The first phase of Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin’s much-touted audits have been completed. The results: Atlanta’s city government is a wreck.

Of course, this won’t suprise anyone who lives in Atlanta. And, quite honestly, I was even expecting much worse. Bill Campbell (Atlanta’s former mayor) left our city broke and broken, in the era immediately succeeding the most prosperous epoch in Atlanta’s history.

Some of the highlights of the audit: Atlanta has too few parks, a puzzling budget process in which the budget is actually set two months after it is already in effect, a police department of limited effectiveness (primarily due to understaffing), and infrastructure that is corroded and in need of serious overhaul.

Atlanta’s assets far outweigh the liabilities, in my opinion. The trees, the economy, the neighborhoods,
the people, the diversity—not many cities can touch Atlanta on these fronts. But our government, traffic and, by extension, our pollution may turn everything toward the worse.

Hopefully, Mayor Franklin can set us on the path to decent government. I admire the fact that she chose to undertake the audits, when her opponents in the election thought they were unnecessary and expensive, saying “we know it’s broken, we don’t need audits; we just need to fix it.” The audits provide the government with the necessary baselines and “best practices” while delineating the specific problems and even outlines some solutions. Additionally, some of the work was undertaken for free by companies who are interested in seeing Atlanta live up to its potential.

The old saying goes something like this: Atlanta tried to be the New York of the South and became the L.A. of the East.

With some hard work, we could make our city the Atlanta of the world.

AJC Article Below:

By D.L. BENNETT
Atlanta Journal-Constitution Staff Writer

A review of Atlanta government found there’s just not much the city does
well.

And Bain & Co. expects it will be years before Atlanta government can hope
to claim it meets Mayor Shirley Franklin’s goal of being a “best-in-class”
city.

“Overall, Atlanta needs a turnaround,” said Peter Aman, vice president with
Bain, the international consulting firm that has volunteered to help the
Franklin administration reform Atlanta government. “It has the potential to
be a best-in-class city. It isn’t. We know there are serious needs to
improve in several areas.”

Bain spent the past several weeks interviewing department heads and other
employees and researching services and levels of service provided by other
cities across America.

The company used that data to create a turnaround plan for Atlanta similar
to what it might provide for a struggling corporate client. The 62-page
document lists four major areas for improvement: public safety, finances,
efficiency and infrastructure.

Under that there are 28 specific comparisons and areas for improvement.

Bain found Atlanta: has less parkland than other comparable cities, relies
too much on the state to pay for road maintenance, should consider
consolidation with Fulton County and may need a utility to deal with
stormwater. The report also lays out ways to improve and a time line for
action.

Bain cites finances and public safety as the most critical concerns. More
than a dozen pages are devoted to police matters. Atlanta’s financial woes
have been highly publicized since Franklin took over in January and found a
potential deficit of $82 million.

The recommendations from Bain call for redoing Atlanta’s budget process in
which it adopts a budget two months after it takes effect. The firm wants
Atlanta to start earlier so it can adopt a 2003 budget before 2002 ends.

Bain also suggested better monitoring of expenses and collections, more
public input, and long-range financial planning.

“Everything has to stand on a firm financial foundation,” said Rick
Anderson, interim chief financial officer. He stressed that all the goals
in the study could and should be accomplished by the finance department.

The plan gives Atlanta’s sanitation department until the end of the year to
perform a rate study and review whether the service could be privatized.

The department faces a $10 million shortfall this year.

Bain’s review notes that more than half of the cities it reviewed used
private companies to collect residential garbage while Atlanta uses public
employees.

Franklin said she will use the document as a blueprint for reform. She
urged city residents and voters to hold her accountable for meeting its
goals and doing so by the deadlines it sets.

“This allows us to lay out specific areas where we fall short,” Franklin
said.

“We need to make improvement. We are not trying to be average. We want to
be best in class.”