Mayor makes effort as Council postures

Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin is entirely justified in ignoring the City Council’s posturing on public safety and keeping the padlocks on Fire Station No. 7.

The council has shown no real leadership —- and little credibility —- in addressing Atlanta’s budget woes, especially in the area of public safety.

In fact, the same council that wants to spend $1.1 million to keep an unneeded, century-old fire station open for one small part of the city also can’t find a dime to make sure that Grady Health System’s EMS crews can get to heart attack victims within eight minutes citywide, the standard of care recommended by experts.

And while Franklin deserves criticism for failing to anticipate the depth of the city’s budget woes, the council has subsequently frustrated her efforts to deal wisely with the consequences. Its members largely refused to accept her plan to curtail non-public safety spending and raise taxes slightly. So the mayor, forced to try to cover a $14.6 million deficit the council left her, had to make the hard call not to fill 53 vacant police officer positions. She also ordered Fire Station No. 7 closed, noting that her public safety advisers had concluded that there are four newer stations within three miles and that No. 7, built in 1910, is the costliest facility in the city to run.

Predictably, that decision generated howls of protest in the West End neighborhood served by the station. Closing fire stations is like closing schools. Every neighborhood wants its own and fights to keep it. But Franklin, to her credit, has held her ground.

Not so the council. After the public uproar, council members magically found $1.1 million in other budget cuts —- essentially ordering across-the-board cuts in other city agencies to equal that figure —- and demanded that the money be transferred to the fire department so that No. 7 could reopen.

Franklin vetoed that measure last month. The council overrode her veto on Tuesday, but acknowledged that it probably lacked the authority to make Franklin spend the money the way it wants. They are correct about that. The mayor runs the city. Allowing the council —- especially this council —- to second-guess every administrative decision the mayor makes would be a very bad idea.

If the council really wanted to make a difference, it should have responded when the Fulton County Commission cut off Grady Health System’s subsidy for emergency medical services in the city of Atlanta. Unlike the closing of No. 7, that move clearly jeopardizes the lives of heart-attack and stroke victims by lengthening the time it takes for ambulances to respond to emergencies.

The Fulton commission was wrong to end the subsidy, but other Fulton County cities have stepped in to provide financial relief to their EMS providers so that response times will be maintained. Atlanta, on the other hand, decided to force Grady’s EMS to absorb the entire additional cost of providing the quickest response times, a decision that will cost Grady’s EMS subsidiary at least $6.8 million a year at a time when the public hospital’s overall budget can least afford it.

The hubbub over Fire Station No. 7 and the needless confrontation with Franklin only add to the evidence that this council lacks credibility in dealing with the city’s significant financial problems. A big part of those problems can be traced directly to council decisions in recent years to make employee pension benefits more generous. As a result, those pension plans that are now underfunded by more than $1 billion, and yes, that’s billion with a “b.”

And while Franklin was making a strong case for belt-tightening of non-essential services earlier this year, these council members refused to impose any significant spending reductions on themselves. While ordering Franklin to make additional cuts in other agencies, they awarded themselves an additional $3 million next year to spend on staff, travel and other constituent work. (It’s no coincidence that 2009 is an election year.)

Fire Station No. 7 has come to symbolize the Atlanta City Council’s inability to grasp the seriousness of the city’s budget straits. Because of this and so many other refusals to face reality, Mayor Franklin should ignore the council’s override of her veto.

—- Mike King, for the editorial board (mking@ajc.com)