Mayor Bottoms To Give First Official State Of The City Address
Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms will give her first State of the City address.
David Goldman / Associated Press
Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms will give a State of the City address Wednesday. The first four months of her tenure have presented many challenges.
Bottoms’ new administration is dealing with old problems: an ongoing federal bribery investigation, a lawsuit over the city’s response to open records requests, and now, questions about bonuses former Mayor Kasim Reed awarded. Plus there’s the debilitating ransomware attack that hit the city’s computers in March.
Reed was a vocal supporter of Bottoms’, but she’s already gotten rid of seven top officials from his administration.
“She wants to show the Atlanta public that she is not a third term of the previous mayor,” Harvey Newman, urban policy expert and professor emeritus at Georgia State University, said.
He said it’s normal for a new mayor to distance his or herself from a predecessor, but this volume, at this stage, is unusual.
It’s also complicated by Reed’s campaign endorsement of Bottoms, according to Newman.
“The fact that she probably owes a pretty strong debt to her predecessor makes this somewhat more awkward and difficult,” he said.
What does he expect to hear from Bottoms’ speech tomorrow?
“This is a chance to articulate a vision for the city and goodness knows we need all the vision we can get,” he said.
Newman said Bottoms needs to make clear to Atlanta that her administration will be different from Reed’s.
He suggested she update the city ethics code, which he said has not changed since Shirley Franklin took office. He also said the ethics office could be strengthened and given more funding.
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