She’s the mayor, not the queen

Although it’s fun to watch Mayor Shirley Franklin and AJC Editorial Page Editor Cynthia Tucker lob rhetorical grenades at each other, one thing is clear: Tucker was entirely right in describing Atlanta’s “sorry financial shape” as Franklin enters the final months of her regime. If anything, the AJC editor was too polite.

One thing is also clear. Criticize the mayor, even mildly, and you’ll get a blast of vitriol from her office. One public official, for example, had the temerity to tell me that she doubted the mayor’s commitment to the transportation component of the Beltline. After all, other cities — Charlotte (which is quickly stealing Atlanta’s title of “Business Capital of the South”) and Denver come to mind — have actually greatly expanded transit systems while we have, um, drawn pretty maps. That official told me that the “mayor came after me like a low-flying missile” for daring to express an opinion, a very well-founded opinion.

Last year, I became curious about the mayor’s travel records. She is almost always on a trip, it seems. There were two things that I learned from my curiosity: First, in City Hall, ethics are relative (you could also call this “Franklin Exceptionalism”), and the city’s financial management was awful.