Bloglanta

In New York, the MTA is radically shaking up how they manage the various train lines that run through the city.

Each Train line will now have its own manager, who is personally accountable for the on time performance, security, and cleanliness of their line. Their names will be public and their job performance will depend on how well their line is run.

Perhaps MARTA needs to do the same thing for the trains and bus lines. Can you imagine if, rather than contacting a public relations department, you could personally confront the person in charge of that particular line when you had a problem?

Perhaps a Union Rep could also be assigned to each line, and they would be required to listen to and address public concerns. (this seems like a pipe dream, but what the heck)

Further, employee bonuses could be pegged to the lines that had the most courteous staff and on time performance.

If nothing else, it would create meaningful benchmarks for the people administering the system.

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!

DragonCon Junior, AKA Anime Weekend Atlanta, has hit and it has twice the orientation acceptance yet an average age of attendance of half of DragonCon.

If you live in Atlanta, you know the wildest party of the year if DragonCon.  In fact, it’s the wildest party Atlanta has seen since Freaknik.  It’s people in all manner of get ups invading downtown for the weekend and essentially shutting down Peachtree Center.  We all know it’s wild, we all know it’s licentious (if you’re doing it right), and we all know we want those tourist dollars.

Many of you may be unaware that about 20% of the people who went to DragonCon will come back inside the perimeter this weekend to put their Bleach costume back on and go to AWA.  People come from Florida, Tennessee, Chicago, Texas, and even Japan to participate in the convention.  Thousands of people attend and thousands dress in costume.  The Waverly and Galleria are used almost exclusively for the conference (in fact, if you’re part of the Log and Timber Show, you’re in for a surprise).

What makes AWA interesting is that while it’s nominal focus and events are more narrowly targeted, the anime focus makes explicit more of the funnier and more adult parts of DragonCon.  This while the audience is generally younger.  While topics focus heavily on anime, it’s production elements, on creating the costumes, and new releases, there are also elements that acknowledge certain fetishes and those who like them.

There is a sub-genre of anime that specifically deals with ‘boys who like boys‘ and the girls who like them.  At AWA this year, there was a meet and greet specifically for fans of this genre.  This was then followed by another 18 and up session dealing specifically with the art of Japanese Bondage.  What makes this amazing is that because a large minority of the anime produced is expressly sexual in content, the convention reasonably deals with it and expects participants to be generally tolerant if not open and affirming of people of different orientations.  This perhaps reached a fever pitch with an ad hoc march/conga line of the furries through the Waverly.

The people running the convention are walking a very fine line.  They want to attract a diverse audience and give people room to dress up as it ads to the atmosphere.  On the other hand, they are expressly concerned with the well being of thousands of attending children and the concerns of their parents.  Not only have they made some events strictly 18 and up, but they make a serious effort to keep other events G-rated and put serious constraints on what can be put into a costume.  They even (perhaps wisely) have decided that silly string is a weapon.

Still, these restrictions don’t seem to cramp the style of the convention, which has a formal ball, a Jazz night, and a higher percentage of participants in costume than DragonCon.  What AWA needs to do now is add programming.  They have a few tracks, but they are limited.  If the number of participants grows, adding more seminars will give people a place to go, add to the quality of the presentations, and raise the prestige of the event.   That should make the convention managers, Cobb County, and local vendors very happy indeed.

Dear MARTA,

Quick notes for you!

1. Using police officers to shackle teen-agers taking photos of themselves in a MARTA station is overkill.  The same is true when applied to Taiwanese tourists. Anyone with a camera phone or a palm pilot can take a full scale movie of this.  You can’t stop the pictures so use some judgment. If they’re just taking silly pictures of each other, no problem. If they’re taking detailed telephotos of the venting mechanism at Peachtree Center, that’s a different thing. It’s great to see MARTA Police! It’s sad to see them used to silly purposes.
2. You need to replace the maps in the trains as they are missing some cultural landmarks (such as the Children’s Museum & Theatrical Outfit) and list landmarks that have not been downtown this decade (Onstage Atlanta).
3. Run 6 car trains after Braves Games. Patrons are told to spread out on the platform only to have to rush back toward the middle to get on the 4 car trains running that late at night.
4. Please add 802.11 to your radio feeds on the trains and buses. Want to increase use of the system and tourist dollars? If every MARTA station, train, and bus had free internet on it, you’d be in business. Heck, ACVB might help you!

These simple steps will make MARTA a more pleasant place to be, keep your customers, and your revenue stream.

Recently, Gilda’s Club held an event at 2 Peachtree Street.  The results tell a lot of about Atlantans.  It turns out that White native Atlantans had no idea where this was.

This building used to be known as the First Atlanta Tower and the Woodruff Foundation paid to refurbish the building then gave it to the state.  It now houses state departments and some offices of Georgia State University.  For nearly 10 years it was the tallest building in Atlanta and it was the second tallest for another 8 years.  Now, people have forgotten it completely.

Why?  Because for many years, Atlanta wasn’t a city, it was Los Angeles East, and White native Atlantans abandoned downtown as soon as Mayor Jackson was elected.  Part of the culture was the wholesale abandonment of downtown for the mall.  Hence, Rich’s and Davidsons are long gone.  Hence Underground continues to have trouble.  Hence Fairlie Poplar still has not become the nightclub/theatre section of town it is perfectly laid out to be.

The result is that the people who actually knew, or at least deduced, where the building was were all northerners or African Americans.  They were people who had thought about the actual street number and what it meant, something which the white natives apparently no longer do.  They were also the ones who actually knew their way around downtown a little bit.

What Atlanta needs is for the current generation of native Atlantans to actually discover the city part of their city.  They should know where 2 Peachtree is.  They should know where 206 Washington Street is and what is there.  The same goes for 84 Luckie Street.  If Atlanta is to thrive, people need to be able to take advantage of these resources, and to do that, they have to be able to find them without a GPS.

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.

WABE’s HD Radio News Stream is off the air. There is nothing in their website about this problem and it’s been off for several weeks. This is a troubling development. Ultimately, in a battle between news coverage and classical music, the news is going to win, but having an HD channel specifically for it was a great compromise.

Perhaps new staff have determined that the news broadcast was not important to members, but they’re wrong and the decision will come back to haunt them. They may also be fighting other fires.

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting published a study which showed that WABE is among the least diverse stations in the country. With a listening audience that is very diverse, having only one daily host who is not white and no regular news and information programming focusing on the city itself is perhaps of more immediate attention.

Still, as the comments to various posts here have shown, people want the news and cutting off the HD stream is not going to help. WABE should return it to air as soon as possible.

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.