Good Marks For Kasim Reed Navigating Through Occupy Atlanta

Today’s Courier Herald Column:

It can’t be that easy being Mayor. Mayors, like Governors and Presidents, are chief executives. They are popularly elected by their constituents, but are in a role that has ultimate accountability. Legislators, by contrast, can be perpetually for or against something without ever being burdened with developing and implementing workable solutions. Executives, by contrast, take the brunt of competing forces of public will and must make some attempt at balancing the interests of various factions into one reasonable scheme of governance.

Presidents and Governors, likewise, have it a bit easier. By being higher on the political food chain, they enjoy a bit more separation from their constituents and their opinions of how things are going than can Mayors. Mayors must live among those they serve, and the feedback is both immediate and constant.

I say the above as a preamble to this: It could not have been easy to be Mayor Kasim Reed over the past three weeks. As Occupy Atlanta staged their protest, Reed had to answer to a variety of competing constituencies as he attempted to monitor the situation, explore a suitable end game, and ultimately ensure a peaceful and safe ending for all concerned.

Reed was also acutely aware of Atlanta’s role in the history of non-violent protests, even when protest organizers displayed clear ignorance of this by refusing to allow Congressman and civil rights pioneer John Lewis to address them. As such, the international visibility with which Atlanta would receive over how the protests ended mattered to Reed, because it would become part of Atlanta’s image.

Atlanta’s image, for the rest of us who do not live within the city, still matters. The Olympics, which put the city squarely on the international stage, were largely awarded because of Atlanta’s civil rights heritage combined with the logistics of being able to move people here quickly and efficiently from all corners of the world. That combination continues to serve the state well today.

Reed, naturally, took a cautious approach toward handling the protestors. Though many if not most lived outside the city, they were granted exceptions to many city ordinances, had sanitation services provided, and were generally free from the threat of arrest during the majority of their stay in the park.

While many were clamoring for the Mayor to support the protestors, the pressure to contain and remove them continued to grow throughout the sit in. While Woodruff Park was once the center of Atlanta’s thriving commercial downtown, it now largely serves as a daytime gathering place for the homeless amid students moving from one side of Georgia State University’s campus to the other. The daytime burden to the city was thus not substantial.

Woodruff Park is surrounded, however, by condominiums and apartments, each housing voting constituents of Mayor Reed. While tolerating the protests somewhat over its first few days, their opposition to ongoing drum circles and other disturbing activities in the park at all hours grew throughout the protest. Residents began organizing themselves to pressure Reed to end the protests, formally and informally.

As the protests drug on, the burdens for the city and the residents became higher, but the demands and direction of the protests could not converge into any set of coherent or actionable demands. The point of the protest became to protest, and the protesters eventually consumed all of the good will that Atlanta could provide them.

Members of Atlanta’s clergy, instrumental in navigating through the civil rights era protests of the sixties, were called upon by Mayor Reed to negotiate an end to the standoff, but to no avail. When the police did move in, there were no flash grenades, no fire hoses, nor police dogs to evoke memories of a dimmer past. At 6 am, the time protestors had called on those not arrested to return to the park to resume the protest, the park stood still and peaceful.

Reed will no doubt take criticism from all sides for the handling of this event. After all, no one attempting to balance all the wants and needs of disparate interest groups and weigh those against the needs of the city will ever please anyone. With that said, the Occupy Atlanta Movement will now likely go down as a novelty occurrence that occurred in the Fall of 2011. The movement itself will likely be morphed into the 2012 Presidential campaign, where the ideas of the group – as best as anyone can discern them – will be incorporated into the larger political debate. Atlanta, however, emerges unscathed and unharmed, for both its residents and its reputation.

Tagged as: Kasim Reed