Fresh Loaf

On Oct. 14, Westview and West End residents received good news about the long-overlooked L&N railroad tracks in Southwest Atlanta: the Georgia Department of Transportation finally voted to allow the PATH Foundation to move ahead with a proposed Beltline jogging and biking trail.

For more than a year, Patrick Berry and other neighborhood residents waited for glimmers of progress on the abandoned tracks.

Unfortunately, all they saw were dumped mattresses, shopping carts, and blankets of kudzu piling up.

“When people came to the neighborhood, they’d see garbage and overgrowth,” Berry, vice president of the Westview Community Organization, says. “It gives the impression that nobody cares.”

Beltline officials say they’ve inked a deal with Trees Atlanta to begin a five-year kudzu removal process. Ed McBrayer of the PATH Foundation, which will oversee construction of the the trail, says he plans to meet with GDOT officials this week to discuss the project.

Once completed, the 1.4-mile trail will connect with the West End trail along White Street.

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Fox 5 reports that some of Atlanta’s ne’er-do-wells have turned their sights toward pricey palm trees that were recently planted in Southwest Atlanta along the Beltline. Because copper, blue jeans and flat screens just weren’t cutting it, we suppose.

The station reports that the $450-a-pop palm trees’ roots were secured with rebar to prevent them from being removed. They were purchased with a grant provided by the Arthur Blank Foundation for the $2.8 billion project’s arboretum, or “museum of trees.”

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Today is the deadline for Fulton, Clayton and Cobb County property owners to appeal their property tax assessments.

Just curious: did any Fresh Loaf readers file appeals?

I’m about to file mine. In true journalistic fashion, I’ve waited until deadline day.

Fulton County wants to tax my home in Southwest Atlanta based on its 2006 value. Home values in much of Southwest Atlanta have, in fact, been in free-fall since early 2007.

The situation is so bad at the moment, if you look up 2BD/1BA listings near my home you’ll find a home on sale for $6,700. It’s almost certainly a rat-infested shit-hole (or, possibly, a shit-infested rat-hole), but it drags down the value of every other 2BD/1BA home in the area.

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What is it with liberals and bake sales, anyway? They’re fascinated by them. I’m thinking of the bumper sticker plastered all over Volvos back in the day that bemoaned, “It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber.” A more recent example came from the 2006 campaign, “Bake Sales for Body Armor,” which “is dedicated to saving the lives of our soldiers by raising funds to buy body armor, medical supplies, and other items that promote their health and welfare.”

Laugh all you want. There’s gold in them cookies, as the presidential campaign for Barack Obama proved over the weekend with its “Hungry for Change” campaign that staged more than 700 bake sales all over the country — including several in Atlanta. The timing of the Saturday sales could not have come at a more ironic moment as they came on the heels of the presumptive Democratic nominee’s pledge-breaking announcement that he would opt out of accepting public financing for his campaign. Under those restrictions, Obama could have received no more than $85 million — peanuts these days, considering that Obama already has raised a couple hundred million, and some estimates see him reaching half a billion by the fall elections.

The wisdom and ethics of his decision depends on your perspective, I suppose. Critics say his decision shows him as a two-timing hypocrite in that he had earlier pledged to accept public financing along with John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, and that he has campaigned as a reformer. Supporters say that, considering his unprecedented success at raising money at the grass-roots level — mostly on the Internet — Obama has redefined the entire concept of the term “public financing.”

Which brings us back to the bake sales, which could be found all over the Atlanta area on Saturday. (There was no confirmation about whether all the goodies were baked by left hands only.) I stopped by two of them in vastly contrasting neighborhoods: Little Five Points and Southwest Atlanta. The first one was hosted by Lexa King, an L5P resident of nearly a quarter century and Realtor. Like others, King learned of the bake sales through an email from MoveOn.org. (more…)

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