Atlanta Progressive News

(APN) ATLANTA — The Board of Directors of Atlanta Progressive News has endorsed Councilwoman Mary Norwood as the next Mayor of Atlanta, for the term beginning in 2009.

APN will also be issuing City Council endorsements for every seat in the near future, so stay tuned for that.

The following is the explanation for our editorial endorsement of Norwood:

Atlanta Progressive News has conducted in-depth interviews and background research regarding each of the candidates running for Mayor since the weather was still cold this year. Our first Mayoral candidate interview was with Ceasar Mitchell, back when he was running for Mayor [instead of Council President], Council President Lisa Borders had dropped out of the race [before re-joining it], and few people had heard of the Black Leadership Forum.

Some readers have said that APN has conducted the most in-depth research and analysis out of all Atlanta publications, and we tend to agree.

At the forefront of this process has been our mission to empower our readers with the information they need to make an informed choice this election.

In our opinion, outgoing Mayor Shirley Franklin has been a dismal failure: she promoted a panhandling ordinance that infringed on the free speech rights of homeless people; she single-handedly signed off on behalf of the City on the public policy atrocity that was the public housing demolitions in 2007 and 2008; and she oversaw an apparent campaign to sabotage the Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless. On top of that there was the financial mismanagement, the Enron-style accounting [yes, it did appear fraudulent], the bullying of Council, and the non-cooperation with media outlets.

So needless to say, we have a lot at stake, in terms of the future of the working class and even the middle class in this city to have affordable housing, safe streets, and a local government they can trust. There’s already a lot of damage to undo, and we need to move forward, not backward; we need things to get better, not worse.

With that being said, we believe that out of the current set of candidates, Mary Norwood has the best chance of putting families before developers, neighborhoods before corporate interests, and integrity before insolvency.

First of all, out of the three major candidates–Lisa Borders, State Sen. Kasim Reed, and Mary Norwood–Norwood is the most independent from the current political regime.

Borders is positively entrenched, entangled with a web of developer and corporate interests, and was a former executive at Cousins Properties.

Meanwhile, Reed is the former campaign manager for Mayor Franklin. Do we really want the same circle of people for another four or eight years? We at APN don’t think so.

Norwood, on the other hand, is her own political institution. She has spent almost twenty years developing solid relationships with neighborhood leaders, seniors, and community organizations in every geographic area of Atlanta.

And this relates to our second point about Norwood: she is extremely knowledgeable about the inner-workings of the city as well as the diverse leadership and interests throughout our neighborhoods. This will allow her to put together an incredibly diverse coalition of Atlantans in addressing our city’s problems, particularly if she’s elected.

As a former State Senator, Reed has simply not been as Atlanta-focused over the past several years; and frankly, some of recent his statements praising the Gateway Center, homeless czar Debi Starnes, and the Atlanta Housing Authority suggest he hasn’t been paying attention.

As for Lisa Borders, if she is as knowledgeable as Norwood, she hasn’t been demonstrating it. The way the business community reportedly pushed her back into the race–presumably because the other two candidates weren’t bourgeois enough–it doesn’t even seem like she really wants to be Mayor.

Our third point about Norwood is that she is open-minded and accessible. She has returned almost all of APN’s phonecalls since we first contacted her in 2006 regarding her McMansion Moratorium. As we continue to talk to dozens of people all across the City–especially in impoverished areas like Southwest Atlanta–people are saying the same thing: We tried calling everyone, but Mary returned our calls; Mary is the only one who did something.

#4: APN conducted an exclusive analysis of campaign contributions from the Spring of this year, and found that State Sen. Kasim Reed had the most developer and real estate contributions, followed by Borders; Norwood had received fewer than half the donations as either of them had. At the same time, Norwood raised more money than either of her opponents, including pages and pages of large and small donations from retired persons, housewives, and other individuals.

To be sure, we do not really know whether the receipt of campaign contributions from developers means that the candidate has any expectation of favoring the contributors later on, although it’s something to be suspcious about. But we can ask, what is it that developers see in Borders and Reed that they don’t see in Norwood, that would make her the least attractive candidate to developers?

The answer to that has to do with–#5–Norwood’s record of going up against development interests on behalf of neighborhood preservation and affordable housing.

We were impressed by Norwood’s McMansion moratorium, which passed despite non-cooperation from the Mayor, after years of work by the Councilwoman.

More recently, we learned about Norwood’s work on make sure that a portion of federal HOME money–which was going to go into high-density condominiums on Peachtree–into a downpayment assistance program and working and middle class aspiring homebuyers.

Norwood also supported an investigation into the City’s firing of former Chief Arborist Tom Coffin, a veteran progressive activist and former journalist with the Great Speckled Bird.

#6: Norwood also released a comprehensive affordable housing plan, as published exclusively on Atlanta Progressive News, last week. She is the first candidate, to our knowledge, to do so.

After APN’s initial interview with Norwood, where Norwood talked about fixing up foreclosed properties and helping families move into them as a solution to affordable housing. APN challenged Norwood to come up with a more comprehensive plan, as she had done with public safety. Norwood rose to the occasion and produced the plan.

Now, we know that Norwood is not progressive, in terms of our editorial understanding of the rules, but she comes closest out of all the candidates. Since Glenn Thomas dropped out of the race it doesn’t seem like there is any candidate running who we would describe as such.

However, we believe that Norwood is the most likely to be open to hearing from all viewpoints, to including progressive leaders at the table when policy issues arise, and to not necessarily begin with a bias towards developers.

We also know that as our readership grows, more and more people are reading Atlanta Progressive News who may be more moderate than our editorial priorities provide. For those people, we have endeavored to make our decision in this race as transparent as possible so that you can weigh our perceived strengths and weaknesses of the candidates with your own.

To that effect, we should note that we do have some concerns about Norwood. First of all, Norwood has left open the question of whether she supports privatization of city services or not; in a recent debate at Inman Middle School, she said she would support privatization or marketization of specific services if it seemed like the right thing to do. On the other hand, Reed told the AFL-CIO he does not support privatization; that is one of the things that led to his endorsement by the labor unions.

From a policy evaluation standpoint, APN would be hard-pressed to find any instance in which we would support privatization. Privatization of water has been a disaster; privatization of public housing management was obviously a disaster; and, as you can see in our recent coverage, privatization of Grady Hospital has left dialysis patients to possibly die.

We also believe that Norwood’s plan on homelessness needs some work. To be sure, her plan is probably the best out of all the candidates, and that’s not saying a lot.

Norwood did not indicate whether she would support funding for the Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless, whose local funding was cut and national funding was opposed by Mayor Franklin. Norwood said the Task Force needs more security. There’s no doubt that that’s true, but the Task Force also needs the resources to provide that security, and more importantly, greater services.

On the other hand, Reed said he would support the Task Force in his interview with APN. However, when he went on to discuss his affection for the Gateway Center and Debbie Starnes, we wondered whether his support for the Task Force was part of an overall policy position or perhaps an incongruous suggestion by a progressive supporter [State. Sen. Vincent Fort?].

Norwood also has championed a program to get homeless people working, and she cites a program she had developed to get homeless people picking up garbage on Atlanta’s streets for a living.

APN’s concerns about this program–which Norwood would likely seek to expand–are that it can’t just be picking up garbage [the City already treats homeless people like they were the garbage] and it ignores the fact that many homeless people are already working.

Before finalizing this endorsement, APN asked Norwood whether she would be willing to meet with Anita Beaty, the Task Force’s Executive Director, to discuss the issues of homelessness more broadly and the shelter specifically; she agreed to do so.

Some might ask, if Reed is against privatization and in support of the Task Force, why support Norwood who has equivocated on both?

The answer is, in our view, the two do not balance out all of the other issues we have laid out in this piece.

Also, many in the community have expressed concern about Reed coming off as aloof or arrogant, whereas Norwood is open, candid, and personable. This is not only important in terms of developing an intuitive sense of someone as a leader, but also, to the extent that progressives have concerns about Norwood’s policies, we believe she’s approachable; to the extent progressives have concerns about Reed’s policies, we believe this is as good as it’s going to get.

As far as Lisa Borders, we believe that working families of Atlanta are in deep trouble if she is elected. It is particularly ironic that the Black Leadership Forum’s memo would suggest that Black voters unite behind Borders to prevent Atlanta from electing the first White mayor in decades, when Borders seems the most likely to support positions harmful to Black candidates.

Borders’s behavior during the Atlanta Housing Authority debacle was an atrocity; Norwood, on the other hand, supported some Council oversight of the demolition applications.

Borders is being backed by major corporate donors and influential corporate leaders throughout the City, most notably Tom Bell. Again, she comes from a big developer’s background. She’s overseeing the Grady Foundation, mingling with big corporate donors to raise money for privatized Grady, and hasn’t shown any leadership as the dialysis patients now sit in limbo.

So, we’re very troubled about the possibility of a Mayor Borders; if we’re going to elect her, we might as well sell the City to the biggest developer for a dollar.

In review, we are supporting Norwood because of her independence, her knowledge, her accessibility and open-mindedness, her not being funded as much by developers, her willingness to stand up to developers, and her affordable housing plan.

She’s tenacious and she obviously cares about the job she is seeking to do.

We thank our readers for your time. And most importantly, we hope that you vote, and make your vote meaningful by continuing to gather as much information as possible. Stay tuned to APN for continuing coverage of the Mayoral and Council races this year.

About the author:

Matthew Cardinale is the News Editor for Atlanta Progressive News and is reachable at matthew@atlantaprogressivenews.com.

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