Bill Torpy at Large: Hawks arena can’t trump Hizzoner’s blue lights
When bad news is afoot, politicians often try to kill it or somehow change the subject.
Killing is always the preferred option, although it’s rare because no news agency that ever wants to look itself in the mirror again will have anything to do with that.
So that leaves option two: wave a shiny object at the public and try to distract its attention from the steaming pile at center stage.
Mayor Kasim Reed went for the latter this past week when he suddenly called a news conference to say a deal had been reached to keep the Hawks in downtown Atlanta for another 30 years.
The plan calls for the city to pump $142.5 million into Philips Arena because that sports venue is absolutely ancient by Atlanta sports facility standards. Seventeen years old?!? Those poor basketball players and the team’s new billionaire lead owner must worry the place will collapse on them.
The announcement of an arena agreement between the city and the Hawks had been in the wind for weeks because the two sides had been talking for almost a year. So why announce it at 2:30 on Tuesday?
Hmmmmm.
The timing was instantly suspicious to this professional skeptic because Hizzoner was set to be electronically spanked at 5 p.m. on Tuesday by my corporate cousins at Channel 2 Action News.
Over the past several weeks, the TV sleuths had busily collected footage of the mayor coming and going in his black SUV, coming and going very fast, in fact. Sometimes the SUV ran red lights or exceeded the speed limit or ran up the shoulder of a clogged highway or moved regular schleps off to the side of the road.
Reed was able to do this because he’s the mayor and has a cop driving him with blue lights and a siren on the SUV. And they like to use them. A lot. About every time WSB went out with a camera, Hizzoner’s blue lights were flashing.
The mayor rushed headlong to ribbon-cuttings, speeches, press conferences and even parties.He did this because he’s the mayor and we are not, although state law is pretty specific that such toys are to be used only for real emergencies.
Reed, who is largely obtuse as to how he comes across, must have figured this didn’t look good because he initially tried to kill the story. When that didn’t work, he called a quick press conference.
The recipients of this latest government giveaway — the Hawks — were, I’m told, surprised to get a call on Monday from the mayor’s office saying the announcement was coming the next afternoon. It seemed odd to them because the deal wasn’t totally locked down.
On Wednesday, the day after the press conference, my AJC colleague Scott Trubey requested a copy of the agreement and was told by Keisha Bottoms, the head of the Atlanta Fulton County Recreation Authority, that “an agreement has not yet been executed on behalf of AFCRA.”
Trubey was a bit befuddled. After all, the previous afternoon he watched the mayor talk about this new public-private initiative. He asked for drafts of the agreement or something concrete that says, “We have a deal here.” Again, he was told “AFCRA has not formally executed an Agreement.”
Later, the mayor’s folks got back to him saying he’d get such documents Friday.
The announced deal said the city would keep taxing people who rent cars to come up with most of the $142.5 million. The Hawks would kick in $50 million and even agree to stay until Reed is a very old man.
However, the deal isn’t as rosy as the one Hizzoner told the AJC about back in February. Back then, he said the city would spend $100 million to $150 million for an arena overhaul that would run between $200 million to $300 million. Under that sliding scale, the Hawks might have put up $100 million or more into the renovation. In the end, they didn’t pony up anywhere near that amount.
(In the Hawks’ defense, $50 million is not chump change. That kind of money can get Dwight Howard and his aching back for a couple of years.)
The point remains that the mayor’s crew, I firmly believe, rushed this sucker to a press conference just a couple of hours before WSB’s “Blue Light Special” was set to run and bring a fair amount of public indignation down on the mayor. Heck, even Mike Luckovich jumped in with a cartoon showing the Mayormobile on an "emergency" run.
And this announcement of largess for a sports team came a week before voters will be asked to contribute a combined $2.8 billion for MARTA and transportation upgrades. If I were ever asked to join the mayor’s “strategery” team, I’d recommend springing this one on the public after the election.
But since we’re talking scheming, does this time-honored tactic of trying to steal the bad news message work for pols?
I called a couple of veterans of this realm — Angelo Fuster, who handled communications for Atlanta Mayors Maynard Jackson and Bill Campbell, and Dan McLagan, who did so for Gov. Sonny Perdue.
“It’s a standard tactic to trump one story with a bigger story or a different story, but there is seldom success,” Fuster said. “It’s like the magician moving the right hand so you don’t look at the left hand. But magicians are more successful than politicians.”
I asked for examples of when such an effort worked. Both thought long and hard but couldn’t think of when their camps were able to pitch stories to overtake a bad one. It has to be organic news.
In 1995, Fuster said, Mayor Campbell’s office was worried about Freaknik coverage. Then came breaking news — a federal courthouse in Oklahoma had been bombed with terrible loss of life.
A year earlier, McLagan was working for Ollie North as the former Marine and Reagan conspirator ran for the Senate. The campaign was ready to take a bad hit in the news that day when a worried McLagan flipped on the news to see a helicopter following a white Bronco down an L.A. freeway. Hello, O.J.
So I kind of feel for Reed. Short of Donald Trump declaring war on Russia that Tuesday afternoon, our mayor never had a shot at dimming the blue lights.
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