1 Boring Old Man

Seldom-Heard Compliment for Atlanta’s Mayor: ‘You Were Right’
New York Times
By SHAILA DEWAN
September 7, 2009

ATLANTA — Over the last 18 months, it has seemed as if the recession is foreclosing on yet another victim: the legacy of Mayor Shirley Franklin of Atlanta, the first black woman to lead a major city in the South. Mayor Shirley Franklin, right, said of being criticized: “I have a bull’s-eye on my chest. I ran for mayor. I knew that when I ran.”

Mayor Shirley Franklin, nearing the end of her tenure, was criticized in January 2008 when she warned of a financial crisis. Forgotten were the plaudits in Time and Newsweek. Standing ovations were replaced by boos and shouts. City tax revenues sank, exposing a barnacled mess of poor accounting and multimillion-dollar errors that stretched back years. After four rounds of layoffs, the mayor, nearing the end of her second and final term, imposed furloughs on city employees and presided as garbage went uncollected.

Critics sneered that Ms. Franklin, for all her accolades as an efficient leader, would leave Atlanta as broke as she had found it. Television reporters asked her if she had “checked out.” It was as if someone had taken a metal spatula to the mayor’s Teflon. But Ms. Franklin, a tiny, unflappable woman who always wears a giant flower pinned to her lapel, is beginning to seem more a prophet than a has-been. Some of her fiercest opponents on the City Council have admitted that they should have listened when she warned, months before Wall Street collapsed, that the city’s economy was grinding to a halt.

Ms. Franklin’s remedies, including a property tax increase, have generated bitterness and hostility among constituents. But some who take the long view say she will be better remembered for her major accomplishments, like fixing the city’s medieval sewers, developing an ambitious ring of new parks and trails known as the Beltline and saving the papers of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. from the auction block…

Ms. Franklin squeaked to victory in 2001, vowing to restore confidence in City Hall after an administration that a federal prosecutor called a “cesspool of corruption.” Her openness and lack of racial animosity, a notable trait in Atlanta politics, quickly won admiration from skeptics, including the largely white downtown business community. Ms. Franklin won voter approval for a sales tax increase to pay for a court-ordered $3.4 billion sewer repair project long resisted by the city. In 2005, she won re-election with more than 90 percent of the vote…

But in January 2008, Ms. Franklin went to the Council with bad news. The city had a projected budget gap of $70 million, she said, from a slowing economy, faulty estimates and growing pension and health insurance costs. Longstanding bad accounting practices, which the administration had been taking steps to fix, had helped mask the city’s true financial condition. After a round of layoffs and cuts, Ms. Franklin said a small tax increase was needed to prevent public safety cuts. The Council, which had rarely bucked the mayor, voted unanimously to cut taxes instead…

But even as headlines suggested that the mayor’s reputation was permanently scarred, things began to turn around. Ms. Franklin beat back the Beltline threat. She persuaded the Council to use tax money earmarked for the civil rights museum to pay off the King papers, in the hope that the museum would replace the money with private finances when the economy improved. A new sewer bond issue brought $150 million more than the city hoped.

And in June, the Council, besieged by complaints over the police furloughs, was forced to pass a tax increase more than six times higher than the one the mayor recommended in 2008 — in an election year. In late August, the mayor announced that the city was back in the black. But she did not revel in the news, or dwell on posterity. “If you have to worry about your legacy,” she said, “you don’t have one.” But she added something that had little to do with sewage treatment or parks. “I would hope,” she said, “my legacy would be that a woman was up to the job.”

I first met Shirley Franklin in a Virginia-Highland backyard at a party. She’s a snaggle-toothed black lady with short blond hair and a gravelly voice. She’s got a "spring in her step" even when she’s not walking. I knew I’d vote for her before I even knew who else was running. In Atlanta, we’d had a number of black Mayors – pretty classy people – but they’d ignored the nitty-gritty, the sewers and roads. It fell to Shirley to make up for their inattentiveness. She was personally on the street shoveling asphalt into pot holes in her first few months. She fought with everyone who needed fighting with and pissed off somebody from every angle of Atlanta’s varied pantheon. And she got the job done.

Shirley Franklin did what needed doing whether it made her popular or not. She was a perfect choice for the Atlanta she was elected to serve. In her two terms, she focused us on sewers and sinkholes, on trimming City Personnel, on raising taxes to fit the need. No-glitz Shirley will be a bronze statue somewhere, some day.