As snowflakes began to fall Tuesday, political partners Gov. Nathan Deal and Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed shared the stage at a luncheon honoring influential Georgians.
By midnight they stood before a national audience trying to explain their response to a winter storm that left thousands stranded in the region’s worst traffic jam in decades.
The embarrassing traffic fiasco, which trapped drivers in cars for more than a day and students in schools overnight, presents the state’s two most prominent leaders with a political crisis.
Deal, who was inaugurated in the midst of a crippling 2011 ice storm, confronts unyielding criticism as he wages a competitive re-election bid. And Reed, who recently began his second term, is carefully trying to avoid slamming a GOP ally even as his own response comes under attack.
“I’m not going to get into that blame game, but the crisis that we are going through is across the region,” Reed said during a Wednesday morning press conference, defending his administration’s work in pre-treating roads and mobilizing first responders. “If you look at anybody’s streets in any community across the entire region, there’s no one doing a better job than we are in the city of Atlanta.”
Still, both men have been roundly criticized — nowhere louder than by outraged voices on social media — for underestimating a storm that dumped two inches of snow across most parts of metro Atlanta. The snowfall spurred a near-simultaneous release of students, office workers and government employees who clogged interstates and blocked transportation crews trying to treat roads. Many drivers were still stuck deep into Wednesday.
It was a failure Reed quickly acknowledged, advocating that officials should have implemented a “staggered release” that involves the dismissal of students first, then private-sector businesses and lastly government staffers. How that would be successful — presumably as working parents would want to be home when students arrived — remained unmentioned.
The bipartisan political duo, who have worked closely on high-profile business deals and the push to deepen Savannah’s port, apologized for mistakes made but said they were reacting to the best information available at the time.
“We can never promise, because it would be an unrealistic promise, that we will always be correct when it comes to deciding what Mother Nature is going to do because she truly does have a mind of her own,” said Deal, who judged the state’s response as “reasonable” but apologized for the gridlock that ensued.
The governor largely escaped widespread criticism during the ice storm of 2011, given that it happened as he prepared to take office. Not so this time, when he was lambasted for earlier comments that it was an “unexpected storm.”
Local and national forecasters predicted the storm as early as last weekend. And AccuWeather issued an alert Monday that the storm, in combination with an area unaccustomed to snow, would virtually shut down transportation regionwide.
Deal walked back his comments at a combative press conference, saying he meant that the severity of the storm was unexpected. If he had shuttered state government needlessly, he said, he would have been accused of “crying wolf.”
The two, who Reed recently dubbed as a “Batman and Robin” pair, pushed back against assertions that lessons from the 2011 storm have already been forgotten.
Reed, taking pains to note that his office isn’t responsible for interstates nor school closings, said a more coordinated effort has already yielded a better response than in 2011. Then, city and state officials waited days to respond to a weather debacle that left the city paralyzed.
Since then, Atlanta has dramatically upped its number of trucks and equipment, he said.
“All I want the people in the city and region to know is we are not sitting around twiddling our thumbs,” Reed said. “We’ll take the criticism about what should have happened fast, but we definitely have coordinated more than we ever did in ‘11.”
For both men, the timing is far from ideal. Reed is already grappling with the Atlanta Braves’ decision to bolt downtown for suburban Cobb County and the defeat of political allies in the November election despite his efforts to keep them in office.
For Deal, who is challenged by three opponents, the stakes are measurably higher. Democrat Jason Carter, who will bring a well-funded campaign, has declined to comment. But other high-profile Democrats are taking aim, as are his GOP challengers, Dalton Mayor David Pennington and state Schools Superintendent John Barge.
Pennington said the governor “failed miserably,” and Barge said leaders should have “erred on the side of caution” and shut down schools and offices.
“When you’re talking about children’s’ lives, I’ll take heat for closing,” Barge said, “especially when it involves safety.”
When pressed, Barge said he declined to urge the schools to close on his own for fears of “overreaching.”
Other critics of Deal and Reed have to walk a fine line to avoid ruffling feathers within their own parties. State Democratic Party Chairman DuBose Porter focused his ire solely on Deal, who he said “got caught with his britches down.”
“This is only two inches of snow. Imagine if it had been more than that, what shape would the state be in?” Porter said. “Either way, he got caught with the state unprepared.”
