To understand why the Beltline matters, you need to walk it.
I’ve walked my dogs (actually, they walk me) or ridden my bike on it countless times. It offers rare moments in the heart of a big city. You make eye contact with people as they move seamlessly from one neighborhood to the next. You get smiles and occasional warnings that someone wants to pass. Heck, people occasionally say “good morning” or stop to ask impertinent questions about your dog’s DNA. You experience something nicely human and tangible in an age of digital isolation.
Moreover, the continuous stream through intentionally natural spaces gives you a glimpse of what a city ought to be – a place where people escape their caves to share some fresh air.
Then you read today’s front page piece by Katie Leslie, our City Hall reporter, and wonder if it all isn’t too good to be true.
If someone doesn’t play statesman soon, it seems there’s more than a passing chance that this new wonder will be stopped in its tracks.
Leslie details the impasse between Atlanta’s municipal government and school system over some serious money that no one can afford to lose. Her story also hints at a familiar cautionary tale about the risks politicians take to bring their visions come to life.
It is also the kind of internecine conflict that ordinary people find sufficiently frustrating to turn them away from politics.
Ryan Gravel, who dreamed up the Beltline when he was in grad school at Georgia Tech, finds the whole thing disappointing. “The world literally is watching us,” he told Leslie. “The idea that we’re going to bicker about this stuff is a little disheartening.”
The seeds for today’s dispute were sewn in the dreamy days before anyone realized the expanding real estate boom was in fact a bubble stretching toward explosion. In 2005, it may have seemed perfectly reasonable to assume that the development along the Beltline would generate barrels of fresh property taxes. In those days supporters believed the Beltline would create 30,000 jobs and spur housing for 50,000 new Atlanta residents by 2030. Eager to tap the inevitable property tax gush, proponents convinced the school board to forgo its share in exchange for cash. They assumed the details would be sorted out later.
Welcome to later.
As we all know, the economy tanked. A lawsuit over diverting school revenues stymied development. Nearly a decade after its auspicious start, the Beltline is way behind in its payments to the school system, which awaits a check for $19 million to bring the city’s account current.
Stuck in the middle is Atlanta Beltline Inc., the nonprofit overseeing the project. Folks at the nonprofit worry that the dispute poses an existentialist threat.
The leaders who struck the original deal – Mayor Shirley Franklin and Superintendent Beverly Hall – are out of the picture for very different reasons. Today’s combatants may remember little or nothing about the understandings that shaped the original deal. In recent weeks, the dispute has degraded to threats and counterthreats. Outgoing Superintendent Erroll Davis is threatening to sue the city while Mayor Kasim Reed retorted that the school system’s rhetoric amounts to hostage taking.
“… For [Davis] to be taking such an aggressive position is disappointing,” Reed told Leslie. “And it’s going to be met with similar aggression.”
Folks, this is a school system arguing with City Hall, not Russia invading Ukraine.
This all reminds me of another of Atlanta’s big ideas — the Olympics. The years leading to the Olympics were no less harrowing — with the same posturing, threats and hostage taking. The organizing committee hated the city; the city hated the organizing committee. The International Olympic Committee hated us all.
But the city and Olympic organizers were blessed with the prospect of eternal humiliation and a non-negotiable deadline – motivations sorely missing now.
Oddly, the stakes now may be just as high. In my view, the Beltline promises a much more lasting effect on the city. If fully realized, it could add a level of coherence to the central city that was destroyed by white flight and the economic stagnation of the last century. It could make Atlanta whole again.
What seems lacking now is leaders able to see the greater good beyond their narrow interests.
Franklin told me last week that she has been surprised by the ugly public fight and believes the city and school system should behave as partners and hash it out. “Solutions are found when parties listen to each other, seek to understand the other side, never give up in tough situations and are willing to compromise,” she said. “Andy Young used to tell his cabinet he expected us to negotiate win/win solutions, because those are the solutions he sought in negotiating with warring parties and as a civil rights leader.”
Surely these lessons were too hard to come by to forget now.
