B y Maria Saporta
The legacy of Ray Anderson, a corporate champion of sustainability, will live on at Georgia Tech.
The Ray C. Anderson Foundation has awarded a $750,000 grant to Georgia Tech to establish the Center on Business Strategies of Sustainability (CBSS) within the Ernest Scheller Jr. College of Business.
The new program will be developed by Dr. L. Beril Toktay, operations management professor and Brady Family Chair at the Scheller College of Business.
Georgia is preparing to repeal rules for radioactive waste disposal because the state is not in the business of storing such waste and has no plans to start, a state official said.
The state also intends to update its regulations of radioactive materials used for medical and industrial purposes. The revision aims to bring state rules into compliance with new federal standards.
Both measures are part of the routine maintenance of Georgia’s rules and regulations of radioactive materials, according to Jac Capp, chief of the air protection branch of Georgia’s Department of Natural Resources.
By Maria Saporta
Published in the Atlanta Business Chronicle on Friday, January 11, 2013
Several new initiatives will be part of the 2013 work plan for the Georgia Chamber of Commerce, which will hold its annual meeting on Jan. 15 at the Georgia World Congress Center.
Those initiatives will help continue the recent success that the Georgia Chamber has enjoyed in getting its legislative agenda passed.
In 2012, the Georgia Chamber had the “best legislative session we’ve had in 20 years,” said Chris Clark, president of the organization.
Georgia First Lady Sandra Deal is slated to announce Monday that Georgia is creating a one-stop shop to help pregnant women and mothers of infants get all the assistance their communities provide.
The new initiative, Great Start Georgia, aims to promote the welfare of young children by helping their mothers and others who care for them. Mother and child will be guided through the process of locating and accessing existing programs.
The program intends to address the precarious conditions facing Georgia’s children. The state now ranks 37th in terms of child well-being, according to the 2012 Kids Count Data Book released last summer by the Annie E. Casey Foundation.
The Atlanta Streetcar is to be operating within 12 months, but its builders don’t have all the property the project will require.
MARTA is getting ready to start talking to companies it wants to hire to appraise 26 parcels along the streetcar route. The parcels are needed for purposes including two streetcar stops and a roadway realignment.
There’s also new trouble with stringing the overhead power cables that will provide electricity to propel the vehicles. Power cables may have to be strung from guy wires attached to buildings, in some areas, because utility poles can’t be installed above newly discovered basements.
By David Martin, President and CEO of VeinInnovations The presidential campaign is (finally) over. President Obama will serve a second and final term, and the Senate remains in the hands of the Democrats. The Affordable Care Act (ACA), now widely known as Obamacare, will remain in place. ACA provisions will be implemented as planned. The […]
By Guest Columnist DAVE PETERSON, co-founder of Atlanta-based global consulting company North Highland
All people, particularly children, need art and cultural experiences. Children need arts and culture because it promotes brain development. Adults and families need them as a way to lift themselves from the weights and measures of today’s reality.
Cities and communities need arts and culture to promote quality of life and enhance economic development. Through those artistic and cultural experiences, we all connect ourselves to the world around us in different ways and are better off for it personally and financially.
Old Walt Whitman got it right. As messy as this one is likely to be, as many as have already voted before the polls open Tuesday, Election Day remains our “powerfulest scene and show,” more majestic in its way than our greatest natural wonders.
The heart of it, he thought, was not in the chosen but the choosing, and that’s a good way to look at things when you’re writing about an election this close, the day before it’s over.
First about close. Not only is the presidential election close enough for it to be conceivable the next winter storm could hit the East Coast before the winner is known, but there are some nail-biters in this comfortably red state as well.
By Maria Saporta
Published in the Atlanta Business Chronicle on October 5, 2012
The United Way of Greater Atlanta has selected its 2013 campaign chair — Pat Falotico, senior state executive for IBM in Georgia.
Falotico has been serving on the United Way board for more than a year and has chaired IBM’s internal campaign for the past four years.
“I see this a great opportunity,” Falotico said. “I love United Way, and it also gives me an opportunity to represent IBM in the community. I’m really excited about it.”
Chairing the annual United Way is one of the most demanding civic jobs in town. The campaign chair heads up the effort that has been raising more than $80 million a year for the past several years.
By Guest Columnist PAUL BOWERS, CEO of Georgia Power and board chair of the /Georgia Partnership for Excellence in Education
We at the Georgia Partnership for Excellence in Education are celebrating our 20th Anniversary.
As chairman of the board, I feel it is important to take this time and not only reflect on our past and how we started, but to also think about our future: the future of the Partnership, the future of our educational system, and the future of our state’s economic health and well-being.
There is a lot riding on what we have done in the past, what we do today, and how well we prepare for tomorrow.
By Chris Schroder
Ruffling feathers with a cartoon isn’t unfamiliar territory for Atlanta Journal-Constitution editorial cartoonist, Mike Luckovich, but his approach to his cartoons was permanently defined by a high school Moment. Luckovich was a sophomore in high school at Sheldon High School in Eugene, Oregon and had just begun drawing cartoons for the school newspaper.
He joked, “In high school, believe it or not, I was not a very big guy” and described how the rest of his peers towered over him – even the Sheldon High School cheerleaders. “So I did this cartoon – I don’t know what I was thinking,” he said.
The cartoon depicted a freak museum with a billboard marquis that read: “Freak Museum: featuring Snerdily the boy with three nostrils, Melvin the deformed hippo and main attraction: The Sheldon Cheerleaders.”
By Guest Columnist JEFF ANDERSON, a 2010 Independent candidate for the U.S. House in Georgia’s 11th District from Acworth who heads the Anderson Center for American Policy Solutions
Georgia’s decade-and-a-half evolution into a Republican stronghold is more a story of tradition than transition.
While more than a prior century of identical Democratic dominance has surely been flipped on paper, even considering the modern demographic changes that have marked development of the New South, the general ideological character of this state’s voters really has not changed all that much.
Instead, at the level of the average Georgia citizen, this is more of a label-swapping story that centers on commercial quality issues with the two state political parties. Of real importance to each of us today is not that history, but the question of what are we getting (or more correctly, NOT getting) out of our one-party political condition?
The marimba beat from the iPhone woke me as usual, only the direction was very wrong. The sound came from the floor, where the phone had fallen.
My phone is my lifeline, stowing my schedule, contacts, reminders, lists, music, maps, photos, news and diversions in case of boredom. Just how emotional and deep that connection can be became more evident in the brief, illuminating adventure to turn a cracked screen clear again.
The quest led to a small, thriving universe that exists to reconnect us, and how one young man in Atlanta, Shahzad Pirani, re-made himself through repairing phones.
When Jenny Munn worked at the Atlanta Convention and Visitors Bureau, she traveled to Latin America to persuade people and companies to visit Atlanta. Her message relied on her fluency in Spanish.
Today she’s 31 and no longer needs a passport for the global reach of her language skills. Her expert fluency these days is in search engine optimization (SEO) – the way we find what we are looking for on the Internet, and how businesses use our word patterns to connect with us.
“SEO does have its own language, with basics that you need to understand to become more fluent in it,” said Munn, a native Atlantan who went to Lassiter High School and University of Georgia. “Once you get the ‘code,’ you can break down the barriers.”
By Guest Columnist RHONE RESCH, president and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association
The numbers don’t lie – 2011 was a banner year for solar energy in America as consumers saw the cost of installing solar drop by 20 percent in just a single year.
The U.S. solar energy industry installed a record 1,855 megawatts of new solar capacity last year, more than doubling the previous record set in 2010. In the fourth quarter alone, the industry installed 755 megawatts of new capacity – more than the solar installation totals for the full years of 2008 and 2009 combined.
By Guest Columnist STACEY J. KEY, president and CEO of the Georgia Minority Supplier Development Council
Getting a small business off the ground can prove to be a daunting task. In fact, the vast majority of new businesses fail within the first few years.
The Georgia Mentor Protégé Connection (MPC) is an innovative business development initiative
By Maria Saporta
The environmentally-focused law firm — GreenLaw — has hired a new executive director.
Stephanie Stuckey Benfield, a DeKalb representative of Georgia General Assembly since 1999, will become GreenLaw’s executive on April 9.
The news was announced in an email to GreenLaw’s friends Wednesday by Greg Presmanes, who is chairman of GreenLaw’s board.
“I am so excited that Stephanie will be leading our team forward into its third decade of giving Georgia’s environment its day in court,” Presmanes said.
Where do we go from here, in the struggle to keep the lights on and the factories humming, while insuring the earth doesn’t become an oven and the water we drink a luxury? A satisfactory answer to that question is still a long distance away, but Georgia is looking more and more like the “here” referred to in that question.
Last month, the Environmental Protection Agency made available a new database showing the nation’s largest emitters of greenhouse gases, and the top two sites – the Southern Company’s Plant Scherer in Juliette and Plant Bowen near Cartersville – are in Georgia, and within a 65-mile radius of Atlanta.
Along with the nation’s third-largest emitter — Southern’s Plant Miller near Birmingham, Ala. — these sources for the electricity which lights the screen this is being written on account for more carbon emissions than the entire nation of Finland, according to one report.
By Maria Saporta
Friday, January 20, 2012
The tide has turned for the Georgia Research Alliance.
A year ago, the public-private research and innovation organization was fighting for survival. Gov. Nathan Deal had proposed in his first budget, which had been put together by the administration of former Gov. Sonny Perdue, to slash GRA’s funding from nearly $17 million to $4.5 million.
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.
