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Georgia likes to brag about what an excellent place to do business it is. Part of that is seeing what price it takes for the Legislature to be sympathetic to business.

It turns out were in the middle of the pack, but nearly every state costs less than you’d think. Now, of course, certain rules apply here. The price goes directly with the ease of understanding the issue and the interest of the general public directly in it. That’s why in issues of the death penalty, flag amendments, etc, the price is too high for money to have any effect. It’s too easy to understand and it tugs directly at the emotions of too many.

However, in terms of reasonably arcane elements of regulatory legislation, money is everything.

The Wall Street Journal looked at ‘tangible net benefit requirements‘ for mortgages and lobbying from 2001 to 2004. Now, lots of people are concerned with making sure their states have these laws, but from 2001 to 2004, it was pretty arcane stuff. Ameriquest hired a lobbying firm to go from state legislature to state legislature to fight the inclusion of the requirements in their laws. It was a good investment. It turns out it does not take a lot of money to buy a legislature and Georgia is in the middle of the pack.

The most expensive, of course was California. At $10 million, it’s 3 sigma out. Texas was $190,000, Florida and New Jersey were $180,000, and Georgia $160,000.

The effort in Georgia occurred in 2001. Of that 160K, $5000.00 went directly to then Lt. Governor Mark Taylor. In addition to direct campaign contributions, Ameriquest bought and gave away Rolling Stones tickets. It’s a sobering thought that literally, there are people who cannot afford their mortgage because Mick and Keith were on tour.

They tried to offer Senator Vincent Fort a contribution and he declined, but argued vigorously with the Ameriquest representatives. In the end, Fort lost as both the Senate and the House stripped tangible net benefit requirements from their bills, and they went on to pass by large margins.

With Mr. Taylor gone, $155,000 seems as though it’s a relatively cheap cost if your company can turn millions in revenue with a small regulatory change. Goodness knows how much total is really spend of wooing legislators.

So what can be done? Most companies hire lobbyists who then have to register with the clerks office as paid lobbying people. Those folks should have to make public on the web, within 24 hours of the transaction, a detailed public statement of what money they spend and on whom and what they spent it. Have a reception for the legislature? You have to declare who you invited and how much the event cost. Did you buy tickets for a Senator? You have to declare immediately.

The legislators should also have to declare what they received and from whom they received it. In combination, two quick things will happen. First, Creative Loafing will have a lot more fodder and second, people who do their own lobbying will be much more influential as they do not have to register. That makes the whole thing far more democratic and the more people who are involved the better.

Remember Mayor Franklin? Whatever happened to her? Is she hibernating? She’s Gone!

Sistah Mayah used to be everywhere! Openings, closings, luncheons, announcements, Beltlines, projects, schools, houses… heck if you asked nicely she’d meet you at a donut shop. Now she’s gone. She’s ‘Underground Shirley’, and like Underground she’s giving the impression that she is not doing very well.

Now, yes, I know her kids have been involved in some nasty
stuff, but it’s time for the Mayor to stop skiing and get back to being a leader for Atlanta. She can overcome any negative publicity her family may bring her by being the kind of Mayor she was in her first term!

Among the agenda items she should consider:

• Putting some muscle and the bully pulpit forward to keep the Beltline project moving forward
• Guarantee that by a date certain during her administration, all the city’s streets will be fully repaired and in excellent shape, at lease for one day
• Use the power of her office to get the Atlanta School Board to root out corruption while encouraging Atlanta students to study more math and science
• Push for a law requiring a public good requirement for all new construction. Can you imagine if every new building had a library, fire department or theater in it?
• Work with CAP/ADID to develop a plan to move AMTRAK back downtown and revitalize 5 Points in a meaningful way
• Develop a plan for affordable housing with adequate public safety for it.

Pick three. Accomplish three of these and Mayor Franklin’s second term will be well remembered, as opposed to now, where people are forgetting what she looks like.

Reports show that less than 10% of you voted.  In so doing, you let the zealots choose for you.  They had the decency to show up.

In the Lithonia mayor’s race , 1 vote seperates first and second.  In Mountain Park, the difference between getting in the run-off and being out in the cold is 13 votes.  Fewer people could show up for the run-off.

The elections will have major impacts.  For example, in Avondale Estates, the redevelopment plan will likely be shelved and change will be more hap-hazard.   Doraville faces continued racial stress and tension between the council and police department.   These are the people who decide who gets to build in your town, what kind of businesses there can be and how much you’ll pay in sales tax.

What those in government should take from this is that almost nobody cares.  In fact, so few people care that a small number of folks can come in and topple everything.  Even when elected, your base won’t be there when you need them.

Ironically, turnout in the February  primary will be more than 5 times Tuesday’s turnout for an office that ultimately the people do not elect.

Hopefully this will serve as a wake up call and more people will vote in the December 4th.  This means you!

If you’ve ever thought ‘my vote doesn’t count’,  then Vote Tuesday!   Several Georgia cities are holding municipal elections Tuesday and turnout is notoriously low.

If you want your vote to count, show up and you’ll be making a big difference.

In Gwinnett & Dekalb County cities, the elections turn on what direction development should go in smaller towns.  Should it include large scale developmental changes with new streets and more businesses, or should it be as minimal as possible?  Ethnic tensions are having an effect in Doraville, Chamblee, and Norcross.  Cobb Cities are also dealing with local elections.

Fulton county is the odd bird here, for though, it is a county with almost no unincorporated areas anymore, different cities have their elections in different years.  Atlanta will not hold mayoral elections until 2009.  While there is a certain wisdom to having the State’s largest city distinct in it’s election cycle, total voter turnout would be higher if it were connected to the rest of the cities.

Polls are open from 7 A.M. to 7 P.M. and state law requires that if you have no other opportunity to vote, that you may take 2 hours of time during the work day to go vote.

You should!

MARTA did not win customers this weekend.  On one of the busiest weekends of the year, MARTA decided to single track.  Further, they ran a number of trains on the opposite site of where they usually arrive confusing tons of out of towners.

Here’s what happened this weekend:

• The Braves were in town
• Falcons played
• Georgia Tech Played
• African American Gay Pride
• Oh, Yeah, the 60,000 people that went to some part of DragonCon!

All of these events meant that trains were packed.  Often they were so full, that if you tried to get on at a station south of Lindbergh you couldn’t.  Moreover, during the day on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, they did not run all the trains to the airport, doubling the demand for southbound trains.

People griped.  Worse, Klingons griped!  You don’t want to be stuck in a MARTA car between an angry Klingon, a Wookie, and a Mets Fan.

Of course MARTA has to do maintenance, but events such as DragonCon are high profile events that bring lots of tourists to town.  Those folks will go back to work Tuesday and help determine whether more conventions come to here.  Their negative MARTA experience will not help.  Surely, MARTA management, the local sports teams, and the ACVB can coordinate events so that maintenance is done at night and on weekends when nothing is happening in town.

Moreover, MARTA needs to make a guarantee.  If you wait more than 20 minutes for a train ever, that ride is free.  How can they do this?  Tap out.  The system knows where you got on.  They know how long it takes to travel on MARTA to your destination.  They know when you tap out.  Hence if your time traveled plus twenty minutes is greater than your tap in and out, the system can credit you.

Such a guarantee would encourage MARTA use and put pressure on operations staff to keep things well maintained.  It can also go into the Union goals as a benchmark for them to hit and that will also please the MARTOC committee.  When the customers win, the politicians are satiated and efforts are made to increase the economy of the product, we’ll get better results both in transit and in economic development terms.

The buzz of Atlanta Radio is whether or not the prosecution and reporting of the Michael Vick has been adversely effected by race.  The NAACP has certainly been involved in trying to defend Vick.

People have been arguing that athletes such as Dany Heatley received far less harsh sentences than Vick because Heatley was White.  However, the analogy here is not Heatley, but Rae Carruth, who murdered the mother of his child.  Of all organizations, the NAACP should know that this is a Martin Luther King Jr. moment.  Judge Michael Vick not by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character. 

Michael Vick is pleading guilty to a crime in which he willfully inflicted cruel treatment on animals who could not defend themselves and enjoyed that cruelty.  That’s his character; pathological and dangerous.  That’s a person who should not be running around in anyone’s community.

What Heatley did was stupid and tragic, but it was not willfully cruel.  A person who chooses willfully cruel way of killing the defenseless for the purposes of enjoying that pain deserves prison.

That’s the crime here.  Calling it a racially motivated witch hunt just compounds it.

It looked as though a constructive re-formulation of Grady might be in the works with a new governance system, a new board, and new money.  Meetings were happening and even the Speaker of the House was in attendance.  But those already in power at Grady saw their livelihoods in danger and so they pulled the race switch.  This, of course, has thrown the train off the track.  Whether it derails is yet to be seen.

Part of the Grady issue is about race.  The people who use Grady is disproportionately minorities.  People without health insurance in Georgia are also disproportionately minorities.  Grady also has a stigma of race left over from past decades when people referred to the hospital as “The Grady’s”.   Morehouse, one of the few African American medical schools has said that if Grady Closes, they too may have to shut their doors.

Still, race here, while legitimate, is only an issue.  It’s not The Issue.  The issue is that letting Grady close is flat stupid and no one seems to have the courage to step up and say “Grady will not close, it’s too important an asset, we’ll all accept changes to make it happen”.  If there were a real disaster and Grady was closed, we’d have lost the best level one trauma center south of DC to handle the emergency.  People with real traumas would also lose their access to good care.  Without Grady, more people will die.

Yes, there are racial concerns if Morehouse close, but the real issue of Morehouse closing is that we need Doctors.  Georgia needs all they can get and keeping Medical schools open is important.  Again, if Grady closes and Morehouse closes, there will be fewer Doctors and more people will die.

The Chamber of Commerce recommendations (with which everyone has a complaint, so you know they did something right), suggest keeping the operating authority in place and it’s board in place to address governmental oversight, long term strategic issues, and a link to the communities which Grady primarily serves.  Under that board, would the be board of the Non Profit Corporation which was responsible for running the hospital and health system day to day and doing the general strategic and tactical management necessary to keep the enterprise financially stable.

Who should be on the two boards?  On the Authority board, there should be elected representatives from the City of Atlanta, Dekalb County, and Fulton County.  They should make a bare majority.  Then, representatives from the State, Atlanta Regional Commission, and community groups should also be represented.  Lastly, members of the Corporation Board should have voting power on the new Authority board.  This way, the tax payers who have carried the bulk of the load for Grady will still make a majority of the board and they, via election, would have to be responsive to the people most likely to use the hospital.

The Corporation board will need to be made up of dedicated professionals.  Members of Emory University, Morehouse, business leaders, and experts in financial stabilization such as Lisa Cremin must be on this board.  A balance of financial experts and medical professionals is needed to keep Grady Running.

Further, the goal of both board must be the same:  To financially stabilize and increase the quality of care for all those using the system, regardless of ability to pay.

Grady, perhaps more than any other institution in Georgia calls for a Deming style approach to improve the excellence in the care it provides.  To accomplish this, the focus has to be on the customers.  To make the customers happy, efforts will be needed to make effective use of staff time, to give them incentives to improve things, and guarantees that the system will still be in place.

So far, one politician seems to get this, and he is Lt. Governor Casey Cagle.  Much to the surprise of everyone, he has been out front and recognizing Grady’s importance, keeping it open to those it currently serves, and suing state resources to help fund the transition to a more stable structure that wastes less money.  Working with Senator David Shaeffer, there will be enabling legislation for the changes envisioned by the Chamber Report in the coming session of the Legislature.

As for those who still harp about the loss of ‘Black Power’, this is worth pointing out.  Power, in and of itself, is pointless.  Unchecked, it merely leads to inefficiency… witness the current system at Grady.  The key is not power, but actually doing something to help the people who the hospital serves:  those in great medical need and those without insurance.  A majority of the people using Grady are minorities and so if the system is fixed, the majority who will actually benefit, will also be minorities.

On the outside, the color that matters here is green.  On the inside, the color that matters is red.  If all you can see is Black or White, you’ll never capture enough green to stop the red from hemorrhaging.

That Grady Hospital is in trouble is nothing new, but after talking to physicians that work there, there is new information to add to the mix.

Just in case, you’re unaware, Grady Hospital is in big trouble.  It is again on the verge of closing.  One physician who asked to not be identified said she expects Grady to close before October.  It will simply run out of money and Emory will be financially forced to stop providing free services.

There are several causes here.  One is clearly mismanagement, but that’s not the whole ball of wax.  The Board is at fault, but so are Fulton and Dekalb County who have bickered over funding the hospital and providing alternate clinics for non emergency health care for the uninsured.  Uninsured and Indigent patients make up 60% of the workload of Grady.  Also, as discussed previously, the suburbs leach off of Grady for the most severe cases and don’t provide any funding on their own. Some working at Grady even allege that indigent patients from Cobb, Gwinnett, Henry, and Clayton Counties are brought to Grady and dumped so that hospitals in those communities don’t have to take the hit.  Lastly, as with MARTA, the state has provided nothing but regulation.  They have provided no funding.

Letting Grady close would be a tragedy of untold proportions.  Grady is the best level one trauma center in the country.  If you suffer severe trauma, you want to go to Grady.  Not only is it the best, it’s the only Level One Trauma Center for 100 miles in any direction.  No other hospital in Metro Atlanta can match it’s emergency resources.  If Grady closes, we’re a lot less prepared for a terrorist attack or major disaster.  Keeping Grady open is a matter of Homeland Security.

Doctors working a Grady are disheartened.  Many departments are working on Doctors who are not getting paid.  They are working pro-bono.  As well intentioned as they are, if the choice is going to put in hours a Grady or going to see their kid’s soccer game, Grady is going to lose some hours.  Moreover, Doctors complain of staff shortages, security concerns, and the notion that once an emergency is over, the goal is no longer to give good care, but passable care.  “It’s not what I signed up for” opined one Doctor, “But I have to do something.”   Is that they attitude we want from Doctors?

Asked about solutions, Doctors want a new board and new governing structure.  While there is some skepticism, the opinion seems to be that the Grady Task Force Plan is better than other alternatives out there.  They also want action from the Governor.  The Governor apparently appoints a substantial portion of the Grady Board but has not held those members accountable.  Doctors would like to see a sign that the Governor is aware of the problem and is ready to do something about it.

The irony is that Governor Perdue is perfectly situated to help right now.  He has a surplus of tax revenues which are unassigned.  Right now he can create a Grady Hospital Rainy Day Fund and pledge to help the hospital recover from its current financial crisis in return for reforms that will improve the quality of care and let the hospital reform its structure.  He doesn’t even necessarily have to spend the money.  Simply guaranteeing the Hospitals Debt would go a long way toward helping it come out of the woods.  Even if the bonds came due, he could invest the money and likely not even use half of it.  The problem is that he is unwilling to offer money even if changes are made!  This will not help his political legacy or future.

Allegedly, Perdue has Vice Presidential aspirations.  If he lets the best trauma center close, he won’t be chosen.  If, instead, he shows some leadership and creates a successful program that ensures that Grady Hospital thrives long term, that will get him some notice… and he’d actually do something as Governor!  How about that!

Alabama Governor Bob Riley must be really thirsty, because he wants 18 billion gallons of water from us.  He has threatened to sue the Army Corps of Engineers to get them to essentially drain Lake Acworth, Lake Allatoona, and Carter’s Lake.

Riley wants the water for Alabama and believes that the Army Corps has broken its promises.  For their part, the Army disagrees.  Riley has said that there are uses for the water kept in those lakes and that “It’s not for recreation”.  Riley complains that Alabama towns are in deep trouble and may lose access to water if they don’t get some of ours.

Here are two steps Riley could have taken, but didn’t.  He did not call the Governor of Georgia and ask for help.  If Alabama towns really, honestly, literally are going to be without water, Georgia can help a little, but the need really has to be there and there needs to be evidence of steps taken to economize the resources that are there.

That includes stopping to flow of water to Golf Courses.  That’s a step Georgia could take as well.  The Environmental Protection Agency already has safety concerns about golf courses and water use.  Limiting the amount of water they use could help all of use dramatically.  Two steps can immediately help here.  Water only the greens and water them only after sunset.  This reduce the amount of water a Golf Course uses by up to 80%.  Also use gray water for this.  The grass is less picky about the kind of water used.  That lets the most expensive, processed water go to the schools and homes that need it.

Until Governor Perdue hears from Governor Riley, he should urge the corps to maintain appropriate reservoir levels at Georgia’s Lakes.  Our citizens have needs as well and our growth rate is higher.  We’re all going to have to conserve and use water more economically, but over time, Georgia is going to keep more of its own water as our population is growing.

If there is one case that the Atlanta Police and Fulton County District Attorney’s Office has to handle it’s the case of the Cabbage Town Kidnappers.

If you’re not familiar with this, at 2:30 AM on July first, two attorneys from prominent legal organizations were kidnapped outside of a nightclub.  They were not freed until 15 hours later.  The names of suspects have not been released.

Nothing.  Absolutely nothing will shut off tourism and confirm white flight fears of downtown faster than kidnappings.  While it is horrible that this happened, and the kidnappers were just plain stupid to attack someone who worked with the Public Defenders Office, this is a chance at redemption for the police department.  Heaven knows they need it.

If the police get this case solved quickly and by the book, their reputation will be partially restored.  If they give the D.A. a case that is easy to prosecute that will help too.  The District Attorney then needs to make it very clear that kidnappers will swiftly receive the full impact of justice.

The Mayor, Convention and Visitors Bureau, and club owners then need to work together to make sure that this does not happen again.  That means more police at various clubs at all hours of the night.  It means that the police are going to have to work harder and smarter and may not be able to take as many side gigs.

So far, people have felt safe moving back into the city, but if another kidnapping happens, or if worse, one is successful, those condos will become very inexpensive very quickly and Real Estate Developers will egg on an already eager legislature to punish the city.

The Mayor specifically needs to get her hands dirty here.  She needs to find the money to hire more officers, pay them more, and make sure they’re not corrupt.  She then needs to publicly put pressure on Chief Pennington to make real changes and to cooperate with the Union.  She needs to get businesses to help with some support for officers and the families.  Then, we need the cop on every corner pledge.

Downtown, you need to always be able to see a police officer.  Chicago did this in the 1970s and it made a huge difference.  Literally, there was a cop on every block, all the time.  From Castleberry Hill to the Fox and from Centennial Park to the King Center, any should be able to simply say, “Excuse Me, Mr. Officer?” and get  immediate friendly help.

Do that and downtown booms.  Fail to do that, see one major crime happen, and the whole city will lose 20% of the its property tax value over night.