Sunday, July 05, 2009
News, In this Issue..., Politics, Atlanta

Atlanta's next mayor

SP talks candidly with the front-runners about their strengths—and their weaknesses

Courtesy of Mary Norwood, Kasim Reed and Lisa Borders

By Stephanie Ramage

City Council President Lisa Borders, Councilwoman Mary Norwood and State Sen. Kasim Reed are the front-runners in Atlanta’s mayoral race by virtue of the amount of money they’ve raised. At this point in the race, in all likelihood, one of them will be Atlanta’s next mayor.

So I decided it was time to bring them together in one article and check out some of their strengths and weaknesses. It turns out the two are the same.

Norwood probably has more curiosity about the city’s finances than anyone else in the race. Already a wonk on the topic of the city’s sewers, she has now similarly hunkered down with financial documents. Unfortunately for voters, it’s the unanswered questions that make it impossible for Norwood to offer concrete ideas about how to improve the city’s financial future, beyond asking experts to come in and tear the budget apart.

Reed has history with City Hall. He spearheaded Mayor Shirley Franklin’s search for a police chief, and he found—Chief Richard Pennington.

Borders has made public safety her central pillar, one she often bolsters by mentioning that she was married to a police officer—but should the profession of one’s spouse (or former spouse, in her case) really translate into one’s own experience with that profession?

MARY NORWOOD

In conversations about the city’s lack of transparency, Norwood often refers to the Nancy Creek sewer project, a neighborhood issue that propelled her onto the civic stage during Mayor Bill Campbell’s administration. She was elected to the council in 2001.

More recently—last week, in fact—she voted against a 3-millage-point tax hike that even the city’s respected chief financial officer, Jim Glass, has repeatedly said was necessary in order to end public safety furloughs and allow the city to meet its debt obligation. (She knows I wrote columns in support of the increase, so that’s on the table from the beginning.)

The tax increase passed by an 8 to 7 vote. Norwood insists that the money to end the public safety furloughs could have come from somewhere else. I ask her no fewer than six times where the money would have come from. She is not specific. Her responses include the caveat that she does not have the information she needs to determine that, but that she would have that information if she were elected mayor.

I ask her if she intended to allow the furloughs to continue until she was elected mayor. She says no, that the council could have passed a mandate to end the furloughs, or could have sued the mayor to end them. (They did neither.)

She pulls out a laptop to show me the city budget, and says the city has 84 different funding accounts, aside from the general fund, that hold, she says, $5 billion. But she avers that she’s not implying there’s anything unethical about the accounts; it’s just that she doesn’t know much about them. If she were elected mayor, however, she would know.

THE SUNDAY PAPER: You voted against the tax hike to end the furloughs at a time when a lot of city residents thought the furloughs had to end because of crime.
 
NORWOOD: If I truly believed there was no other way to end the furloughs except with the tax hike, that decision would have been different, but I don’t truly believe that.
 
SP: But you also did not suggest any ideas for finding that money.
 
I don’t have access to that information. I just don’t and there is no other explanation. I am running for mayor and I intend to make the financial transactions of the city absolutely transparent. You will know every penny and where it’s going and what it’s being used for. I have been down there for eight years and I have watched a tremendous amount of money flowing in and out of the city, and I believe our citizens need to understand where it’s going and what it’s being used for. We have citizens that are taxed by our three different entities, their city government, their county government and their school board.

We are trying to run a city on 17 to 23 cents of each tax dollar. But it is incumbent upon the city to get its own financial house in order before anybody from the city talks about any of the other entities. We all need to watch our taxes and what we are getting for them. People are paying so much in taxes in this town. Socioeconomically, it permeates everyone.
 
SP: Is there a problem with the city only getting 17 to 23 cents of the tax dollar? Is that a problem to you? Is it too little?
 
I think this is something for the citizenry to take a look at.
 
SP: But you are saying people already pay so much in taxes. So, do you think the 17 cents is too much, too little, just right? Where are we with that?
 
MN: I think we—[pause]. Let’s move on to something else.

KASIM REED

State Sen. Kasim Reed has served in the legislature for 11 years, four in the House and 7 in the Senate. Last January, he introduced legislation to provide a secure revenue stream, tax money set aside specifically for public safety. The measure was scuttled by the Fulton County Taxpayers Association, which sued, claiming his legislation was procedurally faulty.

The FCTA has links to a group called Campaign for Atlanta. One of the more noticeable links is the fact that former state Rep. Bob Irvin, a Republican who serves on the board of the FCTA, is married to Lynn Irvin, a founding member of CFA. Already, CFA has made powerful forays into Atlanta’s neighborhoods to knit together a voting block. Though the organization does not endorse candidates, its core members, like members of FCTA, expressed opposition to the 3-millage-point tax hike.  

I ask Reed if his old nemeses will be factors in this election. He admits they will, but also points out that he favored, not a 3-millage-point increase, but a 1-millage-point increase.

During his time in the legislature, Reed also ran Shirley Franklin’s successful mayoral campaign. And he led the national search for a police chief, which brought in oft-bemoaned Chief Richard Pennington to head Atlanta’s police department.

“I think if anyone reads the information that was available at the time Chief Pennington was selected, he received glowing reviews nationally and was one of the most sought after police chiefs in the country at the time of the selection,” he says. “So, all of the conversation now is hindsight, but at the time this was a police chief who had been featured on ‘60 Minutes’ for cleaning up the New Orleans Police Department and had been a chief in the nation’s capitol.”
 
[Editor’s Note: Pennington worked under the administration of Washington, D.C. Mayor Marion Berry. Berry served a federal prison sentence on drug charges after being caught with cocaine in a Washington, D.C. police sting operation in 1990. After his six months of incarceration, Berry successfully ran for mayor again in 1994—the same year Pennington was hired as chief of police in New Orleans.]

SP: Would you look out of town again for the next chief?

KASIM REED: I would tell you candidly that after spending the time that I have spent with the police officers, I am inclined and would desire to hire a person off of the City of Atlanta police force right now. Really, because I think it is needed from a morale standpoint. I just don’t want to preclude other candidates competing in the process. I will open it up to national competition, but I want to hire from among the men and women in Atlanta’s police force. I am also going to ask members of the International Brotherhood of Police Officers to be part of whatever kind of search panel I create.

SP: You’ve spent 11 years at the Capitol, but what your detractors say is that being there isn’t necessarily getting it done. What has Kasim Reed actually gotten done?

The biggest crisis the City of Atlanta has faced is the water and sewer crisis. I co-authored that legislation and carried it through the [state] Senate and the House. The co-sponsors were Eric Johnson, who is the president of the Senate, and Casey Cagle, who at that time was the chair of the Senate Finance Committee. If you talk to the mayor of Atlanta and you talk to Casey Cagle and ask them who played the most significant role in the passage of legislation that provided for $500 million in low-interest loans and an opportunity to vote on the 1 percent sales tax, the people who were there will tell you it was me.

On both transportation bills [Senate Bill 120, which would have allowed MARTA to access its own money, and Senate Bill 39, which would have allowed for a regional 1 percent sales tax to support transportation initiatives], although they failed, I was a co-sponsor on both of them, and this year I was on the conference committee for the transportation bill [SB 39] in the Senate, which most serious people in this city believe was the best bill for transportation for the city of Atlanta.

SP: But you admit both bills failed in the House. I know you’re in the Senate, but Eric Johnson, whom you say is a friend, is also in the Senate, and he certainly has pull over at the House.

What happened to the transportation bills had a great deal to do with the issues around the Speaker of the House and the lieutenant governor [Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle]—who was at the time considered a candidate for governor. What was going on was also about whether something as important as a multi-billion-dollar transportation bill was going to pass and give the lieutenant governor something to run on when there were other competing candidates thinking about the governor’s race.

LISA BORDERS

Usually, when someone mentions expertise in public safety, City Council President Lisa Borders says, “I was married to a police officer.” That was also her response to me when I brought up the subject.

 She speaks in the past tense, and does so with such solemn dignity that by the time I met with her on June 22, I had the impression that some tragedy had befallen her husband. I was actually afraid to inquire about how he came to his end.

But, I force myself to ask quietly, “What happened?”

She looks at me in bafflement and at her communications person, Liz Flowers. I am worried for a minute that I have asked her about something horrible that everyone else in town knows all about and that I must be really out of touch not to know.

“What do you mean?” she asks.

I reply, “How did it … end?”

“Oh. We divorced,” she says.

So, as much as Borders was married to a police officer, she is also divorced from one.

I am relieved, if not entirely convinced—having myself been married, consecutively, to a competitive surfer, a bodybuilder and a musician—that her former marriage to a cop confers upon her some special expertise in terms of public safety. I, after all, can neither surf, identify a serratus muscle, nor play any musical instrument.

As detailed in my column in this paper on June 28, the most persistent concern voiced to The Sunday Paper regarding Borders is that her position as City Council president has narrowly limited her opportunities to vote, a situation that allowed her access to power without a paper trail of culpability. Though her tiebreaker vote once again proved unnecessary, Borders went on the record at the time, before the City Council vote in favor of the tax increase, as supporting the hike that would end public safety furloughs.
 
LISA BORDERS: If you look at the Bain Consulting study from 2001, what you see is that on a per capita basis in 2001, Atlanta spent one of the highest amounts on municipal services. Today, to have those numbers adjusted, which Bain just finished about a month ago, we spend, for cities of our like size, and demographic makeup, one of the lowest amounts. The only city that spends less than us on municipal services of our own size and makeup is Charlotte.
 
Everyone thinks Atlanta’s taxes are so high, so I’m making the comparison from ’01 and ’02 to ’09 that we’ve moved from the left side of the graph, all the way to the right side of the graph, so I would submit that we have hyper-corrected our tax model.

SP: There has been speculation that as City Council president, you haven’t voted on much, and your ability to get things done is limited. Has there been something, though, that you did put your support behind, of which you are proud?

BORDERS: The Beltline. I believe the Beltline will be an economic engine second only to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. It will strategically place Atlanta in front of her urban peers, which is huge. Atlanta has always had a leadership position when we talked about economic development. So this is far and away the crown jewel. If MARTA serves as spine to a regional system, the Beltline will be a distributor.
  
SP: But, with all due respect, it’s not finished.

Remember, it’s a 25-year project. SP