise to the city.
Now, he’s got another chance.
By Guest Columnist KEVIN KUNTZ, president of the Southeast Division of McCarthy Building Companies, Inc.
I write today as a conservative and registered Republican, a descendant of German immigrants to America, and a 30-year veteran of the construction industry. I started on the jobsite and worked my way to a senior management role with one of the country’s oldest and largest general contractors. These threads all tie together.
When the economy collapsed in 2007 and 2008, the construction industry was hit much harder than most. For the past several years, our unemployment rate has been double the national average, hovering at times near 25 percent. The January 2013 employment data showed an increase in construction jobs across the United States, but even now the industry remains two million jobs below its April 2006 peak.
Now that Atlanta has approved public funding for the Falcons stadium, the Georgia World Congress Center is hiring a new lobbyist at a salary that could exceed $100,000 a year.
The GWCC was sidelined during the final financial negotiations for public funding for the $1 billion stadium. Gov. Nathan Deal decided against asking the Legislature to get involved in the tax issue and asked Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed to broker a deal with the Falcons.
Frank Poe, the GWCC’s executive director, told ESPN.com on the day the preliminary deal was announced, March 7, that he was not aware of the financial agreement until, “the last 24 hours.”
Drought conditions have eased in Georgia and Lake Lanier is just 0.4 foot short of full pool, according to the National Drought Mitigation Center and a monitor at the lake.
The improvements are likely a function of rainfall amounts that, at least in the Atlanta area, have exceeded the 30-year-average during the first three months of the year. Average rainfall totals are nearly 13.7 inches and this year’s total is nearly 17 inches, excluding April, according to the National Weather Service.
But don’t tell that to a couple in Rome, who blame the lingering drought for the loss of some 2,000 azaleas on their property. The couple once had about 5,000 azaleas, according to a report on the drought center’s website.
The combined insight of two new reports sheds an interesting perspective on the housing market in metro Atlanta. The question remains: Who’s buying?
The most recent Beige Book from the Federal Reserve described home sales as “strong” in the Atlanta district, which covers portions of the Deep South.
In a report specific to metro Atlanta, Bloomberg news reported Thursday that the Blackstone Group has purchased 1,400 homes in the Atlanta area. The transaction is described as the largest bulk sale in the homes-to-lease industry – a business built on folks who don’t want to buy a home or can’t.
Terrence Malick’s “To the Wonder” is about a girl who lost her twirl.
Malick, of course, is the famously infertile filmmaker who once went two decades between movies. After blazing a name for himself with a pair of brilliant efforts in the 1970s, “Badlands” and “Days of Heaven,” Malick went all J.D. Salinger on us. Reclusive. Elusive. Legendary.
Finally, in 1998, he completed the fairly oblique albeit star-laden “The Thin Red Line,” a World War II tale that misused everybody from Sean Penn to George Clooney.
But it was pure genius compared to Malick’s follow-ups: “The New World,” an epic-sized bit of nonsense about Pocahontas, and the interminable — and interminably ludicrous — “The Tree of Life,” which co-starred Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain and some dinosaurs.
By Maria Saporta
When Keith Parker, MARTA ‘s general manager, came on board in December, the prospects for the transit system were dire.
The MARTA board had adopted a five-year budget plan that called for no salary increases for employees — continuing a practice that has been in place for five years. It called for a 25-cent fare increase in fiscal year 2014 (which begins in July) increasing MARTA’s base fare to $2.75 — among the highest transit fare in the country. It projected reserves declining from $109.7 million in fiscal year 2013 to $1.5 million at the end of fiscal year 2018. And it still expected that it would face an unsustainable healthcare business model.
On Thursday morning, however, Parker and his staff presented an alternate five-year plan to the MARTA board’s Business Management Committee — one that has a much brighter outcome for the transit system.
By Maria Saporta
Published in the Atlanta Business Chronicle on Friday, April 19, 2013
California-based DPR Construction firm is the new owner of Hardin Construction, an Atlanta-based builder that was founded in 1946. The previously announced deal closed on April 15.
From now on, the combined company will be named DPR except in the Atlanta market (Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee) where it will be branded as DPR Hardin Construction.
By Maria Saporta
After conducting a national search for a new dean, Georgia Tech’s College of Architecture ended up picking the internal choice.
Steven P. French, associate dean for research and professor of city and regional planning, will become dean of Georgia Tech’s College of Architecture on July 1.
He will succeed Dean Alan Balfour, who announced last August that he intended to step down in June and rejoin the architecture faculty.
