Rick Anderson was a quiet, unassuming civil servant with no accounting background, but when he ventured opinions about municipal revenues and spending, people in government and business listened attentively.
For 20 years he was the city of Atlanta’s budget director and for five more its chief financial officer.
As former Mayor Andrew Young put it, “Rick knew the budget better than anyone in City Hall. He knew where the bodies were buried and the treasures were hidden.”
Richard J. Anderson, 66, died Wednesday at his Gainesville, Fla., home of complications from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. A celebration of his life will be held at 4 p.m. Monday at Matheson Museum in Gainesville. Arrangements are being made for a memorial service in Atlanta near the end of February.
Mayor Young said that when he took office the leadership of the finance department wasn’t nearly as communicative with him as he would have liked.
"Rick was a staff budget analyst at the time, and he did talk to me,” he said. “I came to trust his instincts regarding a wide range of financial matters.”
Young recalled that once, when the city was in a budget pinch, Mr. Anderson was able to recommend a relatively painless remedy: He knew each of its departments had job positions that weren’t filled, and Mayor Young was able to freeze them.
“When Rick looked at a spread sheet, he didn’t see just the numbers,” Mayor Young said. “He also saw the people involved.”
Throughout his 30-year career with the city, Mr. Anderson was a stickler for adhering to its charter and its ordinances. For instance, fee-based services such as trash collection should be self-supporting and new expenses should be matched by new revenue. The hard job of budgeting, he often said, was an art, not a science.
In 1994 Mr. Anderson left his City Hall position, vowing not to return, and for several years was director of financial services for the Atlanta Regional Commission. However, he returned in 2002 as Atlanta’s CFO at the urging of Mayor Shirley Franklin, a longtime friend.
Mayor Franklin said pressing sewer and financial problems made the first two years of her administration especially difficult, but Mr. Anderson was a major player in alleviating them.
“Rick was a master at budgeting, at financial planning, and at relations with the City Council,” she said. “He also had a great love for Atlanta and gave it all of his talent.”
Councilman Howard Shook, former chair of the City Council’s finance committee, said he enjoyed bouncing financing ideas off Mr. Anderson, even when the two of them had to communicate by email after the latter’s retirement and subsequent move to Florida.
“We’ll never see anyone quite like Rick,” he said. “He managed the controls [of the city’s finances] with great skill. He knew the needs of and the threats to the system. He had seen it all and was rarely surprised.”
In addition to his work for the city, Mr. Anderson served on the Atlanta Olympics Organizing Committee and the Georgia State University Foundation board. A GSU graduate with both a bachelor’s and master’s degree, he endowed scholarships at GSU’s Andrew Young School of Policy Studies and at the College of Education at the University of Florida.
Survivors include his wife of 43 years, Barbara Anderson; two sisters Clarice Helfand of Vero Beach, Fla., and Eileen Stephens of Gainesville; and a brother, Bob Anderson of Decatur.
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