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Posted inATL Business Chronicle, Maria's Metro

Column: Wells Fargo commits $2 million to Woodruff for teen arts

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By Maria Saporta
Published in the Atlanta Business Chronicle on Friday, April 12, 2013

In one of the more novel gifts that the Woodruff Arts Center has ever received, Wells Fargo is committing $2 million over the next five years to create a teen outreach initiative that will cross all four of the center’s divisions.

The first annual Wells Fargo ArtsVibe Teen Program — which will involve a two-day “teen takeover” of the Woodruff Center campus on April 26 and 27, will involve an American Idol-like competition for best Atlanta talent on Friday night as well as live music, dancing, workshops and other entertainment on Saturday.

Posted inLatest News

Delta Air Lines’ gravity pulled MLT Vacations headquarters to Atlanta

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By Maria Saporta

More than a year ago, Delta Air Lines CEO Richard Anderson believed that having MLT Vacations under its own roof rather than in Minnesota made great business sense.

So on Wednesday afternoon, Anderson and Gov. Nathan Deal cut the ribbon on MLT Vacations new headquarters on the campus of Atlanta-based Delta Air Lines. The move has meant 100 new jobs in Atlanta so far with the promise of more to come, according to John Caldwell, president of MLT Vacations, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Delta Air Lines.

“I was very involved,” Anderson said. “We took the decision that they were going to move here.

Posted inDavid Pendered

As feds probe possible fraud in Atlanta’s workforce agency, Invest Atlanta steps into void

by David Pendered

Invest Atlanta, the city’s development arm, plans to hire a consultant next month to sharpen Atlanta’s workforce development strategy.

The project is moving forward as the federal Department of Labor weighs evidence of possible fraud in the federally funded Atlanta Workforce Development Agency. The agency’s budget approaches $10 million a year.

Invest Atlanta distributed a request for proposals regarding the workforce strategy on March 4, according to a schedule contained in the RFP. That was a month after the Feb. 4 release of a city audit that revealed the evidence of possible fraud and recommended Atlanta’s workforce agency be discontinued.

Posted inSaba Long

Peach Pundit helping Republicans find a pragmatic voice in local politics

by Saba Long

Atlanta politicos sometimes forget Republicans live, work and play in the city and also vote in municipal elections.

During the 2009 City Council elections, Peach Pundit, a right-leaning political blog I had been following for a while, had a “meet and greet” in Midtown, and only one candidate attended. That candidate ended up making a solid impression on the group of Republicans present, including Charlie Harper, the blog’s editor.

In a sea of partisan pandering, Harper is often a lone voice of reason — ready to call either side out on their respective shenanigans. Recently, he’s admonished Better Georgia, a progressive organization, for calling on Gov. Nathan Deal to publicly support Wilcox County’s first integrated prom.

Posted inMichelle Hiskey, Michelle Hiskey & Ben Smith

In pollen season, Kirkwood’s old-school carwash hums

by Michelle Hiskey

Monday marked nine straight days in Atlanta of extremely high (over 1500) pollen counts. You can’t avoid the blanket of yellow green dust covering the city.

For Stuart Brady, the plague of pollen on our cars is almost a biblical call to atone through what his business serves: lots of water and your own elbow grease. At his Kirkwood Car Wash, three words preach from the shingled roof: “Honor Thy Auto.”

These days, the ka-ching of tokens in the self-serve machines is the reason Brady calls pollen “gold dust.” It also gives him hope that his slice of Americana might survive the relentless redevelopment that Atlanta is known for.

Posted inDavid Pendered

Falcons stadium: An uphill fight to right a community beset by wrongs

by David Pendered

“I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

That sentence, popularized by President Reagan, could well sum up the first challenge facing the effort to improve the quality of life in neighborhoods around the future Falcons stadium.

From the 2006 shooting death of Kathryn Johnston by Atlanta police during a botched drug raid, to the cheating scandal that touched Bethune Elementary School, to recurrent flooding problems – the neighborhoods of English Avenue and Vine City have seen plenty of efforts to help them either go no where or go awry.

Neighborhood residents have their own share of problems, as well.

Posted inMoments, Moments Season 2

Cancer diagnosis led Atlanta INtown owner Wendy Binns, husband to adopt son from the Congo

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In September of 2011 at age 36, Wendy Binns was diagnosed with invasive ductal carcinoma – breast cancer. At that Moment, the owner and publisher of Atlanta INtown newspaper joined the ranks of more than 200,000 other women – including Wendy’s mother – who are diagnosed with breast cancer every year.

Wendy had seen the toll the diagnosis had taken on her mother and her family and she knew the difficulty of undergoing treatments. But she also knew had her mother not been diagnosed, Wendy might not have been as vigilant and discovered her own diagnosis so early. The mother and daughter saw that as a gift.

“The most excruciating part of getting the diagnosis was having to pick up the phone and call her and tell her that her baby girl was diagnosed with breast cancer too,” Wendy told us in our accompanying Moments HD video.

Posted inTom Baxter

For simple and fair, state income tax tops the alternatives

Avatar photo by Tom Baxter

Taxes should be simple and fair. You hear that mantra a lot these days, and it has a special power around this time of year. The more I meditate on it, the more my mind is drawn toward the raging irony that the simplest and fairest tax my household pays, the state income tax, is the very one which some seem hell-bent on getting rid of.

Start with simple. Like thousands of Georgians, I use a computer tax preparation program to file our federal and state taxes every year. The federal taxes are a pain, especially since I pay self-employment tax and have to send Uncle Sam a check for estimated taxes four times a year.

But our state income taxes are literally as simple as pushing a button. It takes less than a minute for the program to compute my state tax after the drudgery of calculating the federal income tax is finished. And it’s a pleasant interlude, because this year, like last year and several years before that, we’ve had to write the federal government a check for more money while we’ve received a refund from the state.

Posted inLatest News

CNN’s Jeff Zucker reassures Atlanta will remain news network’s home

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By Maria Saporta

When the new president of CNN Jeff Zucker addressed the Atlanta Press Club on Monday, he emphasized the importance of Atlanta to the 24-hour news organization.

“I know that people know that I’m the first chief executive of CNN not based in Atlanta,” said Zucker, who lives in New York and had spent nearly his entire career with NBC. “I did not make my first luncheon with the press club of New York. Atlanta will continue to the home of CNN, and Atlanta will continue to be the backbone of CNN.”

Zucker did say that CNN does have a lot of programming based out of New York, and that is not going to change, but he went on to say that he is in Atlanta on a regular basis. And he added that we live in a virtual world.

Posted inLatest News

MARTA’s Keith Parker realigns executive team with four key moves

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By Maria Saporta

After four months as MARTA’s general manager, Keith Parker is reorganizing his executive team.

MARTA is expected to announce on Monday a realignment of its management organization and four new members of its executive team, MARTA spokesman Lyle Harris confirmed.

Gone is the position of deputy general manager. Parker decided that the transit agency would be able to streamline costs by no longer having that position. MARTA’s former deputy general manager, Dwight Ferrell, resigned just one day after Parker started his post on Dec. 10, 2012. At one time, Ferrell had been in the running for the top MARTA job.

Posted inMaria's Metro

We’ve got five years to create a thriving area around new Falcons stadium

Avatar photo by Maria Saporta

As Invest Atlanta voted for a new Atlanta Falcons stadium on April 4, board member Joseph Brown said success would be measured by “what does it look like across the street from the stadium” in 2017.

Brown, a co-fund manager for the New York-based Centerline Urban Partners Fund, was referring to whether Northside Drive and the communities of Vine City, English Avenue and Castleberry Hill would be significantly improved by having a new $1 billion stadium as a next door neighbor.

Two facts were not lost on those present.

Posted inLatest News

MARTA board member Jim Durrett runs fast to keep transit system safe

Avatar photo by Maria Saporta

By Maria Saporta

Sometimes you just have to take things in your own hands.

That the situation that Jim Durrett, a MARTA board member and executive director of the Buckhead Community Improvement District, found himself in on Saturday morning.

He was waiting for his wife and brother-in-law near the Lindbergh MARTA Station on Saturday morning reading an email on his iPhone. All of a sudden, someone grabbed the iPhone out of his hands and started running.

Durrett, a super well-fit 50-something, bolted after the young man who had stolen his iPhone. Not only did he catch the guy and retrieve his iPhone. Durrett also took a picture of the guy with the very phone that had been grabbed out of his hands.

Posted inDavid Pendered

Cousins Properties acquisitions in Texas, stock buy-back at $25 a share, show how one company fights back

by David Pendered

Cousins Properties, Inc. raised $165.1 million in a stock sale April 12 that shows how one Atlanta-based real estate firm is waging its fight back from the recession.

Cousins intends to use the money from the stock sale to further its expansion into urban markets in Texas. Cousins also plans to redeem $74.8 million of preferred stock, according to Cousins filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Cousins, a real estate investment trust, was formed in Atlanta in 1958 and more than two-thirds of its office holdings remain in Atlanta – 5.3 million square feet of the 7.6 million square feet of office space cited in its 2012 annual SEC filing. The remainder of the office space is located in Charlotte, Dallas, and Birmingham.

Posted inGuest Column

Transit agencies can partner with taxi firms to serve people with disabilities

by Teresa Johnston

By Guest Columnist JOHN KEYS, transportation consultant on mobility management

Transit systems in many areas of the country successfully build cooperative, cost-effective, partnerships to deliver service. Partnerships are used to provide quality transit service at cost savings and to maintain vehicles and facilities with workers frequently hired through community organizations served by the transit system.

In these systems, the use of partners ranging from private companies to non-profit agencies, from transit unions to volunteers and faith-based groups, enables them to deliver customer-focused, tech-based mobility management. Everyone works together to meld numerous transportation options into a system benefiting all, and frequently under leadership that embraces problem-solving rather than turf-guarding.

Posted inATL Business Chronicle, Maria's Metro

New GSU law school to be ‘showplace’ on key downtown block

Avatar photo by Maria Saporta

By Maria Saporta and Doug Sams
Published in the Atlanta Business Chronicle on Friday, April 12, 2013

Thanks to a $5 million grant from the Robert W. Woodruff Foundation, Georgia State University now has raised enough money to build a new College of Law building on a key downtown site that is currently a surface parking lot.

The $82.5 million project, to be located just off Peachtree Street just south of the Georgia-Pacific Center tower, will position Georgia State’s professional schools next to downtown’s core business district. Eventually, the J. Mack Robinson College of Business also is planned to go on the same block.

“It really puts the law school in a showplace building at a showplace location,” said Mark Becker, president of Georgia State University.

Posted inLatest News

Georgia Tech’s architecture college honors past as it picks new dean

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By Maria Saporta

As Georgia Tech’s College of Architecture prepares to enter a new era, it is taking time to remember its past.

Any day now, the College of Architecture will be naming its new dean from three finalists — two outside candidates and one internal one.

Although Georgia Tech has had an architectural program for more than 100 years, the College has only been in existence since 1976 and has only had three deans during that tenure — William Fash (1976 to 1992), Thomas Galloway (1992 to 2007) and Alan Balfour (2008 to present). Douglas Allen served as an interim dean from 2007 to 2008 following Galloway’s sudden death.

Posted inDavid Pendered

Juanita Jones Abernathy, John S. Wilson to be honored with formal reception by Atlanta City Council

by David Pendered

The Atlanta City Council will honor a civil rights leader of the past and an academician for the future at an April 15 reception at Atlanta City Hall.

Juanita Jones Abernathy marched with Martin Luther King Jr. and has continued her work in the human rights and corporate arenas. John S. Wilson is the 11th president of Morehouse College, King’s alma mater, taking the helm in a transitional era for the country’s institutions of higher learning.

The reception is slated from noon to 1 p.m., in advance of a council meeting at which the council is expected to catch its breath after its March 18 approval of public financing for the Falcons Stadium.

Posted inEleanor Ringel Cater

Remembering Roger Ebert: a populist movie critic who truly loved movies

Avatar photo by Eleanor Ringel Cater

I’ve only met a few people who loved movies as much as Roger Ebert did.

I’ve known fewer still who played a bad hand so well and so bravely. The cancer that finally got him was an exceptionally cruel disease — disabling and, as many of us saw in his final years, as disfiguring as anything dreamt up by any horror-movie-master.

Funny how upstarts become institutions. When Ebert and his Chicago Tribune rival, Gene Siskel, first started their Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down routine — first locally, then nationally — I know a lot of movie critics who wearily moaned, has it come to this? Two Thumbs UP???!!!! Or One Thumb Down

Posted inDavid Pendered

Metro Atlanta roads: How to make do with a transportation system that’s (mostly) already on the ground

by David Pendered

State and regional transportation planners are taking the steps they think are within reach in order to relieve traffic congestion in metro Atlanta. GRTA’s board took its first step Wednesday.

The solution won’t be a magic bullet, no more so than if voters in 2012 had approved the construction program envisioned for the proposed 1 percent transportation sales tax. Transit was not part of Wednesday’s conversation.

Gov. Nathan Deal’s touch is evident in the new approach. Deal said after the sales tax referendum that the state would focus on affordable transportation solutions, or, in the words of the resolution approved by GRTA’s board: Georgia will, “improve the movement of people and goods across and within the state [in order to] expand Georgia’s role as a major logistic hub for global commerce.”

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