Reed pledges to aggressively address panhandling

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By Leon Stafford

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

In a meeting Wednesday with the folks that bring conventioneers and tourists to Atlanta, Mayor-elect Kasim Reed got straight to the point on one of their biggest gripes: Panhandling

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A few panhandlers sit on the side of a walkway through the center of Woodruff Park in downtown Atlanta. The walkway is largely used by GSU students and business people going to lunch and class.

Jason Getz, jgetz@ajc.com A few panhandlers sit on the side of a walkway through the center of Woodruff Park in downtown Atlanta. The walkway is largely used by GSU students and business people going to lunch and class.

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"We're going to enforce the ordinances and we are going to fix the panhandling challenge in the city of Atlanta, period," Reed said to rousing applause from members of the Atlanta Convention and Visitors Bureau.

"We are going to deal with this issue in a very muscular way," he said.

Convention visitors have consistently listed panhandling as one of the city's biggest drawbacks when surveyed. City leaders have tried different methods to attack the problem, including outlawing the practice in tourism zones and installing meters for people to donate spare change.

Hospitality is an $11 billion industry in metro Atlanta and much of its health depends on the impression it makes on visitors, industry observers said. That makes addressing the issue critical, they said.

Wednesday's ACVB meeting touched on a number of topics important to the group.

Beverly Scott, general manager and chief executive officer of MARTA, asked ACVB members for their support as she seeks funding for the struggling transit agency. She stressed the importance of MARTA to hospitality and what threatened cuts could mean to the industry.

About 60 percent of workers in the hospitality industry use MARTA, said William Pate, president of the ACVB. During big shows, about 25,000 conventioneers depend on the service.

Cuts "would put additional pressure on the industry at a time when we are starting to see some recovery," Pate said.

Incoming Atlanta City Council President Ceasar Mitchell pledged to have meetings quarterly or every six months to keep the hospitality industry up-to-date on what's going on with the city. He also said it was important that industries that benefit from MARTA do more than offer words of support.

"We can't just be spectators," he said. "We have to be engaged."

While not offering any specifics about how he would address panhandling, Reed said his first push would be to do more to differentiate between the homeless -- which the city has taken steps to address through efforts such as the Gateway Center homeless shelter -- and panhandlers, who he said beg for a living.

"From Day 1, I'm going to separate the two," he said.

Reed said that panhandling hurts low-wage workers most because it scares off consumers.

When a business lays off for lack of customers, "The first people to go are the people who cook the food at the hotels, the people who make the beds in the hotels," he said.