Shirley Franklin began her first year as Atlanta's mayor staring down the barrel of an $82 million budget deficit. She ended it by delivering a $17 million surplus to her city, earning praise from the national media and the respect of Atlanta's business leaders, many of whom backed her opponent in the 2001 mayoral election.
"Her term as mayor right now has been an unbelievable breath of fresh air for the business community," Sam Williams, president of the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, told USA Today. "She in many ways has the diplomatic skills of (former U.N. ambassador and Atlanta mayor) Andrew Young and the business acumen of a CEO."
"Business is receiving her message of partnership and is extending its hand to the city," adds Art McClung, director of operations for Georgia Power Company, in an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Franklin, Atlanta's first female mayor and the first African-American woman to serve as mayor of a major southern city, began getting a handle on the budget crisis through a partnership with the consulting firm Bain & Co., which volunteered to conduct a comprehensive study of the city's finances. The mayor used it to show business leaders that she was serious about government reform and labor leaders that municipal job cuts were unavoidable.
Franklin persuaded the city council to go along with a major property tax increase that raised revenues sufficient to wipe out about half the deficit. Budget cuts, including a hiring freeze and the elimination of nearly 700 city jobs, covered much of the rest. Franklin also clamped down on bureaucratic perks, directing all city employees to turn in city-owned cars and cell phones not essential to their jobs. She cut her own salary from $141,000 to $101,000 and even got on the phone to persuade the top debtors to the city's sanitation department to pay their bills.
Franklin's 2003 budget, approved by the city council in February, holds the line on new taxes but calls for an additional 300 job cuts. "Clearly we are moving in the right direction," she told the Journal-Constitution in January. "There were a lot of tough decisions that brought us to this point."
The budget, however, isn't the only tough item on Franklin's agenda. In March, together with the city council, she dissolved the city's strained four-year relationship with its private water contractor. Local governments are clamoring for a share of the city's control over Hartsfield Airport and its jobs and vending contracts, and a taxpayers' group is collecting signatures on a referendum to force the city to lease the facility to a private contractor. And acting in concert with the leaders of 10 metropolitan Atlanta counties, in February Franklin called for a regional tax to help untangle the traffic gridlock that threatens the area's economy and environment.
Franklin describes herself as a practitioner of the politics of inclusion. "Atlanta is not the same city as when I moved here 30 years agoour population is more Latino, more aged, more gay, and more Asian," she noted in her January 2002 inaugural address. In an interview with The Christian Science Monitor that same month, she elaborated: "I had an advantage in that I had never run for office. I didn't fall into that trap that some groups of people would vote for me, and some people wouldn't. I had to build a new base as opposed to appealing to just the historically black vote."
"I don't think there's a move away from race," she said, "but a move toward inclusiveness."
