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Ethics
You deserve an ethical, transparent, and responsive City Hall, one that you can brag to your friends and family about. The headlines about possible bribery these past few months have been appalling. We must get ethics right, period.
Among other things, I will take action on:
Culture
The first priority in any organization is ensuring everyone participates in an ethical culture. It must start from the top, with a credible, ethical and honest leader. Atlanta’s voters must focus on selecting the candidate with the best record and most passionate support of ethics.
- Ethics Training: I promise to personally train all 8,000 of the city’s employees on updated ethics procedures in my first year in office.
- Guilty Bystanders: I expect employees to let me or a manager know if something out of line is going on. Those that see it and don’t report it will be held accountable.
- Reporting: We will expand the ways city employees can report possible issues to include smartphones, an “open door” policy in the mayor’s office and random third-party surveys.
Access
If you’ve been getting contracts because you do the best job, you’ll have the opportunity to keep winning them. If you’ve been getting contracts just because you know someone at City Hall, that will not give you an advantage any more. New bidders will get a truly fair shot, including small, minority-owned, and disadvantaged businesses, who will be supported by the continuation and improvement of Atlanta ‘s EBO and DBE policies and programs.
- Lottery System: When the city reviews multiple bids and decides there is a tie, a lottery will decide the winner, when possible. This way, things are fair.
- Joint Task Force: I plan to partner with the counties and other city agencies to form a coalition to simplify and streamline regulations and do joint purchasing where possible. This way, regulations are easier to understand and less of an overwhelming expense for small businesses and the pool of buyers and sellers with common contracts will be larger.
- Proactive Alerts: New RFPs of whatever sort, including property, will be readily available to any who sign up for alerts. You should not have to be an expert at reviewing lists of RFPs to get an opportunity to bid.
Transparency
Sunshine makes it harder for people to work in the shadows. You deserve to know what the city is doing with your taxpayer dollars.
- Timely Audits: All emergency procurements will face stringent audits. Costs may be higher in these situations and safety is the first concern, but that doesn’t mean we can’t monitor them closely and hold people accountable.
- Pay/See policy: If the City pays someone you will be able to see it–all payments made by the city will be posted online and searchable, and analytic tools will be developed that anyone can use to help spot problems.
- On the Record: As mayor, I will expand the amount of other information, such as contracts, City Hall makes open to the public. And, I’ll make it easier to search items online. We will also explore recording and making available audio recordings of bid-related meetings between vendors and city officials, as is done in other cities.
Safety
Atlanta cannot thrive if its citizens do not feel safe. The city has made improvements in fighting crime, but regardless of the statistics, how you feel in your neighborhood at night matters most.
Many areas of the city are still not safe enough and there continues to be a pervasive fear of crimes such as home invasions and burglaries in our neighborhoods. There is more we can do to prevent crime and get those who repeatedly break the law off the streets and treatment where appropriate.
Among other actions, I believe we must:
- Ensure Atlanta’s police department is fully staffed, with a focus on training, retention and predictable, competitive pay for our men and women in blue.
- Continue investing in new technologies (video cameras, license plate readers, predictive policing analytics, application of analytics to investigations, etc.).
- Hire and train committed officers, investigators and leaders and ensure the entire APD management and support organization is as effective as possible.
- Implement even greater use of community-oriented policing and community relations so that every officer goes out of his or her way to authentically bond with the community every day.
- Work with law enforcement agencies and the judicial branch to prevent repeat offenders from becoming career criminals.
- Develop and implement proven and effective treatment, rehabilitation and reentry programs.
- Develop and support programs to help youth before and after their first interaction with law enforcement.
- Support our neighborhoods’ efforts to feel safer through partnerships with APD and even more effective removal of vacant and abandoned houses.
Traffic and Mobility
We must have a city where people can move — People can’t get to their jobs and companies won’t relocate here if we don’t address gridlock. Traffic and a lack of transit options is a significant problem for Atlanta and we must put our full efforts behind both short and long-term solutions.
Among other actions, I believe we must:
- Work in strong partnership with the state and other cities and counties to develop and implement regional transportation solutions, funding and execution.
- Strongly support the development of transit along the Atlanta BeltLine and MARTA’s efforts to expand.
- Add more bus routes, expand the bike share program, more bike lanes and improve pedestrian pathways.
- Tackle the top 50 worst intersections and street sections and prioritize de-bottlenecking projects. We must also find short-term fixes now for the causes of traffic jams (e.g., add traffic officers at rush hour, better management of office-building outflow, etc.)
- Use technology to unclog the bottlenecks that build every day in major roads and intersections (e.g., more traffic light synchronization, promotion of use of phones by citizens to find quickest routes, city-wide traffic optimization, etc.)
- Improve the clearing response to accidents and other impediments (e.g., delivery truck stops, temporary commercial construction, etc.) to rush hour traffic in partnership with the state and other local jurisdictions.
- Examine parking availability and utilization to determine future innovations in parking management.[4][5]
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Keisha Bottoms 
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