Municipal blues

Atlanta is getting me down.

I’m losing my hope that Atlanta’s most serious chronic problems are going to improve any time soon.

I’ve got the municipal blues.

It’s not any one thing. It’s all the things: the city’s budget woes, crime woes, environmental woes, crap schools, and the entirely predictable botching of the Beltline’s funding scheme.

And then there’s the leadership — or lack of it.

Mayor Franklin was either too inattentive or too incompetent to notice the city’s budget projections were wildly off-base.

Instead of being apologetic, Franklin veers between self-aggrandizement and self-pity. She began a recent news conference about the city budget with a whiny recital of her greatest hits and a complaint that the media is too hard on her.

Yeah, yeah, yeah you fixed the sewers and you’re not Bill Campbell. Great. Thank you. I appreciate it. “I’ll make you proud” has morphed into “I’ll make you less ashamed than the last guy did.” And she expects us to be happy with that.

State leadership is, remarkably, even worse. It doesn’t just fail to fix things, it sabotages other people’s efforts to fix things. Last month the state scuttled an effort by county leaders who wanted to pool their resources to address regional transit.

No place is perfect, but the stuff I don’t like about Atlanta, the stuff I assumed would get better with time, seem only to have gotten worse. If Mayor Franklin can’t hire more cops, reform public schools, or even synchronize traffic lights during economic good times, I doubt very much its going to make many improvements in those areas during lean times. If the state won’t pay for (or allow state residents to pay for) transit during good times, I can’t imagine it will do any better during a downturn.

How bad is my Metro outlook today? The only civic improvement I can see on the horizon in metro Atlanta in 2008 is Thursday’s opening of an H&M store in Alpharetta.

I’ve got the municipal blues.