Fresh Loaf

The Army Corps of Engineers’ regional headquarters in Mobile, Ala., has seen fit to issue a news release explaining that Georgia’s new, Sonny-signed law allowing guns in taverns, parks and subway trains does not apply to the lakes and parkland it manages. Here’s an excerpt from the release:

“This clarification was prompted by several inquiries received by the Corps concerning the law and media reports about the law’s application to parks,” said E. Patrick Robbins, Public Affairs Officer, Mobile District.

Robbins, however, does not indicate whether the inquiries came from people worried about recreating amid heavily armed crowds or from folks eager to bring their shootin’ irons to a federal reservoir. This being Georgia, you never know.

We haven’t heard from the Department of the Interior yet, but we’ll go ahead and note that the new state law doesn’t apply to any federal property, such as Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park, the Chattahoochee River Recreation Area or the MLK Historic Site.

If you’re confused about what rules apply where, you might just want to leave the Smith and Wesson in the glove box, like God intended.

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Today is the final day for Gov. Perdue to sign or veto legislation passed during the recent General Assembly. If he does nothing, the bills will still go into law after today, so the signing ceremonies are orchestrated largely for political benefit – to earn support from special-interest groups.

So what has Sonny decided to sign lately? On Tuesday, he notched a photo-op with celebrated miser Clark Howard by lending his John Hancock to HB 130, a consumer-protection bill that allows reg’lar folks to “freeze” their credit report so that it can’t be sold to third parties without their approval, as is the norm now. The goal is prevent identity thieves from applying for credit under someone else’s name.

So far, so good. But also on Tuesday, Sonny signed SB 1, a bill to effectively restore Georgia’s harsh sex-offender residency restrictions that were ruled unconstitutional last fall by the state Supreme Court. The new bill was promoted by its sponsor, Sen. Eric Johnson, R-Savannah, as a less-unfair version of the nullified law, but it still includes no exemptions for registered sex offenders who pose no conceivable threat to society, such as nursing-home residents and invalids.

Johnson added his own touch, a measure that forbids registered sex offenders from photographing kids. Who’s gonna enforce that – the GBI’s Pixel Posse? The Southern Center for Human Rights, the original litigant against the last law, has already renewed its lawsuit against the new version.

Today is Perdue’s last chance to veto HB 89, the bill to allow folks to carry guns into restaurants that serve booze, public parks and on MARTA trains. We’re guessing he’s going to let that one through.

[Oops. Just as this post was about to go up, the Guv’s office sent a notice that he had signed the gun bill. Start loadin’!]

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Mayor Shirley Franklin lately has publicly boasted of having a thick skin in the face of criticism over the city’s current budget crisis. But her actions seem to speak otherwise. In a Wednesday column, AJC editorial page editor Cynthia Tucker took the Mayor to task over the budget shortfall, calling it a “blot” on her legacy.

 ”After six years in office, she presides over a budgeting process nearly as dysfunctional as that left behind by her criminal predecessor, Bill Campbell.”

As the first time (we can remember) that Tucker has badmouthed Franklin in print, the column raised eyebrows across the city and seemed to represent a turning of the tide of public opinion.

Well, Franklin wasted little time in responding. In an open letter to Tucker posted on the city website, she swipes back with no small amount of sarcasm.

“You quickly conclude my record is blotted. Did you think I was running for prom queen, a one night stand?”

Then she accuses Tucker of dissing Franklin’s political courage:

“You seem to prefer the ‘get elected, duck and hide model.’ Too bad for you and your readers that you don’t comprehend  the full breadth of reform that this city, state and country desperately needs.”

Folks, this whole thing is getting uglier by the moment.

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It’s no fun right now to be Atlanta Chief Financial Officer Janice Davis.

No surprise here, but Davis is high on the list of those being blamed for the fiscal crisis that just prompted Mayor Shirley Franklin to lay off more than 400 city workers and propose a $40 million tax increase.

For her part, Davis has publicly pointed the finger at Atlanta’s longstanding accounting practices; city bureaucrats who don’t follow vending procedures; department heads who overspend their budgets; and her own staff. But, unless we missed something, she has yet to claim responsibility for mistakes that helped derail the city budget – which, in turn, has some Council members feeling less forgiving toward her.

According to City Hall scuttlebutt, there’s a tug-of-war going on now between Council members who want to give Davis the sack and those who believe the city would be in deeper doo-doo if it gets rid of her.

As one nervous Council member puts it: “Janice is one of three people who understands the Mayor’s proposed budget [the others being Chief Operating Officer Greg Giornelli and Franklin herself] and the only one who answers to us. If she leaves, we’re screwed.”

Right now, the ones calling for Davis’ head are a distinct minority. But if one of them were to make an official proposal that she be fired, the other Council members would be forced into the politically awkward position of a public vote a year before city elections.

Voting to keep Davis could be criticized as tolerating incompetence, while canning her could destroy any chance of coming up with a workable solution to the budget problems. Come to think of it, it can’t be much fun being a Council member right now.

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Add one Jesse Spikes to the long list of folks planning to run for Atlanta mayor next year.

No, we weren’t familiar with Mr. Spikes, either, so we gave him a call. Spikes, 57, is a former Rhodes Scholar and a senior partner with McKenna Long & Aldridge, one of the city’s largest law firms. Although he served for a time as Evander Holyfield’s business attorney, he is not a well-known figure in Atlanta – but he does have an interesting back story.

Born on a farm in Henry County, the youngest of 13 children, to parents who never went to high school, Spikes’ future seemed understandably limited. But he was sent to school in New England by A Better Chance, a private educational foundation. Spikes went on to attend Dartmouth College, Harvard Law School and, courtesy of a Rhodes Scholarship, Oxford University.

Spikes, who specializes in business law, says he’d always expected to go to work in the public sector to give back to society, but hadn’t found the right opportunity. He now believes he’s found that chance.

“I think I’m the manager the city needs,” he says. “I’m someone who intends to focus on the nuts and bolts, day-in-day-out job of running the city.”

As someone who’s never run for public office, Spikes has his work cut out for him. So far, the field of mayoral candidates looks to include a number of seasoned political veterans: Council President Lisa Borders; State Sen. Kasim Reed; Council members Caesar Mitchell and Mary Norwood; and Fulton County Commissioner Robb Pitts.

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They say success has many fathers, while failure is an orphan. It may say something about Mayor Shirley Franklin’s proposed budget that it, too, is an orphan – at least where the City Council is concerned.

Let us explain: Typically, when the Mayor has legislation she wants to bring before the Council, she gets a willing Council member to carry it. But this budget includes hundreds of layoffs and a $40 million tax increase. So, for the first time in her tenure, Franklin couldn’t find any Council member willing to put his or her name on the legislation. Even Cleta Winslow, the Mayor’s most ardent loyalist, reputedly read Franklin’s staff the riot act last week. A panic ensued among the Mayor’s top brass over how to get the budget package formally introduced at today’s Council meeting, as required by law.

The compromise was a hastily called special meeting of the Council Finance Committee, which voted – under sometimes vocal protest – to pass the budget items on to the full Council in such a way that no individual member would be regarded as a sponsor. The final vote came moments before the Council meeting was called to order.

Now that the budget proposal has been introduced, you can expect to hear plenty of wailing and gnashing of teeth from the Council before it must approve a final version by June 30.

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Wednesday’s eight-hour meeting of the Atlanta City Council’s Finance Committee was, by turns, tense, confrontational and deadly dull. But there were moments of humor, as when the city auditor’s office revealed that a data-entry glitch had resulted in a few employees receiving the wrong mileage reimbursement rate one week.

They should have gotten 40 cents per mile. Instead, they were reimbursed at a rate of $40 per mile. Oops. The error resulted in more than $300,000 being mistakenly paid out to about 18 city workers – in some cases, amounting to a year’s salary in a single paycheck.

Some of the employees dutifully reported the mistake. Others apparently went shopping. The auditor reported the city had recovered all but $41,000 of the money and was attempting to pry the balance out of a couple of holdouts who seem to think they won the paycheck lottery.

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The opening day for qualifying is always the most exciting because it brings out the serious challengers and candidates for open seats. The idea is to get your name down ASAP in order to scare away potential opponents. There are usually a handful of stragglers who wait until the last moment – which in this case is Friday at noon – but most of the serious contenders use qualifying as a way to serve notice that they now want your money.

That said, let’s see who picked up opposition on Monday, starting with the state Senate:

• We gave Sen. Jeff Chapman, R-Brunswick, a coveted Arnie award for courageously fighting a losing battle to keep developers from turning Jekyll Island into a floating strip mall. He’s being challenged by a fellow Brunswick Republican, Terry Carter, who is – surprise! – a developer.
• Sen. Mitch Seabaugh, R-Sharpsburg, has picked up opposition from 72-year-old Betty Aaron, a Palmetto Democrat who served a few years in the House during the ’80s.
• Sen. Nancy Schaefer, R-Turnerville, has apparently adopted a strategy of confusing potential opponents. First, she was going to run for Congress, then she announced her retirement, then she gave word she was running for re-election to her Senate seat. Her website still says she’s running for Congress – or maybe she’s changed her mind again. Anyway, it appears the strategy hasn’t worked; she now has two GOP challengers, Jim Butterworth of Cornelia and Terry Rogers of Clarkesville.
• Sen. Dan Moody, R-Alpharetta, has Democratic opposition from Akhtar Sadiq, a Roswell business consultant.

Lots more activity on the House side:

• Rep. Ron Forster, R-Ringgold, won a Golden Sleaze award for penning the dumbest bill of the past year, a measure to rent out state inmates to military contractors in Baghdad. We hear conflicting info on whether he’s re-upping, but so far, he has two GOP challengers, Bob Jenkins of Dalton and Tom Weldon Jr. of Ringgold.
• GOP Rep. Matt Dollar, East Cobb’s own good-time party boy, is being challenged by Democrat RuthE Levy of Marietta, an Air Force veteran and grandmother last seen running for state Senate.
• Rep. Joe Wilkinson, R-Sandy Springs, has opposition from Democratic physician Chris Cameron of Atlanta.
• After serving 32 years in the Statehouse, Rep. Bob Holmes, D-Atlanta, is finally retiring. Seeking his seat are Democrats Ralph Long III, a real estate broker; Tony M.L. McCann, a teacher; and the feisty Keisha Waites, who has unsuccessfully run for both the Atlanta City Council and Fulton Commission.
• Rep. Sharon Beasley-Teague, D-Red Oak, who also earned a Golden Sleaze award for claiming a suspiciously large mileage reimbursement, has three Democratic challengers: 71-year-old community activist Sandra Hardy and retiree Woody Holmes, both of Fairburn; and businessman Charles Sharper of Atlanta.
• Lining up to succeed Rep. Stan Watson, D-Decatur, who’s running for DeKalb CEO, are teacher Rita Robinzine and businessman Byron Wilson, both of Ellenwood; and real estate broker Rahn Mayo of Decatur. All are young Democrats and, we believe, first-time political candidates.
• So far, two of DeKalb’s three House Republicans have Democratic opposition. Rep. Mike Jacobs, who last ran with a “D” behind his name, faces businessman Keith Gross, and Rep. Jill Chambers faces businesswoman Cecilia Hailey.
• Surprisingly, Rep. Ron Sailor’s career move into prison has only brought forth one potential successor so far, psychotherapist Jim Sendelbach of Conyers, who is running as a Democrat, although he previously ran for Congress as a Libertarian.
• Rep. Bobby Reese, R-Sugar Hill, is another recent Golden Sleaze laureate for his resolution urging Congress to repeal the 14th Amendment. We can only hope we served in some small way to encourage his GOP challenger, businessman David Hancock of Suwanee.

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As if we needed more evidence that daily newspapers are not a growth industry, Editor & Publisher has released more grim statistics. Of the nation’s 25 largest daily newspapers, virtually all of them saw a decline in paid circulation. The only papers to escape a downturn in weekday circ were the two biggest, USA Today and the Wall Street Journal, which basically remained static. But c’mon, when is the last time anyone can remember actually buying a USA Today? If it weren’t for hotels and airports, this newspaper wouldn’t exist.

The biggest drop was experienced by the Dallas Morning News, whose weekday circ fell a breath-taking 10.6 percent. Ouch. The next-biggest decline was by our very own Atlanta Journal-Constitution, whose Monday-Friday circulation tumbled by 8.5 percent – to about 327,000 – followed by the Boston Globe, Newark’s Star Ledger and so on. The average drop looked to be somewhere around 4.5 percent.

It also seems that the AJC’s ranking among big-city newspapers slipped a couple of notches. Now the nation’s 18th-largest paper by circulation, it has fallen behind both the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Cleveland Plain Dealer since last year. We mention this merely as trivia; only in New York, Chicago and a very few other cities with competing dailies do relative rankings have meaning.

E&P also helpfully lists Sunday circ numbers, and they are even more deflating. The ad-filled Sunday edition is the bread and butter for most newspapers, so this news is especially alarming. The Denver Post/Rocky Mountain News – a combined Sunday edition of the city’s two big dailies – tumbled a stunning 14.8 percent, while Newark readers tuned out to the tune of 12.3 percent. The only major dailies to see small increases in Sunday sales were the St. Petersburg Times and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

The AJC fared slightly better than most, losing only 5 percent of its Sunday circulation since last year, which dropped it just under 5 million copies. This has to be viewed as good news at the AJC, which had seen much-steeper declines in previous months. Even now, AJC staffers and pollsters are feverishly working on what the company calls “AJC 2.0″ – a near-complete overhaul of the Sunday paper that may be unveiled before the end of the year. AJC editor Julia Wallace personally told CL last year that the Sunday paper would likely shrink in size.

The AJC ran an article over the weekend about the new stats, reminding readers that the size of the falloff was partly due to the paper’s decision to shrink its circulation zone in an effort to cut costs. But the headline smacked of Soviet-style spin: “AJC boosts print/online audience.” Polling has shown that, for reasons beyond our ken, AJC.com enjoys one of the healthier readerships among daily newspaper websites. But as any media consultant will tell you, online readers don’t pay the bills.

What does all of this mean for CL and other alternative weekly newspapers? Sorry for the cop-out, but it’s tough to say. One of the reasons for the decline in paid newspaper readership is that, with the ascendancy of the Internet, people have come to view media as something that should be free. But consumption of the printed word – free or otherwise – is slowly declining as well, which doesn’t bode well for newspapers in general.

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Atlanta residents already bracing for a potential tax hike may also be facing a sharp jump in their water and sewer bills.

Although the Department of Watershed Management won’t deliver its proposed budget to the City Council until May 1, a highly placed source in City Hall says the department is planning to ask for a dramatic 25-percent rate increase.

The department had recently sought to enact a “drought surcharge” to offset residents’ lower water usage – and thus lower water revenue – but was rebuffed by the Council.

“It seems unfair to ask people to conserve water and then penalize them for doing it,” says Councilwoman Clair Muller.

The presumption is that Watershed would simply roll the increase into its upcoming budget proposal, which was already anticipated to include higher rates to pay for the next round of sewer fixes. But Muller says the rumored 25-percent hike is much steeper than was expected – and is likely to inflame more controversy in a City Hall already grappling with a budget crisis.

If such a large increase in water rates is proposed, Muller says she will move to postpone future clean-water projects so the city can keep rates lower but still meet a federal consent order to repair its aging sewers.

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With qualifying kicking off next week, we’re hearing plenty of announcements on who’s running for the Statehouse and Congress and who’s not. But Peach Pundit now brings us a double dose of bad news.

We’d blogged earlier that state Sen. Nancy Schaefer, R-Turnerville, was dropping out of the 10th District Congressional race against Paul Broun. At the time, she indicated that her husband’s poor health prevented her from continuing her political career. Well, she’s apparently decided he’s not too sick for her to try to keep her Senate seat. So it appears Georgia may not be rid of its own home-grown version of Phyllis Schlafly any time soon.

The other bummer is that state Rep. Robbie Mumford, R-Conyers, will not be running for reelection. We’ve given Mumford a coveted Arnie Award each of the past three years for bucking the GOP party line to try to preserve a measure of sanity