City fire station flare-up
August 18, 2008 at 10:41 am by Scott Henry in NewsIn a few hours, the latest round of head-butting between the Atlanta City Council and Mayor Shirley Franklin will commence. This time, the issue is the recently shuttered Fire Station #7, which the mayor ordered closed in July as part of $21.6 million in city budget cuts. Located on Whitehall Street just south of the I-20 overpass, #7 had been the city’s oldest fire station still in service.
Councilman Ceasar Mitchell has proposed legislation to reopen #7 by skimming the $1.12 million in needed operating funds from a number of other sources, such as the annual budgets for consulting services, travel and office supplies. which held the distinction of being Atlanta’s oldest station still in service,“It’s a question of priorities,” Mitchell says. “Do we really want to increase fire response times?”
Cynics may theorize that Mitchell may be taking on this fight because he’s running for mayor next year, but he also has reasons that are far from political: The West End neighborhood where he lives is squarely within #7’s response zone.
“Part of the outrage is the sudden way it was closed,” he says. “The community feels slighted and disrespected.”
The legislation is almost guaranteed to pass by a veto-proof margin at today’s Council meeting – no politician wants to cast a public vote for shutting down a fire station.
That said, several Council members privately believe that it made fiscal sense to close the station, given the severity of Atlanta’s budget crisis. It was a tough, unpopular decision, but Franklin argued that the station was non-essential because its response area overlapped with those of nearby stations. But it appears old #7 will get a second lease on life.
(Photo by Thomas Wheatley)
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