Being in charge of a large metropolis area such as Atlanta, Ga., can be a difficult task to take on, to say the least. The mayor has to make sure the city runs smoothly and plan ahead for it’s future success. That official is also the one who takes the brunt of the blame when things go wrong.
Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed, the 59th Mayor of Atlanta who was inaugurated in January 2010 and re-elected for a second term last fall, has hired more than 200 police officers, improved fire-rescue response times, re-opened all of the city’s recreation centers, and improved the service delivery of city departments such as Sanitation and Public Works. During his first year in office, he increased the city’s reserves from $7.4 to $56 million dollars and initiated a series of reforms to address the city’s unfunded pension fund liability.
WATCH as Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed talks about the success he’s experienced in Atlanta:
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“Cities are where the action is going to be,” says Reed. Millions of people and hundreds of businesses are moving into cities each year. With more than 75 percent of the country’s GDP in cities, it is where both mature adults and millennials want to be. Reed says he has been quite successful in keeping Atlanta’s population booming.
“The secret has been to focus on keeping the city safe,” he stresses
Having been elected during the country’s ‘Great Recession,’ Reed says he had a few secrets to his success.
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One was making sure crime rates didn’t spike during hard times to ensure that investment in the city didn’t go down.
“When the business community saw that, they made the decision that this is where they wanted their people to be,” he said.
Companies such as Coca-Cola, AT&T, and Porsche have all moved into the Atlanta city limits since the recession began and the U.S. started to recover from it. Reed says what keeps pushing millennials toward the city is the highly educated population and the third-largest concentration of Fortune 500 businesses. There are a large number of reputable universities and colleges in Atlanta, as well, Reed added, and a vast number of jobs in which young graduates can start their careers.
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The post Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed On The Secret To His Success appeared first on genConnect.
