Progress and Progressivism: Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed on Governing Today’s American City

Kasim Reed is the Mayor of the City of Atlanta, inaugurated on January 4, 2010. Since his election, he has hired more than 800 police officers and funded initiatives to reduce the city’s crime rate by 18 percent. Working with the Atlanta City Council and the city’s employee unions, he successfully initiated a series of sweeping reforms to address the city’s $1.5 billion unfunded pension liability. Mayor Reed has balanced a $48 million budget shortfall with no property tax increases, and Atlanta’s cash reserves have grown from $7.4 million to more than $127 million. A graduate of Howard University in Washington, D.C., he spent 11 years in the Georgia General Assembly prior to his term as mayor.

 At a time when government can be highly partisan and territorial, how important is it for you as mayor to work with elected officials across party lines and at different levels of government?

It’s essential if you want to get things done, and I think that mayors don’t have the luxury and the excuses that many other elected officials have because we’re so close to the people that we govern and lead. I think that bipartisanship, to move a city forward, is really essential because a city is nothing but an idea of the state. All of the powers that a city has are derivative powers, so it’s very important that when you lead a city you understand–certainly when you lead a progressive city in the South and in a very conservative state–that bipartisanship is fundamental if you want to make progress for your city. Bipartisanship, for me, really means working together on the items that you agree on, and I think that cities and states across the country and our federal government would be far more effective if we could get deals on the things we agree on. That’s what I try to do as mayor of the City.

You partnered with Republican Governor Nathan Deal in supporting a temporary sales tax increase to fund transportation infrastructure projects. Especially given your region’s recent struggles with transportation, how can booming metropolises like Atlanta find sustainable ways to grow and move people in and out of the city?

I think transportation is a problem that you have to stay at. Big, complex problems require toughness and determination. For example, the transportation referendum that we lost. Most major American metros generally require two bites at the apple. Our referendum would have called for eight to ten billion dollars in infrastructure investment: roads, bridges, sidewalks, tunnels, streetscapes. If you go and look across the country where you have this kind of effort, it generally takes two times. And while I think that we could have prevailed had we had the vote on the November ballot versus the primary ballot, I think it’s something that you just have to go back at.

But you have to listen to the voters; they rejected our big solution, which I think was the most thoughtful, forward-thinking, aggressive solution because we were trying to solve a complex transportation problem for a ten-county area with multiple governments all at once, and our folks rejected it. That failure doesn’t give us an excuse because folks are still stuck in traffic. So, we’re going to have to go back at it, probably with smaller solutions that are not as bold.

In the City of Atlanta and in the region, I think we have $123 billion in needs and I think we know how to fund $60 billion of that, so that’s going to require creativity. The direct answer to the proposition is that you very rarely have the kind of sweeping change that we were pushing for and win that on the first ballot. You will have to go back at the problem because people are not going to be content to sit in the kind of traffic that they’re experiencing, and the solution is probably going to be smaller than the big, bold ten-county solution.

You mention that Atlanta has ten counties, each with dozens of municipalities that you have to deal with in metropolitan Atlanta. How do you, as the mayor of the 450,000 people of Atlanta, manage a metropolitan region of six million people?

The metropolitan Atlanta region is the ninth largest metro in America now. I think you take the lead by leading. The fact of the matter is that most of the assets, from a commercial value standpoint, are in Atlanta. So if you were to do an assessment of the strategic assets of the region, the glue that holds everything else together and drives the metropolitan economy, that’s still in Atlanta. Most folks in Georgia, in terms of local and state government, recognize the Governor of the State and the Mayor of Atlanta as the essential leaders to progress.

I think that because of the sheer size of my budget, which is the second biggest budget in the state, you do have the ability to convene and to lead, much in the way that we did around the transportation referendum. And much in the way that I’ve done around trying to deepen the Port of Savannah, which is nowhere near Atlanta, but which supports 100,000 jobs in the metro region. There’s just been example after example after example: building a new football stadium to keep the Atlanta Falcons downtown after the state was unwilling to move the funding for that. There is example after example where we are constantly partnering and showing leadership by virtue of our size and scale.

Like a number of Southern cities, Atlanta’s rapid growth is leading to fundamental changes in the demographic and political make-up of the state. For example, you’ve recently been calling for same-sex marriages performed in other states to be recognized in Georgia. How have you been able to reconcile the deeply held beliefs of many of your constituents with your more progressive approach to issues like gay marriage?

I think that that’s what leadership is. I think that when you are fortunate enough to be responsible for one of America’s most important cities, you take positions, and hopefully you have a strong enough record in other areas for people to stick with you. That’s basically what you do with political capital. When you have political capital, which you earn over a series of years based upon the results that you’ve delivered–four balanced budgets, best-in-class cash reserves, no tax increases, the most sweeping pension reform of any comparably-sized city in the United States of America, crime at forty-year lows–I’ve got a number of bona fides that give me some ability to be bold in other areas and hopefully have my constituents stick with me. I was reelected in November with 84 percent of the vote. I had one of the highest reelection numbers of any mayor of a major American city. Without regard to the level of competition you have, you still have the ability for folks to go in and vote for somebody else.

I don’t have political capital to put it on the shelf. I don’t have a job approval to put the number up on the wall and admire it. I use the capacity of my office, and marriage equality is an area that I feel is going to have a harder time taking hold in the South. I believe that the city that I lead is the most important city in the South and as the leader of it, it should start with us. I also think that we have such an incredible tradition in the City of Atlanta, because we are the birthplace of Dr. Martin Luther King and so much of the civil rights movement in the United States that we ought to be right in leading on this issue.

As mayor, you’ve managed to expand the police force and reopen 33 recreational centers for disadvantaged youth, while not only balancing the budget four years in a row without increasing property taxes but actually increasing Atlanta’s cash reserve from just over $7 million to $135 million. What do you say to those who claim progressivism is incompatible with fiscal responsibility?

I think that those people don’t know what they’re talking about. But I do believe that true progressives have to have steel because on the other side of the things you probably got into politics for–you want to improve the lives of working people, or you want greater opportunity in your city; all of the things that guide our most romantic and inspirational notions of politics–you will not get to if you do not master the fundamentals. The public won’t let you, they won’t believe you, they won’t trust you, and you will not hold the public will in your hand.

The relationship between a leader and the people that she or he governs is elastic. So you do good and you have a greater capacity to say we’re going here. If you don’t, it’s tight. And so, the inspirational parts of government you can’t do because people don’t believe you. But once you balance the budget, once you make sure that people have appropriate policing, once you make sure that your bills are paid, and employees are going to be able to retire in dignity, what you will feel is people saying “okay.”

So because of the things that we did with our budget and with public safety, the philanthropic community comes on board and funds opening recreation centers and provides five million [dollars] in philanthropy to make them substantive. Not just places to warehouse kids but places where you’re going to have real programming that’s actually changing the trajectory of these kids’ lives.

So the point I’m going to make in my lecture [at the Institute of Politics] today is that in being a progressive and in being compassionate, there has to be steel and energy and conviction behind that around the fundamentals.

Feature Photo: cc/(C. Elle)