January 2010

What's the Big Idea? An Atlanta Magazine Roundtable (Preview)


Last November, as the mayoral race (and the attendant rhetoric) went into extra innings, we assembled a group of local leaders—including an educator, an imam, a developer, and a neighborhood activist—to talk frankly about the city on the cusp of a new decade and a new mayor. The panel was moderated by Atlanta magazine editor Steve Fennessy, who edited the transcript for length and clarity.

The Contributors

Bill Bolling—executive director and founder of the Atlanta Community Food Bank

Imam Plemon T. El-Amin—Resident Imam of the Atlanta Masjid of Al-Islam, one of the largest mosques in the United States

Angelo Fuster—former deputy chief operating officer for Mayor Bill Campbell and currently a consultant in government, politics, and public affairs

Edward Gilgor—self-employed attorney and chair of Neighborhood Planning Unit W, which includes East Atlanta, Grant Park, and Ormewood Park

Sharron Pitts—chief of staff for Atlanta Public Schools

Dr. Catherine L. Ross—former executive director of the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority and currently director of the Center for Quality Growth & Regional Development at Georgia Tech

Scott Taylor—president of Carter, the largest office developer in the Southeast
Atlanta magazine Let’s start by getting an idea of how the city looks from your own perspectives. Ed, you’ve been Neighborhood Planning Unit (NPU) chair in East Atlanta for most of Shirley Franklin’s administration. What’s the top concern now?

Gilgor Safety. The people in my NPU are willing to accept that they don’t live in a manicured community and that cars can get broken into, things can happen. They’re not looking for, if you will, Alpharetta-like tendedness. It’s not a gated community. Safety has gone up and down. But now we have citizens hiring off-duty police officers. [East Atlanta, like dozens of neighborhoods throughout Atlanta, pays off-duty police officers to augment normal police patrols.] I have direct control over police officers. That’s not a good idea. These guys have guns and badges and I control a paycheck they get. Why would you want this relationship? The answer is, I want it because I need to provide protection that the city is not providing. With crime, perception may not be reality, but it’s very close. You may be safe, you may not be safe, but if you don’t have a feeling of security, then whatever is really there doesn’t matter.

Pitts [At Atlanta Public Schools], we’re benefiting from the revitalization of the public schools in the northern section of the city. People are starting to come back to us, which is a really positive thing. On the other hand, in large parts of the city, a couple factors have really changed the demographics for us, such as taking down the Atlanta Housing Authority developments. We’re seeing lots of mobility and shifting. With the recession, people are losing their homes and their ability to live in the city. So we’re seeing sections of town where we’ve done school closings. That has a negative effect on a community when you close a school.

Fuster Atlanta is a larger city, it’s a younger city, but it’s also a more disengaged city. The numbers reflect it. [Voter turnout in the Atlanta mayoral general election was 72,000—just 30 percent of registered voters in the city.] I don’t think we can just blame lackluster candidates. There’s a lack of interest. I’ve asked questions about how we can energize these newcomers, all the singles who live in these apartments off Freedom Parkway. The campaign people say they’d be wasting resources. It’s pretty common—that sense that young people are too busy looking inward.

The other thing is a lack of interest in what has come before. There’s less of an interest in understanding how things are because of how they were. It’s a lack of context. And it’s one that’s expressed without regret. A reporter will ask me a question and I know he doesn’t have any idea of the context around the question. So I feel compelled to say, “Let me put this in context for you.” And right away I see this veil of lack of interest fall on his face. So that’s the issue—is it the public that is not interested, or is it that they don’t know to get interested?

That does a couple of things. It allows a small number of people to have a lot more influence than they should in everything. I’m not just talking about elections. I’m talking about building on the BeltLine. Those are the middle-aged folks who have been active for a while. I’ve been involved in a number of controversial issues and you see five people in the NPU voting for or against something. I’ve done a survey of a neighborhood. There are 20,000 people who would like to see it happen but the NPU voted against it and there were seven people who voted.

El-Amin When it comes to the mayor, we may have left the era of having leaders instead of managers. I don’t see the giants coming back anytime soon. There are no Maynard Jacksons or Andy Youngs on the horizon. I’m not sure we have the visionaries coming up anytime real soon. And that might be why some people haven’t been so motivated by the election.

AM Scott, what’s happened to Fortune 500 companies here? They don’t relocate to Atlanta the way they used to.

Taylor Our neighboring states have been fairly aggressive in their economic incentives, such as North Carolina. Even Alabama has worked pretty hard. The next mayor is going to have to work very closely with the legislature, with the governor, looking at how we truly leverage the assets that we have. We need a state research park. And here’s something that hasn’t been talked a lot about in the election: This idea that there are two Georgias out there—Atlanta and the rest of the state. This has got to go away.

Bolling The Atlanta Regional Commission every year sponsors a trip of political and business leaders to go to another city. We went to Denver and learned about how they learned to vote regionally there. Fifteen years ago Denver was rolling up the sidewalks. But out of pain, out of tough times, they came together and said, “We’re going to survive together or we’re going to fail together.” We ought to be traveling throughout Georgia. We who consider ourselves leaders need to travel to towns and cities around the state and listen and share with them and invite them here. Because we have a lot more in common with folks in Valdosta or Albany or Moultrie—air, water, transportation, and economic development—than we do with another city out-of-state.

Fuster I’ve argued for years that we need to have a public relations plan to sell Atlanta to the rest of the state. One of the things that frustrates me about the water issue is that Atlanta is seen as the big bad bear. The city of Atlanta puts back into the Chattahoochee almost all of the water that it takes out—almost all of it. Atlanta does not contribute to the shortage of water; the surrounding counties do. They’re the ones who have the great lawns and septic tanks.

One of the real challenges for the next mayor is going to be to try to somehow break that history of perception and mistrust. Shirley tried. She had to undo Bill Campbell. Bill offended everyone around the metro area. And Maynard was not a particularly good metro Atlanta mayor. He’d been rebuffed too many times and said, “Screw that. Atlanta has 450,000 people and those are my people and I’m gonna fight for ’em.”

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