Big to-do list for new Atlanta mayor

The city of Atlanta is facing serious problems that the next mayor must urgently address.

Allow me to summarize the most pressing:

? The city’s bonds have been downgraded to one rank next to junk bonds

? There is a $1.2 billion shortfall in the city’s pension funds, with the city spending an astoundingly high $100 million annually to reduce this shortfall.

? The cost of replacing the city’s sewer and water infrastructure has escalated from $3.2 billion to $4.1 billion, with water bills unaffordable to poor and moderate-income residents.

? A 2009 audit of the Finance Department by the accounting firm, Deloitte and Touche, indicated a department “in disarray.”

? A 2009 audit of the Atlanta Department of Watershed Management revealed “$50 million in delinquents and a failure to collect millions more every year.”

? A 2009 audit of the fleet management concluded that “there are $11.2 million in cost over-runs.”

? A recent study of Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport stressed that “cronyism continues to dominate contracting and purchasing to the disadvantage of the taxpayers.”

What should the taxpayers expect from Atlanta’s next mayor?

1. An update of the city’s turnaround plan: The city’s turnaround plan was brilliantly performed pro bono in 2002 by Bain & Company. There is a desperate need for an updated turnaround plan as well as a city management review by one of the major management consulting firms. The city needs an updated professional plan to be implemented by Atlanta’s next mayor.

2. Significantly reduce the city’s budget: The city’s turnaround plan of 2009 recommended studying whether to out source 12 city services, including garbage pick up, fleet management and maintenance, information systems, airport management and operations, parks and recreation, policing by non-sworn officers, road maintenance, wastewater treatment and water.

In the last eight years, not one of these services has been out sourced. Atlanta’s next mayor should give outsourcing — with guidelines — a priority to significantly reduce the city’s budget. In addition, the city’s turnaround plan recommended performance-based metrics to weed out under-performing employees. This, too, has never been implemented and should be implemented without delay by the next mayor.

A third step to significantly reduce the city’s budget is for the next mayor to appoint a professional oversight committee of volunteer CPA’s and professional engineers to review the city budget line by line to recommend significant reductions, including a better solution to the $1.2 billion shortfall of the pension funds and more cost effective engineering of the $4.1 billion sewer and water infrastructure.

3. The city of Atlanta needs professional city management: The next mayor must appoint a professional city manager and professional department heads. Even a city as small as Bal Harbour, Fla., employed a professional city manager with a master’s degree in public administration. To turn around the city, Atlanta’s next mayor must assemble the best and the brightest in the critical positions of chief of staff, chief financial officer, chief operating officer, city attorney, human resources director, planning and community development director, police and fire chiefs and watershed management director.

4. Atlanta’s next mayor must work closer with the City Council: I have met with the mayor one on one only twice during the last eight years. This is a comment that I have heard from eight of the 15 City Council members. The next mayor must have a much closer relationship with the City Council.

5. Listen carefully to the voice of the people. During the last eight years, Mayor Shirley Franklin and her senior staff have taken umbrage at any criticism. The next mayor should listen to citizens and act on their concerns.

Atlanta has the potential for greatness. But there is a crying need for a mayor with courageous leadership and professional management. These are the qualities that the taxpayers expect of their next mayor.

John S. Sherman is president of the Fulton County Taxpayers Foundation.