Last month, Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens said he had a “shiny thing” to show President Joe Biden when he was in Washington, D.C. for a mass gathering of mayors. We now know that he wasn’t kidding.
Dickens visited the Oval Office with a small figurine of a self-propelled modular transportation unit — a massive transporter vehicle that’s helping the city make big airport improvements.
“Right now we are expanding Concourse D, thanks to the bipartisan infrastructure law that you put in place,” Dickens told Biden. “And this thing here enables us to build it a mile away and then transport it in with millimeter like precision.”
The quippy video featuring Atlanta’s mayor — posted on the president’s official social media channels — gave us our first look at the role Dickens will play in Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris’ reelection bid.
Infrastructure improvements like the one Mayor Dickens described at Hartsfield-Jackson Airport – the world’s busiest airport – demonstrate that America isn’t done modernizing.
— President Biden (@POTUS) January 26, 2024
The City of Atlanta, like our nation, is on the move. pic.twitter.com/GlKga38p4Y
The nation’s mayors are first-hand witnesses of how the administration funding packages have been spent. In Atlanta, that means expanding the world’s busiest airport with limited disruptions to travelers.
“Mayors are the most critical piece of expansion,” Biden says in the video.
Dickens and U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock are among 50 high-profile Democrats from across the country selected to have a leadership role in the presidential campaign. We suspect this means our first-term mayor may increase his national visibility by serving as a surrogate.
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Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
The city is still struggling to reduce wait times for its 9-1-1 emergency services. At the same time, call volumes increased by 14% in 2023. The Atlanta Police Department told City Council members last week that non-emergency calls are tying up dispatchers.
Last year, of the 1.3 million calls answered by Atlanta’s emergency line, only 45,000 were considered high-priority. Atlanta Police Chief Administrative Officer Peter Aman said during Public Safety and Legal Administration committee last week that only 900 calls in 2023 were related to a shooting or stabbing.
“We have a lot of people calling for reasons that are not emergencies — in fact, they’re not even APD or city of Atlanta-related, ” Aman said. “People calling asking for how to get tickets to a baseball game or football game. We had an individual who wanted help moving a cushion from one couch to the other.
“We have a variety of calls — actually really a mind-boggling variety of calls — that people make.”
Still, wait times on average were reduced from 29 seconds to 24 seconds last year, according to APD. The department is hoping increased staffing and redirecting non-emergency calls through channels separate from the emergency line.
“We’ve made progress in the call time,” Aman said. “(But) that is still too high. We still are having folks hold when we don’t want them to hold at all or hold for longer than is our goal.”
The city is planning a new educational “Make the Right Call” campaign to help residents determine when to call the three-digit emergency line or the administrative number for police.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is also investigating 9-1-1 wait times. If you’ve called 9-1-1 in Atlanta or the metro area and struggled to get through, the AJC’s reporters would like to hear your story through a short survey.
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Got tips, tricks or just want to say hello? Email me at riley.bunch@ajc.com.
Credit: Miguel Martinez
Credit: Miguel Martinez
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