Seventh grade can be an awkward time for any student, but for former Atlanta City Council President and current Grady Foundation President Lisa Borders, helping to integrate an independent private school in Atlanta made it especially challenging.
“What I learned is that I had the capacity not only be at that school, but to excel, and it taught me to deal with adverse circumstances, always,” Lisa said.
Just one month after he was inaugurated, President Barack Obama established the White House Office of Urban Affairs with much fanfare.
The executive order stated:
“About 80 percent of Americans live in urban areas, and the economic health and social vitality of our urban communities are critically important to the prosperity and quality of life for Americans.
By Maria Saporta
Friday, April 20, 2012
Junior Achievement of Georgia Inc. is considering locating two hallmark programs — a JA Finance Park and a JA Biz Town — at the Georgia World Congress Center.
By Maria Saporta
A regional effort to build a regional arts and cultural mindset is losing its leader.
Flora Maria Garcia, CEO of the Metro Atlanta Arts & Culture Coalition, will become the new president and CEO of the United Arts of Central Florida starting May 29.
Garcia has been CEO of MAACC since 2007, when she succeeded Bill Nigut, who is now the Southeast Regional director of the Anti-Defamation League.
Tom Key has graced Atlanta audiences with many dramatic productions at Theatrical Outfit and the Alliance Theater, but the curtains rose on his own dramatic Moment 26 years ago when he was offered a chance to lead a theater in New York City.
With echoes of nightly off-Broadway standing ovations for his one-man show still ringing in his head, Tom instead chose to nurture his talents in Atlanta – his “home place in the American South.”
By Larry Williams Vice President, Technology Industry Development, Metro Atlanta Chamber A recently released report on the state of Georgia’s technology industry has aimed a spotlight on some of the most exciting and encouraging news for the future of the economy, not just in Georgia and Atlanta, but in the United States and even globally. […]
The proposed deepening of the Savannah Harbor received a major boost today in the form of documents released by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
The studies released today show the cost would be about $652 million to deepen the Savannah River shipping channel by five feet, to 47 feet. The economic impact of the expected increase in trade would amount to $174 million a year, nationwide.
In a related development, the South Carolina Supreme Court agreed Monday to hear a dispute over a state water quality permit that would allow the dredging of the shipping channel, according to a report by the Associated Press. The court’s decision to take the case will fast track a final ruling in a matter that would have been appealed up from lower courts.
By Maria Saporta
Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed is disappointed that MARTA did not get the legislative assistance it needs during the 2012 General Assembly.
But he is not giving up by any means that the situation can be resolved in 2013.
MARTA had sought to permanently remove a state restriction that requires that half of its sales tax revenues go to operations and half goes to capital investments. The state had waived the 50/50 rule for three years, but that time frame runs out on June 30, 2013.
Bob Voyles has spent much of his career developing signature buildings that grace Atlanta’s prime intersections and highways, so “it was like a fire bell going off in my head” when his daughter Virginia revealed she wasn’t moving back to her hometown because of Atlanta’s growing congestion.
“This was a huge surprise to me, because I love Atlanta and worked here nearly 40 years and my family is from here and always expected my children to want to embrace the city that I loved,” Bob recalled in our accompanying video.
By Chris Schroder
Joyce Fownes has completely transformed the workspace of many of her firm’s clients, proving again and again that interior design can alter how employees interact with each other.
Ironically, she found herself completely transformed one recent Easter morning when she felt spiritual “lightning” travel through her body. She hasn’t been the same since – at home or at work.
By Maria Saporta
It gets so bloody depressing.
Once again, MARTA has gotten screwed. This time, it was at the hands of the State Rep. Mike Jacobs, State Rep. Steve Davis and other misguided colleagues who have lost sight of what being a legislator is all about — to act in the best interests of the state.
In the closing minutes of the 2012 legislative session, political motives and missteps failed to remove the noose around MARTA’s neck that forces the transit agency to spend 50 percent of the sales tax it collects on capital improvements and 50 percent on operations.
Late in the last night of this year’s legislative session, in that hour when so much mischief famously has been done, there was a brief but illuminating flash of red which revealed the way things work under the Golden Dome and the potential of social media to disrupt the old order.
You can it watch it, starting at the 3 hour 16 minute mark, on this Georgia Public Broadcasting archive video.
By Chris Schroder
Having now published a dozen installments of Moments, it seemed an appropriate time to visit with Joel Babbit, the ever-inventive viceroy of Atlanta’s creative scene.
The Georgia sheriff who cracked the case of the stolen statue of Brer Rabbit has come out with a last ditch effort against a proposal pending in the Legislature that is strongly supported by Gov. Nathan Deal and ranking lawmakers.
Putnam County Sheriff Howard Sills says the alternative sentencing bill that’s due for a vote Monday in the state Senate is soft on crime and will shift the cost of lawbreakers from the state to counties. The House unanimously approved the bill.
To fight the bill, Sills has distributed an email filled with the sort of rousing language he deployed in August. At that time, the sheriff vowed to throw the law book at thieves who stole a statue of Brer Rabbit from the front yard of the Uncle Remus Museum, in Eatonton.
A garden gate by Andrew T. Crawford is a frame of beauty and a joy of metal.
It’s also a sign of the artist’s mid-career transformation.
Eleven of Andrew T. Crawford’s organically inspired gates frame the daffodils, tulips and hyacinths in the current exhibit, “Atlanta Blooms: 300,000 Watts of Flower Power” at the Atlanta Botanical Garden, through April. “I learned that you can change how you do something without changing what you do,” said the successful blacksmith who switched gears into more sculpture art at age 40. “Because of that freedom, I’ve done more honest work and met with more success.”
As a longtime news anchor on Atlanta’s top-rated television stations, John Pruitt narrated and often embodied the tumultuous events that punctuated our last half-century. On July 4, 1964, John stood next to a colleague at a segregationist rally when four young African-American men wandered in, inciting a melee in the stands. John’s colleague handed him a video camera, quickly showed him how to press the button to record on film and pushed him in the direction of the battle and into his own Moment of journalistic fate.
Environmentalists have won a battle against a coal gasification power plant in Mississippi, but a Southern Co. unit announced plans to continue construction of that plant pending review by the state’s utilities commission.
The Mississippi Supreme Court reversed last week the approval of state permits for a coal gasification plant that’s being built at the headwaters of the Pascagoula River system. The plan is to create a 14,000-acre strip mine to extract lignite, a soft brown coal. The coal would be converted to a synthetic gas used to fuel the power plant being built at the site, according to several reports.
The court ruling in Mississippi follows two recent actions in Georgia on coal-fueled plants. One of them halted construction of a coal-fired plant in Early County. Another proposed plant, this one near Sandersville, may have been hobbled by operational changes being made by one investor.
By Maria Saporta
Friday, March 9, 2012
Leaders in Atlanta and Georgia have launched a high-powered effort to lure a regional office of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to the city.
The federal government has said that it wants to establish several regional offices that could review and issue patents and trademarks as a way of encouraging innovation throughout the country.
When Noel Khalil moved to Atlanta in 1983, chasing development deals on the affluent north side of Atlanta seemed as natural to him as it was unusual to the white men who dominated the industry in that part of town.
After closing a few deals in the northern suburban counties of Atlanta, Noel was surprised when the secretary of Atlanta’s most prominent African-American developer called to say her boss, Herman Russell, wanted Noel come to his office for a meeting.
Southern Republicans are coming to their Pogo moment.
Back when they were a persecuted minority in states across the South, Republicans used to wail about the corruption and arrogance of the Democrats, at their blatant abuses of power and craven self-aggrandizement.
Now the Republicans are riding high, and looking forward to riding higher with the new legislative and congressional maps aimed at cementing their control. Republican presidential candidates swear their affection for grits, and Southern Republican legislators feel secure enough in their seats to quarrel with Southern Republican governors.
Yet all does not rest well within the region’s now solidly majority party. They have met the enemy, and to paraphrase Walt Kelly’s Okefenokee critter, they are them.
