Atlanta’s Next Hope?
An Interview with Mayoral Candidate Kasim Reed
2009-09-22
By Eric Easter

EDITOR’S NOTE:

While Atlanta has been in the news for a wide variety of things as diverse as reality TV and now floods, the city’s mayoral race is also heating up as groundbreaking mayor Shirley Franklin reaches the end of her term and issues of crime, public safety, urban sprawl and resources take the forefront.

State Senator Kasim Reed, the youngest state official in Georgia, accomplished attorney and activist and a leading candidate for Mayor of Atlanta talked with EbonyJet.com about his chances of winning, the challenges ahead for Atlanta and a new generation of leadership.

EJ: Cornell Belcher, your pollster, released results of a recent poll that showed you in a “statistical dead heat” for second in the Atlanta Mayor’s race. From your point of view, what does that say about your chances and what you have to accomplish in the next 2 months?

REED: It says that we’re right where we wanted to be, and in fact, a little ahead of schedule. I’m the only candidate in the race that’s never run citywide. So to go from where we were to where are today has shown the effectiveness of our campaign and shows poised to win or to be in the runoff. Importantly, we’re also in a strong in a strong financial position. We have more money than both of my opponents and that will make a major difference in the last six weeks There is another reporting period on September 30th and that will show that the trends from the last period will continue.

My opponents are losing support while we’re gaining support. A number of significant political figures are supporting the campaign. We’re about to begin the media portion of the campaign and we are well-positioned. We haven’t spent one dime on TV so far – that’s the next phase. We’re within striking distance and in a superior financial position. That bodes well for us.

EJ: So, the basic and fundamental question: Why you? Why now?

REED: I’m running because I have an 11-year record of doing very hard things for Atlanta and getting concrete results. I’m the right person for right now.

As a State Senator I co-authored the legislation that gave Atlanta development dollars from sales taxes. The Supreme Court struck down funding for the Beltline – a 22 mile green space that would provide revenue. My legislation helped replaced that revenue and save that greenspace. When the city needed money I merged the traffic court with municipal court, which saved the city $7 million a year. Those are concrete results. As someone who’s been a State Senator and a member of the General Assembly, I’m also uniquely positioned to get help from State of Georgia for the City of Atlanta.

EJ: Atlanta has experienced an amazing amount of growth over the last 25 years – the world’s busiest airport, the Olympics, suburban sprawl. Do you think the city has grown faster than its ability to manage that kind of growth?

REED: No, I don’t. What we have not done, and it’s not particularly Atlanta’s  fault but also Georgia’s, is that we have not paid enough time and attention to the issue. We’ve added 100,000 residents to the city itself – that doesn’t include greater Metro area, but just the city itself. There are 530,000 residents in Atlanta, which is up 100,000 over the last seven years.  With that has come infrastructure challenges.

One of the areas that will be Mayor Shirley Franklin’s legacy is what she’s done to secure the future of water and sewer infrastructure because the challenges places us at significant risk .

We also have to deal with traffic. Commutes are now rated #2 behind Los Angeles. We’ve been weak in creating infrastructure to accommodate where Atlanta will be in the future. We have to have the capacity to handle it. Mayor Franklin took some extremely unpopular positions on building out water and sewer capacity. I think the history will prove she was right. She has taken a number of hits for doing things very hard that she could have avoided. The $4 billion dollars she spent will yield $19 billion in revenue and meet our water needs for the next twenty years. The flipside is that we now have the 2nd highest water rates in America. But unlike a Chicago, we get no real Federal support because we don’t have the representative strength in Washington.

EJ: Part of Atlanta’s lure is that it’s become a Mecca of sorts for a new wealthy educate Black middle class. So how do you square that image of Atlanta with the fact that crime and public safety are at the top of the issues concerning Atlanta residents in this election? 

REED: To halt the surge in crime we have to have a surge also in both enforcement and humanity. Nobody black, white, Latino or Asian wants to hear excuses about challenges in public safety. What’s happening in Atlanta is very different now. There used to be a time when if somebody robbed you, you gave it up and they went away. Now, you give it up and you get shot anyway. That’s what’s happening now. The nature of crime is changing.

We’re going to have to have an expanded police force. We need a strong and muscular police force, and we’ll also have to ramp up oversight of police. You can have a commitment to strong policing, but there’s always a fine line between that and sacrificing civil liberties. We will also need more training on issues pitting the police against the community. Bad things can happen for being overly supportive of police without considering community concerns.

But also the 33 recreation Atlanta need to be what I call “centers of hope.” We’ve close two-thirds of them. We have ripped away the structure that we knew when we were young. Those rec centers are where I played little league football. And little league football was the stick my parents used to make sure that I kept get my grades up. If I didn’t do well in school, I didn’t play. That center was where I was until my parents picked me.

Take that foundation and those values away and it creates a vacuum. The little $5 million you might save on running centers is a bad decision given the result. We have to do more. That’s why I talk about Center of Hope – sports, yes, but also real tutorial programs in writing, math and science. Detroit, even with all its current challenges has a wonderful tech program where they are saving kids’ lives with after school programs financed by local business. You just can’t shoot ball. You should have to do something to earn shooting ball. Our generation has to be bring what we have learned to help build this new generation.

EJ: You’ve been able to build a fairly broad-based coalition of support across a number of communities, from the AFL-CIO to firefighters to newspaper columnists. What work do you still have to do solidify your coalition base? 

REED: My coalition is where I want it to be except that I’ve had more challenges in the gay and lesbian community than I would want because I came out against gay marriage. But we’ve been raising more money that our competitors. We have business, labor and community leaders endorsing. One hundred ministers and more than thirty elected officials have come on board. We are strong, but to be perfectly candid, though I have a very progressive record for GLBTG issues, the position I’ve taken is hurting me in that community.

EJ: You’ve done fundraisers in Chicago, this week you have events during the Congressional Black Caucus. Has it become standard for local candidates to essentially campaign nationally?

REED: In this economy, if your not raising money nationally, then I don’t know how your going to be competitive in local elections. It seems to be the tradition now. In Atlanta we raised money for Harold Ford, for Obama’s Senate race, Martin O’ Malley for governor in Maryland, Kamala Harris in California. The change for today is that the level of connectivity among our generation is amazing. Kamala Harris, Adrian Fenty, Cory Booker and I had a fundraiser at the DNC together. Before I announced my Public Safety Initiative, I talked with Kamala Harris for three hours to make sure it was just right. It’s a level of connectivity that is just unprecedented.

EJ: Let’s talk about leadership for a new generation for a minute. You were a student leader as an undergraduate and graduate trustee at Howard University and are still on the Board of Trustees. A couple of weeks ago, students took over the Administration Building at Howard with complaints about a number of issues. From the unique viewpoint of someone on the board who was also a student activist, what does that protest you about this next generation of young leaders?

REED:  That’s one of the reasons that Howard is such an outstanding school. The number of talented people that Howard is producing is no mistake. Whenever you get bright and talented young people together in one place, they will not accept the traditional answers. In some sense, it was about time to have an uprising at Howard that cleared the air. Every 15-20 years or so there’s been some student uprising that cleared the air and brought new thinking.

When there was an uprising in 1967-68, it was the led by a man who is now the Prime Minster of Bermuda, Ewart Brown. It’s a part of students showing their gifts for leadership. One of the amazing things about Howard as an institution, is the ability students have to practice leadership in a way I’ve never seen before at any other university, whether it be an HBCU or an Ivy League school. You really got to practice your craft. I got to be on the school’s Board of Trustees with Andy Young, Dick Parsons and Vernon Jordan. In his advertisement about his endorsement, Andy Young mentions that we met a Howard University. Look at how many of us are in leadership today. People who worked at The Hilltop (newspaper) are the leaders in their field now as writers and journalists. Student government leaders are now leaders in politics. Karen Carter has a real shot a being the next mayor of New Orleans. Kamala Harris has a real shot at being the first woman DA of California, and had she run probably could have been the first black woman Mayor of San Francisco, I’m one of the top candidates for Mayor of Atlanta. That’s not a fluke.

Eric Easter is the VP of Digital and Entertainment for Johnson Publishing.