Atlanta

Greetings from the most toxic city in America!

According to the wise folks who publish Forbes Magazine, Atlanta is the Number One most toxic city in America.

"In Atlanta, Ga., you'll find southern gentility, a world-class music scene--and 21,000 tons of environmental waste. In spite of its charms, the city's combination of air pollution, contaminated land and atmospheric chemicals makes it the most toxic city in the country."

Atlanta doesn't have the most Superfund sites (that would be Chicago) or the number of facilities releasing toxic chemicals (Chicago again). We're not Number One in terms of the total pounds of toxic chemicals released to the environment (that would be Houston) nor did we have the worst air quality (way to go, Miami!). But we ranked high enough in each of the four categories (6th, 10th, 5th and 13th, respectively) to garner Forbes Number One overall ranking. For the record, Las Vegas came in as the least toxic out of 40 cities.

As an environmental consultant working in this area for most of the past three decades, I can tell you that the analysts over at Forbes misinterpreted the data, primarily the Superfund data and the toxic release inventory. Their conclusion, that Atlanta and its surrounding communities are choked with "chemical plants, metal coaters and concrete factories," is just plain wrong. While we clearly do have significant problems with urban sprawl, traffic and auto emissions, an overabundance of industry is not among our problems.

Meanwhile, we had our mayoral election here in Atlanta and . . . no one won. Georgia has a law that an election has to be decided by a greater than 50% majority, and with four major candidates in the race for mayor, plus several dark-horse candidates, no one won a 50% majority. So there will be a run-off election on December 1 among the top two finishers, Kasim Reed and Mary Norwood.

The leader in the contest for City Council President finished with fewer than 400 votes short of a 50% majority, and will also now have to head toward a run-off, along with the candidates for two other City Council seats.

The local press is making much of the fact that Norwood is the first non-African-American to be a serious contender for the Mayor's office since the 1980s. The press is crunching the numbers to report on the support she got in mainly black precincts versus the support her opponent got in predominantly white precincts.

The campaign was refreshingly issue oriented and did not revolve around race. Earlier this year, a controversial memo was released from two Morehouse College professors saying that the African American community needed to unite behind one of the three leading black candidates or risk losing the Mayor's office to the white candidate. The memo was largely renounced by all the candidates, and the one whom the memo had endorsed wound up finishing a distant third in the contest.

Except for that one anomaly, the four-way contest did not revolve around the issue of race, but the press seems determined to make the two-way run-off a racial issue.

And that is the real toxicity in Atlanta.