With 2019 and her first anniversary as mayor of Atlanta looming, Keisha Lance Bottoms did something last week that she had actively shunned since taking the oath of office.
The mayor paid a visit to the offices of the newspaper that has produced much of the disturbing news coming out of her domain, to meet with both editors and reporters.
No peace treaty was signed, but ice was broken. Bottoms may have walked into the Journal-Constitution offices channeling Marie Antoinette, but she left unscathed — perhaps feeling more like Danielle exiting the lion’s den.
“It’s been a hard year,” the mayor of Atlanta began. “If I had to describe this year, I would say it’s an ‘in spite of’ year.” A few metaphors followed: Building an airplane while flying it, fighting with one hand tied behind one’s back, and Sisyphus-like efforts to roll the boulder up the hill, only to see it tumble back down.
It is hard to exaggerate the siege mentality that has dominated large sections of City Hall over the last several years. Bottoms’ predecessor, Kasim Reed, had a famously pugilistic style when it came to critics, including the press. Especially the press.
Stonewalling media requests for documents was a favorite pastime of the Reed administration that lost whatever charm it once possessed when federal prosecutors began collecting guilty pleas for bribery and such.
Bottoms was Reed’s choice to replace him. But her first-year inheritance has been the obligation to fulfill that blocked demand for public records. Her office has received nearly 400 requests so far. Many of them have produced painful headlines. Then there has been the need to rebuild lost trust within a 15-member City Council.
All that, and learning to be a mayor at the same time.
“Every single thing that you do and say is covered. This year, it’s been covered not just by the media, but also, we’ve had a lot of attention from the [U.S. Department of Justice],” Bottoms said. “We’ve had a good year. Sometimes, we have to see it to be reminded of it, and quite frankly, sometimes we can’t look to you all to see it. We have to remind ourselves.”
The hard news coming out of our hourlong session with Bottoms was her decision to rebid lucrative airport concessions contracts that have been placed on hold for more than a year by the corruption investigation. “We are going to start over,” the mayor said.
Bottoms said she doesn’t know where the federal probe is going.
“Much of my sense of the investigation comes from what you all report. We have specifically asked if there are still people working within City Hall that we need to fire or be aware of,” she said. “We haven’t received that information one way or the other. It would be great if we could.”
However, the mayor said her administration is playing ball with investigators in a way that Reed’s office did not. Even so, a sense of conspiracy clearly lingers.
“This may not be fair to you all or the DOJ, but I kind of put you both in the same bucket. We’ve just been much more open. I put you in the same bucket because – a lot of the subpoenas we receive are in tandem to the open records requests, and vice versa. I don’t know if you all are following them, or they’re following you,” Bottoms said. “But it seems to go hand in hand.”
Beyond that, the mayor spoke of the learning curve she has endured. The Gulch project, a $5 billion effort to reclaim an abandoned portion of downtown Atlanta with nearly $2 billion in public financing, became a course in coalition-building. She needed eight council votes. Finding them was a messy business, but council members J. P. Matzigkeit and Dustin Hillis, both representing north Atlanta, “were our rams in the bush,” Bottoms said.
The expression is Old Testament. Look it up.
“It wasn’t pretty, but we made it,” she said. “I think what we underestimated was that we had a new council. Over the last eight years, there was more of a trust factor in giving and receiving information, from a large bloc of council – that was obviously not there when we went for the Gulch. With some of our newer council members, we thought there could be a point of satisfaction. There never was one.”
What may be most refreshing about Bottoms is her willingness to express vulnerability. For instance, there was her description of a first meeting, last January, on the upcoming Super Bowl.
“I almost had an anxiety attack,” the mayor said. She got over it.
Caution appears to be a reflex more instinctive than learned. Invited to comment on reports that the NFL’s policy on kneeling protests during the national anthem had made it harder to find half-time entertainers, Bottoms declined.
“I have my personal thoughts on the stance that the NFL has taken, but I don’t think that it’s appropriate for me to insert my personal opinions into whatever business decisions they’ve made,” the mayor of Atlanta said.
Bottoms was likewise circumspect about her recent meeting with Gov.-elect Brian Kemp. I asked the mayor if she had spoken of the current Republican effort in the state Capitol to put Atlanta-owned Hartsfield Jackson International Airport under some sort of state authority. The city is opposed, of course.
“I don’t get the impression that it’s something [Kemp] is going to sign on his first day in office. But I felt we had been heard,” Bottoms said.
I’ve saved the most interesting portion of Bottoms’ AJC conversation for last. I asked the mayor to describe her relationship with her predecessor over the last year. “I don’t talk to Mayor Reed nearly as much as when I was on City Council,” she replied.
There was a follow-up. Pressed on which former mayor of Atlanta she leans on most for advice, Bottoms was diplomatic. All of them, she said. Andrew Young had encouraged her to make the trip to AJC headquarters, Bottoms noted. Shirley Franklin had texted her only the day before.
The next question to Bottoms was perhaps the most revealing: What has been your biggest surprise as mayor?
“The number of people who sit in front of me and don’t tell me the truth,” the mayor quickly said. She did not name names. She then shifted to another lesson that 2018 presented.
“I’m an introvert who masks as an extrovert. So I’m much more comfortable doing the work than being out, selling the work and taking credit. That has been part of the challenge,” Bottoms said. “People are trying to get to know me and understand me. Everybody assumes that somebody else is making decisions and giving directions – and not realizing that, by and large, with the help of a great team, it’s me.”
Thanks for dropping by, Mayor Bottoms. Come back again any time.
About the Author
