Candidate Profile: Kasim Reed For Atlanta Mayor

ATLANTA — Fourteen Mayoral candidates are running in Atlanta's Nov. 2 municipal election.

Patch asked candidates to answer questions about their campaigns and will be publishing candidate profiles as Election Day draws near.

Kasim Reed is running for Atlanta Mayor.

Age (as of Election Day)

52

Party Affiliation

Democrat

Family

Daughter

Does anyone in your family work in politics or government?

No

Education

B.A., Howard University and J.D., Howard University

Occupation

Lawyer, 26 years

Previous or Current Elected or Appointed Office

Georgia General Assembly, State Representative, 1998-2002
State Senator, 2002-2009
Mayor, City of Atlanta, 2010-2018

Campaign website

kasimreed.com

Why are you seeking elective office?

I am running again because I love Atlanta and am committed to doing everything I can to make Atlanta safe and put our city on the right track. Being Mayor is the best job in the world; not because of the prestige of the office, but because of what you can accomplish for the city.
During my eight years as Mayor, the city’s crime rate was at 40-year lows and we employed 2,000 sworn police officers, the largest force in the city’s history. In my first year, I tackled the looming pension fund crisis. The reform legislation that we passed saved the city $270 million over 10 years and stabilized the pension fund. I grew the city’s cash reserves from $7.4 million in 2010 to more than $200 million when I left office. I worked with City Council to pass a balanced budget every year, without raising taxes. During the worst recession in 80 years, I led a transformation in the city’s financial health. As a result, the city’s credit ratings were elevated to the highest they had been in two decades, including AA+ from Standard & Poor’s. Stabilizing and strengthening the city’s financial position allowed us to make dramatic improvements in city services. We re-opened all 33 recreation centers, creating Centers of Hope at 16 of the centers with high-quality youth programming and saw dramatic increases in the number of kids served through Camp Best Friends summer camps. Under my Administration, the Department of Parks and Recreation acquired an additional 171 acres of land in the City of Atlanta, including 15 new parks, serving as the largest green space accessibility percentage jump in more than 40 years. Under my leadership, the City of Atlanta emerged as a national and international leader in sustainability. Atlanta was the first city in Georgia to pass a Climate Action Plan and was ranked first in the Department of Energy’s Better Buildings Challenge with over 100 million square feet of space in over 550 buildings.

The single most pressing issue facing our (board, district, etc.) is _______, and this is what I intend to do about it.

Crime is the number one issue facing our city. Across all races and in every neighborhood, Atlantans feel less safe. The perception and the reality of crime in Atlanta impact our personal quality of life and the city’s reputation, creating a vicious cycle that undermines everything that makes our city vibrant. I will bring a laser-sharp focus on public safety to reduce crime. The police force will be fully staffed. The Atlanta City jail will remain open. I will collaborate with the Fulton County Sheriff and judges to alleviate overcrowding at the Fulton County Jail to stop the revolving door for repeat offender criminals. But fighting crime requires more than just police and jail resources. Every major department in the city has a role to play from Code Enforcement to Licensing & Permitting to Parks & Recreation. Working with the Atlanta Police Foundation and other private partners, I will open additional @Promise Youth Centers to provide the right kinds of opportunities for kids who need direction. I will close the bars and clubs that continually violate city safety and operational codes. Blighted, abandoned properties will be cleaned, closed and ultimately demolished. The criminal element in our city has easy access to guns. We have to take measures to disrupt the ready availability of guns on the street. There will be no haven and no tolerance for criminal activity.

What are the critical differences between you and the other candidates seeking this post?

The most critical difference is that I have a track record of making significant improvements in the functioning of our city. The future requires bold leadership and decisive action to get Atlanta back on track. No other candidate has the backbone I do to address the crises facing the city.

If you are a challenger, in what way has the current board or officeholder failed the community (or district or constituency)

N/A

How do you think local officials performed in responding to the coronavirus? What if anything would you have done differently?

Atlanta is a resilient city; we will recover from this pandemic and thrive again. However, the breakdown in cooperation between the state and city severely impacted our ability to support residents and businesses during the pandemic. As Mayor, I will prioritize deploying the federal resources that have been made available to support businesses and residents. The city will work with its county partners to continue making vaccination easy and accessible for all residents.

What do you identify as the root causes of the recent and ongoing increase in violent crime, and how would you address the issue?

As Mayor, I have a clarity of purpose and zero tolerance for crime that will be communicated every day. Atlantans will know that I care as much about their safety as I do about my and my family’s safety. When I was Mayor, our weekly cabinet meetings were organized around detailed report-outs on crime data and the measures each department would take to positively impact public safety. That urgency and prioritization will be felt by every department head in my Administration.
For the police force, my commitment is to take every measure necessary to fully staff and better train our officers. We will have more police working with communities to make our neighborhoods safer,
more training on non-violent, community-based policing to ensure fair and impartial interactions, more cameras and other crime-reduction technologies, and more transparency in officers’ interactions with the community.
The partnerships with the Atlanta Police Foundation, the community improvement districts, college and university police departments, neighborhood security patrols, Fulton County Sheriff’s department, Georgia Bureau of Investigation Gang Task Force, Georgia State Patrol, and MARTA police are all critical.

Do you support or oppose the creation of Buckhead City? Why or why not?

Buckhead is an essential part of the city of Atlanta. The push by some to create a separate “Buckhead City” would be disastrous for our city. As Mayor, I will do everything I can to repair the rift that is driving this push by addressing crime and improving the basic city services. All Atlanta residents deserve a cohesive, safe city. We can repair this breach and avoid the protracted legal battle that will come to resolve issues of Atlanta’s debt and pension obligations, impact on Atlanta Public Schools, MARTA funding and debt obligations, among other legal issues.

How would your administration react to the creation of Buckhead City and the resulting loss of a major residential, commercial and cultural center and significant source of tax revenue? How would you respond to residents and businesses in that community if cityhood were rejected?

See above.

Describe the other issues that define your campaign platform.

My other priorities are economic growth and opportunity, housing affordability and infrastructure. Progress on these fronts will also have a positive impact on public safety. Addressing the opportunity gap — the pervasive inequities that sideline folks based on their race, their class, their zip code — will be a guiding principle for my Administration.
During my eight years as Mayor, Invest Atlanta helped to create more than 33,000 jobs through economic development and community revitalization programs. Seventeen major companies moved their regional headquarters to Atlanta or announced a headquarters expansion in the city, such as NCR, Porsche, Merchants e-Solutions, GE Digital and Global Payments. These major business relocations and expansions have created more than 10,000 new jobs. Invest Atlanta programs injected more than $5 billion into Atlanta’s economy, through direct and leveraged investments. Neighborhood revitalization programs created 3,857 multifamily housing units, more than half of which provide affordable workforce housing. My leadership resulted in significant progress on the buildout of the Atlanta BeltLine, four successful referenda to fund water and sewer infrastructure, transportation infrastructure and the largest expansion of public transit in MARTA’s 40-year history.

What accomplishments in your past would you cite as evidence you can handle this job?

During my eight years as Mayor, the city’s crime rate was at 40-year lows and we employed 2,000 sworn police officers, the largest force in the city’s history. In my first year, I tackled the looming pension fund crisis. The reform legislation that we passed saved the city $270 million over 10 years and stabilized the pension fund. I grew the city’s cash reserves from $7.4 million in 2010 to more than $200 million when I left office. I worked with City Council to pass a balanced budget every year, without raising taxes. During the worst recession in 80 years, I led a transformation in the city’s financial health. As a result, the city’s credit ratings were elevated to the highest they had been in two decades, including AA+ from Standard & Poor’s. Stabilizing and strengthening the city’s financial position allowed us to make dramatic improvements in city services. We re-opened all 33 recreation centers, creating Centers of Hope at 16 of the centers with high-quality youth programming and saw dramatic increases in the number of kids served through Camp Best Friends summer camps. Under my Administration, the Department of Parks and Recreation acquired an additional 171 acres of land in the City of Atlanta, including 15 new parks, serving as the largest green space accessibility percentage jump in more than 40 years. Under my leadership, the City of Atlanta emerged as a national and international leader in sustainability. Atlanta was the first city in Georgia to pass a Climate Action Plan and was ranked first in the Department of Energy’s Better Buildings Challenge with over 100 million square feet of space in over 550 buildings.

The best advice ever shared with me was:

If you don’t focus on the basics — the financial health of the City — you will not be in a position to do the things that you thought about doing when you were running for
Mayor. The public won’t allow you to do it. Once you provide the basics, it will free you to govern with innovation.

What else would you like voters to know about yourself and your positions?

I am 100% committed to building the public’s trust and faith in Atlanta city government. I know that begins with me. I support the current City Council’s legislation to create an Office of Inspector General and I will give full support to that office and respect its independence. Additionally, if I have the privilege of serving as mayor again, I will implement additional measures to ensure that ethics remain at the center of my administration. Those measures include:

1. No member of the administration will have a personal or business bankruptcy in their lifetime;
2. Myself, along with all of my direct reports, will file and make public their income tax returns on April 15 of every year;
3. The mayor’s cabinet and senior team will have quarterly ethics training;
4. An ethics council will be in the office of the mayor;
5. the city will require individuals lobbying the executive and/or legislative branch of government to register as a lobbyist.