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Posted inEleanor Ringel Cater

‘Spring Breakers;’ ‘The Gatekeepers’ — two completely different movies

Avatar photo by Eleanor Ringel Cater

There are two movies opening this weekend, and I don’t want you to get them mixed up.

One is “Spring Breakers.” The other one is “The Gatekeepers.”

The first one is a “t-and-a” comedy (not necessarily intentional) about four girls in bikinis who get busted and end up working for James Franco.

I know. It also sounds awfully close to “Beach Blanket Butts.” However, the director is Harmony Korine who, if you haven’t already heard of him, specializes in the sort of calculated smut that’s supposed to be a turn-on in a forbidden-fruit sort of way.

Posted inDavid Pendered

MARTA, developers may start projects at three stations by early fall

by David Pendered

Proposed developments at three MARTA stations are so hot that they could start in a matter of months, according to MARTA records.

The proposals involve the stations of Avondale, Chamblee and King Memorial. Each proposal has “advanced to the point of the board’s decision/action and could be put into action this summer or early fall,” records show.

MARTA can’t wait for a consultant to be hired in May to handle the proposals. Instead, MARTA seeks to hire a consultant to work on these projects over the next 60 to 90 days. Bids for the consulting position close March 25.

Posted inLatest News

Panama Canal chairman: Savannah needs to deepen its port for big ships

Avatar photo by Maria Saporta

By Maria Saporta

Georgia needs to do all it can to deepen the Savannah port if it wants to remain a competitive.

That is the message that Roberto Roy, Panama’s Minister for Canal Affairs who is chairman of the Panama Canal Authority, delivered to Gov. Nathan Deal and Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed on Thursday afternoon.

“It is a critical issue for Georgia and for Savannah,” Roy said in an interview outside the Governor’s office. “The reason is that the shipping fleet is totally changing. It is not only a matter of the ships being bigger The key is that the most important variable is the fuel costs.”

Posted inLatest News

Community leaders want new stadium to improve their neighborhoods

Avatar photo by Maria Saporta

By Maria Saporta

After the Atlanta City Council’s speedy 11-4 vote on Monday in support of the new Falcons stadium, the impacted neighborhoods had their turn on Wednesday evening.

The Northwest Community Alliance had a long-scheduled quarterly meeting to hear from Penny McPhee, president of the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation about its plans to work with the communities located around the stadium.

But the two-and-a-half hour meeting ended up being more about McPhee listening to the concerns, questions and ideas that community leaders had. And that had been McPhee’s intention all along.

Posted inDavid Pendered

ATL concessions: FAA closes inquiry, decides not to appeal GDOT’s rulings that helped four firms win contracts

by David Pendered

The FAA’s review of concessions contracts at Atlanta’s airport has ended with no plan to appeal the matter to the U.S. DOT, the FAA announced Thursday.

The decision evidently means that the $3 billion concessions contracts signed in March 2012 by Mayor Kasim Reed will stand without further governmental inquiry.

Reed’s administration did not issue a statement, but did forward the FAA announcement 13 minutes after its release by the FAA. Reed and his administration had maintained throughout the contract process and subsequent review that the city’s process was above board and without reproach.

Posted inLatest News

Atlanta region to work on metro export plan with Brookings Institution

Avatar photo by Maria Saporta

By Maria Saporta

Metro Atlanta leaders will seek to grow the region’s global business opportunities through a new initiative that was kicked off Wednesday by JP Morgan Chase and the Brookings Institution.

The Global Cities Initiative, which is part of a five-year, $10 million, multi-city effort ultimately will forge new city-to-city partnerships to create trade and economic relationships to prosper from the growing urbanization of the world’s population.

Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed said the initiative takes advantage of growing businesses through exporting and by recognizing that the “Made in USA” brand is becoming increasingly valuable in the world.

Posted inATL Business Chronicle, Maria's Metro

Column: Atlantans helping world’s poorest at Opportunity International

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By Maria Saporta

Published in the Atlanta Business Chronicle on Friday, March 15, 2013

Atlanta native Vicki Escarra, formerly the highest-ranking woman executive at Delta Air Lines Inc. as its chief marketing officer, introduced her newest cause — Opportunity International — at a reception at the Buckhead Club on March 11.

Posted inDavid Pendered

A relation between stadium deal and stalled MARTA bill? Who’s to say

by David Pendered

There may be no relation whatsoever, but the plan to build a new Falcons stadium is moving forward and the proposed legislation to restructure MARTA and privatize some of its operations appears to be fading for the 2013 session.

Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed’s administration delivered a final deal within two months after receiving a troubled proposal from Gov. Nathan Deal. Reed’s team provided the $200 million in construction financing, plus somewhere around $100 million in public/private funds to fix up the area around the future stadium.

Rep. Mike Jacobs (R-Brookhaven) indicated Tuesday that he’s done about all he can to sweeten his team’s proposal to reorganize MARTA. Jacobs has offered to eliminate the privatization provision in House Bill 264 and to resolve in MARTA’s favor all but one concern MARTA has raised. Still, the bill is stalled in the Senate.

Posted inMoments, Moments Season 2

Dennis Creech’s Moment sparked a career that helped Atlanta’s brand as a green building leader

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Dennis Creech, who today is the executive director and co-founder of Southface Energy Institute, was in graduate school training to be a systems ecologist when he had his Moment. Throughout his education in the 1970s, his focus had been aimed at improving environmental conditions, but it wasn’t until that day at Emory University that a, well, light bulb went off that pointed him in a unexpected direction.

As he was studying smog, acid rain, and even the water crisis of Atlanta, it dawned on Dennis that there was a common denominator to many of the threats to the environment’s health and sustainability – the consumption of energy.

Posted inLatest News

Atlanta City Council passes stadium deal; two approvals down, one to go

Avatar photo by Maria Saporta

By Maria Saporta and Dave Williams

Despite pleas from constituents to slow down the train, the Atlanta City Council voted Monday evening 11 to 4 to approve a funding plan for a new $1 billion football stadium in downtown Atlanta.

The City Council vote, which did not go through the normal multi-week committee process, was pushed through on a super fast track on Monday after a six-hour meeting of the whole council.

That approval followed Friday’s unanimous vote by the Georgia World Congress Center Authority that endorsed the new retractable roof stadium for the Atlanta Falcons. Only one more governmental body is needed to approve the deal — the board of Invest Atlanta.

Posted inDavid Pendered

Metro Atlanta split in half by class; wealth creators reside in northside, say new studies by Richard Florida

by David Pendered

Richard Florida’s latest research shows metro Atlanta has become a tale of two regions and likely will continue on that trajectory.

The wealth-generating creative region begins near downtown Atlanta and spreads north along Ga. 400 through Roswell, with outparcels scattered across mainly the northern suburbs. Future wealth generation seems most likely to occur in north Atlanta and close-in suburbs, in Florida’s scenarios.

Florida’s work seems to support policies such as efforts by ARC and its partners to promote community development around Atlanta’s airport and MARTA stations. Likewise with the community benefit agreements that are part of Atlanta’s requirements for supporting a new Falcons stadium.

Posted inTom Baxter

A new way of looking at what makes Georgia’s economy tick

Avatar photo by Tom Baxter

Nearly every discussion about Georgia’s economic future begins at the top, with high-tech companies like Digirad, the medical imaging firm which recently announced it’s relocating its headquarters to Atlanta, or prime industrial plums like the KIA plant in West Point.

But a provocative report by a new group, the Essential Economy Council, argues that the upper tiers of the state’s economy rest on a cluster of low-end economic sectors, not connected to each other in earlier studies, which face severe challenges in the years ahead.

Posted inLatest News

Chick-fil-A selects Carrie Kurlander as new communications vice president

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By Maria Saporta

From nukes to nuggets.

Carrie Kurlander, vice president of communications for the Southern Co. since September 2009, is joining Chick-fil-A as its vice president of public relations.

She will start her new job in mid April.

Kurlander joined the Southern Co. system in February 2003 as director of corporate communications for the Alabama Power Co. Five years later, she was named assistant to the president and CEO of the Alabama Power Co. before moving to Atlanta to work at Southern Co.’s headquarters.

Posted inColumns, Michelle Hiskey & Ben Smith

After 41 years of pizza-based memories, Everybody’s closing

by Michelle Hiskey

Forty-one years of Everybody’s Pizza will end Tuesday, March 19 when the Druid Hills restaurant closes, and scores of longtime customers have been streaming in for their final fix, circling back to a place on the North Decatur roundabout that has been a hub for family milestones, and to say goodbye.

Shelly and Paul Legato drove from Athens Saturday night to pay homage to her neighborhood restaurant growing up and the spot where he proposed in 1996. From their marriage came daughter Stefanie and granddaughter Heidi; also along for the evening was their fourth generation, Shelly’s mother, Kelly McGlaun-Fields.

Posted inATL Business Chronicle, Maria's Metro

John Wilson — Morehouse’s new president — has high ambitions

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By Maria Saporta

Published in the Atlanta Business Chronicle on Friday, March 15, 2013

John S. Wilson grew up in Philadelphia going to a church where the pastor was a “Morehouse Man” — meaning someone who had graduated from Atlanta’s Morehouse College.

“I think he preached about Morehouse as much as he preached about Jesus,” Wilson said. “I followed that path.”

Posted inMaria's Metro

Revive communities by designing new Falcons stadium on a human scale

Avatar photo by Maria Saporta

Part Two: A new football stadium and the surrounding communities

If the first time you don’t succeed, try again.

When the Georgia Dome was developed 23 years ago, setting aside $10 million for the adjacent community — including an $8 million housing trust fund — was seen as a way to address the area’s multiple problems.

But two decades later, the situation has only gotten worse. Population has declined from about 9,000 to 3,000. Nearby blocks that used to be filled with homes are now boarded up or vacant lots, some victims of flooding that could have been caused by run-offs from downtown developments including the convention center and the Georgia Dome.

Posted inGuest Column

Economic and social returns of higher education justify new approaches

by Teresa Johnston

By Guest Columnist MIKE GERBER, founder and president of Cross Channel Initiatives

If this were the game show Jeopardy, the answer would be: “two and a half times.”

The question: “How much more in state taxpayer money does Georgia spend annually to keep someone incarcerated than it does to send a student to a public four-year university?”

That’s right. In fiscal year 2011, the average taxpayer-funded cost per inmate in a state prison was $16,250. That compared to $6,300 in state funding per full-time equivalent student at a University System of Georgia institution.

Posted inDavid Pendered

Airport concessions: FAA legal review continues after quick council vote on administration’s plan in 2012

by David Pendered

A year has passed since Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed signed the $3 billion airport concessions contracts, and the FAA still has the city’s process for selecting vendors under legal review.

Reed signed the contracts March 12, 2012. The FAA notified the city in April that the FAA contends four winning firms were not eligible for preferences they received in the city’s selection process, and thus should not be considered.

The Atlanta City Council approved the contracts after Reed’s administration had pressed for a quick vote on its choice of prime vendors to operate more than 150 storefronts. The administration wanted a vote 13 days after presenting its proposal. Ten of those days fell on weekends or holidays.

Posted inDavid Pendered

Stadium deal: A briar patch with free tickets, wary partners, hardened blight

by David Pendered

The Atlanta City Council really doesn’t want to be thrown into the briar patch when it comes to its role in the deal for a new Falcons stadium.

As council members realized Thursday, they have no choice but to find a way through the thorny thicket of a deal that they inherited this year from the Georgia Legislature. Their meeting was scheduled for two hours and it lasted five and a half.

A lot of fur went flying. Such as – Why is Invest Atlanta slated to receive free tickets to events in the new stadium when other city entities are barred from accepting such items by Atlanta’s ethics rules?

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