By Maria Saporta
Few folks in town the name of the Atlanta woman executive who oversees a business that generates $110 billion in revenues and more than 500,000 employees.
The woman? Rosalind Brewer, president of Wal-Mart East (a territory that stretches from Maine to Puerto Rico and includes about 1,600 stores) and executive vice president of Wal-Mart Stores Inc.
Brewer was the keynote speaker at the
A few weeks ago, I saw Clark Howard working out at the YMCA. He and I seemed to be on the same every-other-day schedule at the time. I try not to stop and talk to celebrities or well-known people. I have no interest in autographs and I try to respect their privacy. But Clark was a year ahead of me in high school and I had interviewed him once before for our school magazine in the early 1990s.
Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed’s administration proposes a sweeping restructuring of the food and drink concessionaires at the airport.
Reed declined Monday to talk about the concessions program and instructed his media officer to refer all questions to airport General Manager Louis Miller. Reed has been adament in maintaining that this procurement will be free of political meddling.
The proposed contracts would create a new landscape of restaurants, coffee shops and kiosks in all the existing concourses, the new international concourse that’s to open next year, and the atrium, according to the administration’s documents.
Dear Readers,
What a year it has been for SaportaReport.
Spending this past week in Mexico has given me an opportunity to reflect on all the developments that have taken place this past year. It also has given me a fresh perspective on where we’re headed as we enter a new year.
saportareport.com actually was launched in February, 2009 — about six months after I had accepted a buyout
By David Pendered
Tennis sensation Andy Roddick is scheduled to play in a tournament at Atlantic Station in July as part of a major tennis deal announced Monday.
The Atlanta Tennis Championships has signed Atlantic Station as a multi-year tournament site. The event scheduled from July 14 through July 22 is the opening event of the Olympus U.S. Open Series season.
By Guest Columnist KEVIN GREEN, president of the Midtown Alliance
For our annual meeting that we held on Dec. 14, we decided to take a different tact. Instead of focusing mainly on traditional subjects like capital projects and programs or new development currently breaking ground in Midtown, we focused instead on what we were all working to achieve: a great place where people want to be.
This requires a level of inquiry that goes beyond the physical assets we normally use to describe a place such as location, urban design, transportation, institutions and economic anchors.
Occupy Atlanta has slipped out of the nightly news, but the protesters haven’t gone away.
Rather, participants are expanding their use of social media to spread their message and schedule events, including a Variety Show complete with a fund-raiser for the organization’s legal fund. The party is set for Dec. 29 at Manuel’s Tavern.
This is hardly the stuff of the Arab Spring, the pro-democracy uprisings that harnessed social media to topple four dictators and reshape global politics in the course of a year.
I feel as if I’m committing film-critic heresy, but here goes:
I preferred David Fincher’s American re-boot of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” to the original Swedish version.
I didn’t think I would. After all, we critics are ALWAYS supposed to prefer the foreign version of anything (I think it’s written down somewhere in a secret code, like the DaVinci Code).
By Maria Saporta
Friday, December 16, 2011
When Lawrence Schall first saw the Gothic-style campus of Oglethorpe University in 2005, he thought to himself: “This is what colleges ought to look like.”
Indeed, today Oglethorpe University has found a successful niche as a private liberal arts college in an urban setting. It is exceeding just about every measure of academic achievement and financial security among its peer institutions.
By Maria Saporta
One of Atlanta’s most important leaders, who is an unsung hero in his hometown, is finally getting the recognition he deserves.
William H. Foege will receive Georgia Tech’s 2012 Ivan Allen Jr. Prize for Social Courage award for his leadership in global health.
Among Foege’s numerous contributions include his leadership in the possible eradication of smallpox and other diseases worldwide.
By Maria Saporta
One of Atlanta’s premier African-American-owned companies — Atlanta Life Financial Group — has named former Georgia Gov. Roy Barnes to its board.
Barnes, who is joining his first corporate board since he left office in 2003, will be the only non-black board member of the diversified financial services company. At the time this article was posted, I could not determine whether Barnes was the first white person to serve on Atlanta Life’s board.
Check back for updates
The companies selected by Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed’s administration to run the food and beverage concessions at the airport were made public today.
One of the proposed winners that is not now listed as a tenant at the airport is Atlanta Restaurant Partners, LLC, a local firm whose agent is listed on state incorporation papers as Daniel Halpern. Reed appointed Halpern to the Atlanta Housing Authority, where he helped engineer the planned departure of its CEO, Renee Glover.
Munson’s final bequest was the latest resurrection of the memory of Noah Harris, who epitomized the passion for the red and black, and a commitment to do what he could to make a difference.
By Maria Saporta
Friday, December 9, 2011
Because of the economic climate, the National Center for Civil and Human Rights will be built in phases rather than at one time.
The center’s board recently met and made two decisions — to go forward with the project with the money it has in hand and to have a business plan that will make the facility 100 percent self-sustaining the day it opens.
Who knew? Georgia’s freshwater turtles are commercially exploited.
Georgia’s turtles evidently are being caught and shipped to Asia, where they become food or medicine or pets. Now the state is poised to curtail the commercial trade in a product that recently was valued at $65 a pound, for dried turtle parts.
Please watch our one-minute video preview of “Moments,” our new weekly glimpse into the men and women whose own personal moments have changed metro Atlanta: http://goo.gl/uc5h0
Two former mayors, Sam Massell and Shirley Franklin, former Georgia Tech graduate student Ryan Gravel who envisioned the Beltline, radio personality Clark Howard – and many others who aren’t so famous – will share their insights into a time when everything changed in their lives. The videos will last only a minute, but we’ll place them into context with an adjoining column.
By Maria Saporta
An agreement to cancel plans for a new coal plant in Blakely, Ga. could mark the end of traditional coal plants in Georgia and even the United States.
LS Power, a New Jersey-based power company, announced Monday that it was halting a 10-year effort to build the Longleaf Energy Station in Blakely.
The decision came after a decade-long opposition campaign by the Sierra Club, Friends of the Chattahoochee and GreenLaw against building the plant.
By Maria Saporta
EarthShare of Georgia, which has been building employee-based giving campaigns for environmental organizations, recently announced that it has added three new groups to benefit from their fundraising in 2012.
The three groups are:
· the Flint Riverkeeper, which aims to restore and preserve habitat, water quality and flow of the Flint River for future generations and dependent wildlife;
The two most populous counties in Georgia — Fulton and Gwinnett — are each taking steps to fine tune their economic development strategies.
At a time when Georgia’s prosperity has been declining compared to the rest of the nation and when it has been struggling with how to redefine itself in the new economy, both Fulton and Gwinnett are responding in kind.
By Guest Columnist BRIAN GIST, a senior attorney and transportation specialist for the Southern Environmental Law Center
Since they opened this October, the public’s response to the high-occupancy toll lanes on I-85 has been pervasive, vocal and angry.
Commuters complain that the lanes are expensive for those choosing to use them and that they have worsened driving conditions for those who choose not to use them.
