Three and a half years ago, just days after Alcide L. Honore and his wife closed on their tony Old Fourth Ward home, someone broke into it. Another burglary soon followed, as well as a car break-in.
“Not too long after that, there was a big issue with the Georgia Tech kids getting robbed,” said Honore, an attorney here in Atlanta.
Now, slowly, things have changed.
Honore said that over the past year, the community has become more vigilant in protecting itself, while the Atlanta Police Department has become more responsive.
“I don’t expect it to change overnight and I would not feel comfortable with my wife walking around the ’hood at night,” Honore said. “But we should feel reasonably safe and secure if we decide we want to walk to the neighborhood grocery store. It feels a lot better these days.”
This morning, Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed will try to put a year’s worth of change into perspective when he delivers his annual state of the city address at the downtown Hilton. The address was originally scheduled for Jan. 13, but was postponed because of the snowstorm.
Based on a series of earlier speeches designed to advance the state of the city, Reed will no doubt recount the successes of his first year in office, where he aggressively followed through on several key campaign promises. But crime, public education, taxes and the nation’s most expensive water bills are also on the minds of Atlantans.
Reed has been touting his successes. He hired more police officers and is paying them better. He reopened each of the city’s 33 recreation centers. He tightened spending and boosted the city’s reserves from $7 million to $56 million. He was able to secure federal funding to build a streetcar system downtown and he has solidified relationships from the Gold Dome to the White House.
Some are still convinced the city still has a long way to go.
Crime is still high, as Reed has acknowledged. Just last week, new FBI data showed that while violent crime rates in Atlanta were only slightly higher than the national figure, the city’s motor vehicle theft rate is 55 percent greater than the national average while the burglary rate is 38 percent higher.
While all of the city’s recreation centers are open, they are not the “Centers of Hope” — facilities that will focus not only on athletics, but also educational, cultural and artistic training — that Reed envisioned.
And although Reed has refused to authorize property tax increases, residents are still hit with high water bills.
John Mangham, who is a CPA and also runs a property management company, said that he has watched his water bill climb steadily. In 2008, his average bill was $45 a month. In 2009 it was $104. In 2010, it jumped to $164.
So naturally, 2011 started out with a boom when he received a $1,835 bill for January for his 1,700-square-foot home in Peachtree Hills.
“The numbers are staggering,” Mangham said.
Barbara Payne, executive director of the Fulton County Taxpayers Foundation, said that will be one of Reed’s many challenges going forward, adding that she hopes that he focuses more on local issues.
“It seems like there is a lot of statewide networking going on, and for me, it feels like he is kind of absent,” Payne said. “APS. APD. The water bills are out of hand. The pensions. Nobody is using the recreation centers like he hoped. It seems like we are chugging along at the same pace. We need more hard hitting, aggressive implementation of his plans.”
The No. 1 issue on Reed’s plate for his second year is turning out to be pension reform.
While he has been able to shave a few million dollars off of pension costs by lowering benefits for new employees, it is still the city’s biggest burden as more than 20 percent of Atlanta’s annual budget goes toward pension payouts. Reed is mulling several options.
Councilman Kwanza Hall, who was first elected in 2005, said that the new administration introduced a “higher level of responsibility, albeit with a lot of new people.”
“The organization has become younger and for long-term sustainability, the organization had to become younger,” Hall said. “But with that, there have been growing pains.”
Hall said that on occasions, the council has felt that the administration has not worked closely enough with them.
But Payne said if anything, she wants Reed to put more “proactive pressure on the City Council.”
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