City of Atlanta Malaise

Mayor Reed, at his speech to the Atlanta Press Club last week, Monday January 31, 2011, said there was a *pall* over Atlanta. And that we citizens needed to snap out of it. And think big. Look to pie-in-the-sky dreaming and shiny, glory-ridden kinds of projects to get us over our dark funk. Something along the lines of the Olympic games! Remember those? I hardly do.

The thing about living in COA (City of Atlanta, and I have for over 20 years now) is that it is a city mired in deep, determined, and wearisome bureaucracy. It’s hard to be cheerful, hopeful, have fun and think big when you’re beaten down from years and years of battling bureaucracy, over and over and over again, just for the most simple of services and responses.

My small Home Owners Association (HOA), for example, is beaten down financially with the weight of the extreme water bills we’ve had to pay for almost two years now. I tried, to no avail, to get help from my city council person, with literally reams of documentation sent to that office on this matter. To no avail. I was told we had no problem, and that all was fine. This was over a year ago. We now know there were some extreme problems at the Watershed Dept.

At the time, over a year ago, I went to the Dept. of Watershed management personally. To no avail. I’ve called and emailed, over and over again, assorted local news media personnel. To no avail, despite their numerous media attentions to the matter of city water bills.

And that’s just one department! Every department is a struggle in futility. Just getting a new Herbie Curbie from the city takes a monumental effort of citizen resolve and determination. Just finding an email or a phone number for an APD community contact is a struggle. How many times have we all been put on hold when calling 9-11? And we’ve all heard the horror stories of trying to get a building permit from COA.

After years of doing battle with the bureaucracy that is City of Atlanta, I feel worn down and wiped out. I feel that *pall* Mayor Reed talks about, in my spirit… at the thought of having to do anything that involves City of Atlanta. I think often about about moving out of City of Atlanta now, something I never used to do.

Mayor Reed’s administration seems to be energized to try to break through some of our crippling bureaucracy. I just hope our crippling *pall* doesn’t get to them too. We residents are about as low as we can already go.

We’re looking to Mayor Reed to talk us back up to a point where we can even CONSIDER calling downtown for a new Herbie Curbie, let alone start thinking, with any hope of renewed energies, of anything big and futuristic and hopeful for this city.

UPDATE: As I wrote this editorial, CBS-Atlanta was working-up a classic, un-sexy example of the daily bureaucrat struggles of just one intown Atlanta neighborhood… to add a traffic light or not. See their news package here. This neighborhood had to beat a very loud drum just to get the city to meet with residents and solicit their input over this critical matter. It is also critical that we have local media support by independent news outlets such as CBS-Atlanta to get City of Atlanta officials to just return a phone call or read an email from a resident. Fortunately, CBS-Atlanta is always responsive to residents’ concerns. Always.

Georgia’s Jobs Creation Project Thwarted By Tea Party Binge Drinking

Georgia’s in a bit of a sticky-wicket, eh? The Georgia GOP has been railroaded by the Tea Party Kool-Aid their teenagers were passing around in a patriot-drag party earlier this year. And, like bummer, the reality police have since raided the place.

Well, this rhetorical hangover is sure gonna be a bitch now! Because Savannah area congressional Rep. Jack Kingston got swept back to where he always was (Georgia Congressional District 1) in a I Hate Pork! frenzy, yet is somehow entirely dependent on congressional pork scraps from Obama’s table (otherwise known as earmarks) to fund the Army Corps of Engineers’ ga-zillion dollar project to dredge (deeper) the Savannah harbor.

Remember kiddies, the Army Corps is the bumbling group of engineers who will oversea the Savannah dredging op; the Army Corps’ bumbling engineering projects are funded entirely by earmarks. And talk about another real bummer, Kingston didn’t get appointed head of House Appropriations either. From Politico:

Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.), a tea party favorite who lost out on his bid to chair the House Appropriations Committee, thinks his party may have overreached.

“Let’s look at transportation,” he said Wednesday. “How do you handle that without earmarks, since that’s a heavily earmarked bill? How do you handle a Corps of Engineers project? I think, right now, we go through a period where we have gone one step further than we meant to go, and there are some unintended consequences.”

Among some members — including Kingston and Simpson, both appropriators — there’s a feeling of giving Congress some tough love until it realizes what it’s thrown away.

The suits, especially the ones at the Georgia Ports Authority (GPA), love ’em some federal pork so much that, let’s be honest here folks, they can’t really exist without it. They sure can’t come up with the billions needed to dredge the Savannah harbor all on their own, with just our pittance of state-of-Georgia taxpayers’ money.

But who will they need to call-on and make nice-nice with (soon) to get the pork they indeed DO need to fund lots of stuff the Big Business suits in Georgia, such as Frank Blake of Home Depot, want? Why that Muslim Kenyan in the White House! The kid they’ve kicked around the playground for a couple of years now. Kinda like that gubernatorial candidate, pathetic as he was, that the Georgia bloggers kicked around for a year or so who now has sued their flamer-butts for slander and libel. *gulp* But let’s not diverge under the rock of the Georgia political blogosphere…

So, in this laughable manuever they think the Georgia press won’t tell on ’em about (and knowing the Georgia press they very well may not) the GPA and GOP suits and Frank Blake and his lobbying minions are going to send Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed to pow-wow with, you know, the brother. The one in the White House. Save face with the holy and righteous constituents back home, because it’s not like the white folk GOP leadership in Georgia’s can be seen asking Obama, of all people, for a handout.

I mean, they’d have to stand there, cap in hand, and look the dude they’ve been calling names all this time straight in in the eye and say, *Yes Sir, Mr. President. Whatever YOU say, Mr. President. We know we owe you BIG TIME if you give us Savannah Port earmarks now.*

Hell, if I was Obama I’d make ’em crawl in to the Oval Office on their knees. While wearing those silly hats and breeches the Tea Party drag queens love so much. But I’m sure POTUS is a lot more forgiving than I am.

Don’t the white folk who need Big Federal Money back home in the woods just crack you up? It’s *jobs for Georgia* now though, so it’s all good. Right?