marta is calling today for the governor, the lieutenant governor and the speaker of the house to convene a special session of the legislature to deal with the marta funding issue.

according to the marta release:

MARTA Board of Directors today urged Governor Sonny Perdue, Lt. Governor Casey Cagle and House Speaker Glenn Richardson to call a special session to deal with transportation and MARTA funding issues. During their 2009 General Assembly, state legislators failed to pass critical legislation providing regional or state transportation funding and lifting restrictions on the use of MARTA’s capital reserve funds. The Georgia General Assembly ended last Friday, April 3. During the 2009 legislative session, MARTA petitioned state lawmakers to grant the authority access to $65 million in its capital reserve account to fund a significant gap in its operating budget.

“I can’t emphasize enough how critical it is that MARTA be allowed flexibility to use its reserve account to fund operation of the system. I commit to you that the MARTA Board is looking for all ways to cut expenses and run this system as efficiently and effectively as possible,” said MARTA Board Chairman Michael Walls. “We implore the state to please reconsider this issue so that during this difficult economic time we can keep this essential transportation service running, which acts as a lifeline for so many people.”

(full press release here)

please help with this. please.

take 30 seconds and call the governor at 404-656-1776 and ask him to convene a special session of the legislature.

then take 30 seconds and call the lieutenant governor at 404-656-5030.

by the way, i just did this. the governor’s office told me to call my legislator, so i am not expecting a ton of leadership from him on this.

at casey cagle’s office they did discuss the issue with me and get my contact information. then again casey wants to be governor so he has some incentive.

please flood our elected leaders. let them know that you want to see some leadership on this.

Ever heard this one? It’s a good one. Alison Krauss belts out this song by, oddly enough the English band, Bad Company. Krauss and Union Station’s arrangement of the tune has a decidedly southern feel.

“Oh, Atlanta, hear me calling, I’m coming back to you one fine day. No need to worry, there ain’t no hurry, ‘Cause I’m, on my way back to Georgia, On my way back to Georgia.”

If you’re a fan of the ATL, maybe crank this as you taxi down Hartsfield-Jackson or sit in traffic on 75 north.

I went to the Coathangers CD release show at The Earl Saturday with a friend.  This makes three times I’ve seen the Coathangers, and the third venue.  The show did not disappoint, but previous shows at the Drunken Unicorn and Lenny’s had more lively crowds.  The girls were good, but I felt like they should have been playing a crowded, sweaty house party instead of The Earl.  I don’t mean that as a knock on the band’s ability – they seem to be having so much fun on stage, that they deserve to have a crowd showing equal levels of abandon.

I’ve got a few friends who can’t stand the Coathangers, but I’ve always liked them.  What can I say, I enjoy a lively show.  Still, they’ve definitly progressed as a band.  I’m not intimately familiar with their set list, but what I presumed were newer songs have more layers and depth to their sound if not always their lyrics.  [Update: I should note that when I say their new songs have "layers" and "depth", I mean relative to their old songs. The basic equation has not changed, and they are still a fairly sloppy garage-band kind of group.]

I got to the Earl in time to see one of the opening bands, Chopper.  Someone listened to a lot of Motorhead, which is generally a very good thing.  Suffice to say, they are quite different from the Coathangers.  I thoroughly enjoyed them, however.  They had some dirty, dirty guitar riffs and bass guitar.  Chopper itself was worth the price of admission.

dear georgia republican party,

f you.

i am about the last guy you could have afforded to piss off. well maybe not exactly, but i am an rnc donor, volunteered for mccain, voted for sonny and casey a few years ago.

i believe in limited government and lower taxes. i believe charity is best left to private sector. i believe that government ought to stick to functions where there is a societal need and the market isn’t capable of providing a competing service. in short, i am your voter.

let’s go back to that last piece though. one of the places where it has been proven, over and over again, that government is needed is municipal mass transit. a strong mass transit system relies on government funding and is necessary to a good urban quality of life. and yet, despite this , the jokers in the georgia republican party that run this state decided to say fu to public transport.

so as a marta commuter, i say fu right back.

the funny thing is marta wasn’t even asking for new money. all they were asking for was to be able to use all of the money that is collected through sales tax in fulton and dekalb for operations. read that, not a state sales tax, a sales tax in two counties.

for those of you who don’t know about this, marta is forced by it’s absurd enabling law to put aside 50 percent of it’s sales tax regulation into a captial fund. no other transit system has to do this. just marta. why you ask? simple, the legislators at the time wanted to keep marta poor so it couldn’t offer free rides. that’s it. no other reason.

and despite all that, you couldn’t find a way to release this money so marta can keep operating. i ride marta every day. how many members of the martoc, including it’s inept chairwoman, jill chambers, can say the same? i ride it and more than 100,000 other people depend on it to get to work. and you are letting it starve.

why? i really don’t know. i don’t understand the legislative chicanery that led to this, but i know that there should have been a way to get it done. and you failed.

there is no telling what marta is going to have to do now. close bathrooms, eliminate weekend service, cut back bus routes? who knows. you could had prevented it, and you didn’t.

so screw you.

in my opinion you have no proven that you are completely incompetent to run this state. i will continue to vote for republicans at the national level, but next time i see a georgia office i am voting for the libertarian.

hope you got a few votes out of butts county out of this, because you lost one in fulton.

sincerely,

james hervey

I have an eight month old dog that needs lots of exercise.  This week has been rough – I’m sure many readers with dogs can relate.  Lots of rain means lots of playing inside, jogs in the intervals between storms, and just accepting a certain level of hyperactivity.  I can do a decent job wearing him out, but I’m not so hot at the kind of play a puppy needs.  Friday I decided to take the dog over to Piedmont Park to play at the dog park.

Piedmont Park is doing renovations on the regular dog park, which means that for a year they have fenced in an area under the bridge near the old dog park.  I have been to it a few times since it opened, and hadn’t been terribly thrilled, but I had reserved judgement.  Friday, I made up my mind.

It might be the worst dog park I’ve been to.  Piedmont Park used to have a nice big dog park that wasn’t terribly busy during the week.  They kept plenty of mulch on-site, and drainage was good enough that even on damp days there was plenty of usable land. I had gotten to know a few of the other regulars of the last few months.

The new park is tiny, for starters.  It is maybe a quarter of the size of the old park.  I could get over that, but there is no mulch whatsoever to help with the mud.  Also, the water spigot is in the dead center of the park.  I don’t think they paid any attention to drainage, so even on a nice day there is a persistent mud pit in the center of the park.  On a day like yesterday, the entire park was two inches deep in mud.  It was completely unusable.

I hope it gets better, but in the mean time I’ll be spending more time at Park Grounds.  Park Grounds is good, but Piedmont Park is five minutes from my house.  This also makes the second dog park near me that is either gone or unusable.  I used to walk up to my old middle school, Inman, for an impromptue dog park every afternoon on a ball field.  It was a great neighborhood social hour, all the dogs were very nice, and it was half a mile from home.  Well, a few months ago the school came out and told us the fun was over, they were going to need the field for sports.  I knew it was only a matter of time, but it was still disappointing.

It isn’t just that I have to drive further for the dog to go play.  I’ve lost access to two communities. Oh well. What can you do?

okay, atlanta, it’s friday, right? opening up a thread here to hear (like that homonym?) what you are up to this weekend.

this author is (apparently) hitting thrift stores on saturday with his buddies wiggidy and the bermanator – quick aside, could i have written a sentence more like gareth from the bbc version of the office? – which will probably be capped off with dinner at fox bros bbq. sunday brings about house cleaning, but not unitl sunday cinema club at midtown arts.

so that’s me. how about you?

The Majestic - image by rustytanton

Thursday nights are my Friday nights.  I have two classes downtown from about 4:30-9:45, and no classes on Friday, so when I am done with my last class for the week I always want to go do something.  Last night, I called el hermano and we went to the Majestic for the first time in while.  The Majestic itself was rather anti-climactic, but what happened afterward made my night.

I was standing outside after dinner, sharing a smoke with el hermano, when we were approached for a cigarette by what was clearly a transvestite with bad makeup.  After bumming a smoke, she introduced herself as “Cat.”

“Cat?” I repeated.  I have a hearing problem.

“Alley Cat,” she said with a wink.  “I’m not homeless,” she said before beginning to explain that she had AIDS, and pulled out a piece of paper with a Grady Health System logo on it.  She looked a little rough – I knew where this was going.

“Sorry, dude, we don’t have any cash,” I said, which was actually true for once.

“I’m not a dude, I’m a shim.”  Doh.  I was afraid I had offended her.  I really hadn’t meant anything by it – it just came out.  I backtracked a little.

“I guessed that.  But I call everyone dude. I didn’t mean anything by it.”  I don’t call everyone dude.  I have no idea what protocol is here.  I can’t decide if I’m amused by this exchange or kinda sketched out.  “Seriously though, we don’t have any cash.”

“That’s okay.  I don’t really have AIDS.”  She smiled and she sashayed away.  It is settled.  I am amused.  In fact, it made my night.

Last night in the ladies at Elliott Street Deli & Pub (best sanny in town BTW) as I reached for a paper towel I eyed a sticker on the dispenser for Earth Hour. It’s been there for over a year, I remember roughly when it went up, I remember turning our lights out that night in observance, unplugging all our excessive doo-dads and harassing a smattering of friends and family about it.

I remember watching the giant Coke bottle go dark on 11Alive, and the shots of downtown that should have been darker than they were.

This year I put it on my calendar, accepted a facebook invitation to attend and made a mental note: none of which actually helped me remember to observe it.

Did anyone else?

I didn’t see anything on the news or in the media attempting to build hype like we had last year. I didn’t see people twittering about it or hear any buzz at the water cooler.

What’s changed in a year? Are we far enough removed now from Al Gore and his interwebs and indie movie that we’ve already forgotten or it’s just not trendy? Is it like the drought and our forgetting how to conserve over the course of the winter and thinking that a few days of good rain are going to save us from ourselves?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m guilty – I forgot. That said, I’m also pretty sure I was passed out cold at 8:30 last Saturday night.

Did you remember / observe? Do you care?

My friend Andrejs invited me out to The EARL last night to see Mary O. Harrison and The Tiny Tears.  Mary O. Harrison is a pop songwriter from Atlanta whose music jumps from singer/songwriter, raucous rockers to Burt Bacharach/Stereolab styled gems.   A multi-instrumentalist, Harrison transitions seamlessly from guitar, keyboards to flute, sometimes all within one song and while singing.

With a brand new drummer backing her, Harrison and the band sounded tight and were obviously having fun on stage.  Playing songs from her 2008 record, Factory of Days, and several new songs, Harrison showed a wide range of songwriting skills.  The band ended the set with an anthem about “Facing my maker.”  The song slowly built and ended with an extended 2 chord jam.  Another highlight was the song, “My Old Island.”  The song blends Bacharach sensibilities with a Stereolab vibe.

You can listen to her entire album on her site, http://www.maryoharrison.com/.

You can catch Harrison preforming a solo acoustic show, April 18th on the Planet 420 Stage at SweetWater’s annual Earth Day Celebration in Candler Park.

http://www.myspace.com/maryoharrison

We have a bit of an exclusive here – word comes from a trusted source The AJC reports that Lisa Borders is indeed going to be, um, re-throwing her hat into the ring for Atlanta Mayor.  She’ll be announcing at City Hall at 11am, which will be streamed live at Tondee’s Tavern, but also here.

Maria Saporta reported that Borders would be getting into the race last week, but Borders had not confirmed the report.  Borders got out of the race in August to help take care of her ailing parents.  Her personal situation has changed (she’s gotten help taking care of her folks, essentially), making the race possible for her now.

For those of you who may not follow politics, you can see my previous writings on this subject on my personal blog.  The basic run down of Borders positioning in the race, however:

• Borders was generally seen as an ally of Mayor Franklin, but Kasim Reed probably will end up being tagged as part of the “Franklin machine” or whatever you care to call it.  He was her campaign manager and a major ally while at the State Senate.
• Borders has extensive connections with the business community (she is a former VP at Cousins, and is currently president of the Grady Health System Foundation), and I these relations have convinced her to get back into the race.  None of the existing candidates ever had their trust – Borders carries much more gravitas than Mary Norwood, and more business experience than Kasim Reed (or Norwood, for that matter).
• At one time, Borders was seen as the front runner.  Now? who knows.  She’s behind in fundraising and getting in and out of a race tends to lower a candidate’s stock (see: Ross Perot).  Also, Mary Norwood and Kasim Reed have been building their networks and gathering supporters.

I’m told that Borders plans to emphasize her Atlanta roots and personal story (single mother, child in school at Westminster, deep family history in Atlanta’s civil rights and church community, she was recently a victim of home robbery).  I’m also told she will have a “5-year plan” for each department – obviously I’d like to know more but the cynical side of me knows that in politics sometimes it is enough to say you have a plan since not many folks are willing to get into the details.

Will it be enough?  Personally, I’m less interested with a personal story, and more interested with concrete plans for the major issues facing the city.  I want to hear plans for crime and reforming the police department that amount to more than just more police officers, among other things.