Since the property market peaked a year later, the 1.25 million-square-foot building has lost 54% of its value, Bank of America, its largest tenant, has reduced space and bond investors who helped finance the purchase are on the hook for losses, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

“It’s a fine building, a beautiful building, and still very much a landmark,” said Kirk Diamond, senior managing director at broker Cassidy Turley, in Atlanta. “It just needs to be recapitalized and written down to a market level to be able to compete effectively.”

Atlanta’s office market is a victim of overbuilding and inflated real-estate prices fueled by issuance of commercial mortgage backed securities that peaked in the U.S. at $232 billion in 2007. While investor demand for property debt surged last month by the most since March 2010 as the economy strengthened, borrowers in cities such as Atlanta outside the prime U.S. office markets of New York, Los Angeles, Washington and Boston are struggling to refinance as about $5.8 billion of five-year office loans bundled inside commercial mortgage backed securities matures.

“We’re hitting a tremendous amount of that debt coming due,” William Yowell, a vice chairman with CBRE Group Inc. in Atlanta, said in a telephone interview. That will cause “more distressed assets that come to market this year” and may lower the price per square foot on buildings, he said.

“He’s now been given the constitution of God as a king,” Messer said, presenting the scroll to Long. “He is now [raised] up from a commoner to a kingship.” At that point, Long, seated in a chair, was raised by four man who walked around the pulpit area of the mega-church.

Goal One: Simplify.

Existing lines of authority and responsibility are too diffuse, with multiple layers of bureaucracies and boards and no central decision-making authority. In addition to 10 county governments, scores of city governments and MARTA in the Atlanta region, you’ve got the state Department of Transportation — led by both a planning director who reports to the governor  and a commissioner who reports to a board who reports to the Legislature — as well as a State Road and Tollway Authority, the Georgia Regional Transportation Agency and the Atlanta Regional Commission. Almost all of those agencies have their own transportation planners.

So simplify. Whether by design or accident, the existing system makes accountability impossible.

Goal Two: Devolve decision-making power to those who have the most at stake in making the system work. Make transit governance accountable to those who pay the freight — in this case, the taxpayers of metro Atlanta — and to those who will be using the system.

After all, if state officials don’t believe that transit is important enough to Georgia to justify spending Georgia tax dollars — if transit in their minds is not a state responsibility — what then is the justification for giving the state control over that system?

With those goals in mind, let’s take a look at recommendations released last week by the governor’s Transit Governance Task Force. In short, its report calls for creation of a new 35-member Transit Governance Council that would in turn be overseen by a revamped board of the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority.

All 15 members of the new GRTA board would be appointed by state officials — nine by the governor, and three each by the lieutenant governor and speaker of the House. They would have veto power over the Transit Governance Council.

In addition, a regional transit governance director would be appointed by the governor and then confirmed by both the GRTA board and the Transit Governance Council.

Now, does that sound as though it simplifies lines of authority and decision-making?

No, it complicates lines of authority. A 35-member board whose decisions could be vetoed by a 15-member board, with operations handled by a transit director who answers to neither board but instead is appointed by the governor?

Where is the accountability? What you’ve got under that system is a lot of politicians with the right to dabble in transit governance, but nobody actually responsible for it.

If you want control over transit, take responsibility for transit. But you cannot devise a workable system in which control over transit is wielded at the state level, while responsibility is pushed down to the regional and local level.

As an alternative, how about a nine-member regional board, comprising the following:

– One member each from Cobb, DeKalb, Fulton and Gwinnett, the most populated counties and those with the most direct need for transit service;

– Two members elected by county commission chairs from the remaining counties, which are both less populated and less transit-intensive (there’s no need to repeat the mistake with the original MARTA board, which for a long time included representatives from Gwinnett, Cobb and Clayton counties even though none of those counties had any stake in MARTA);

– Two members, including at least one from outside the four inner counties, elected by the region’s mayors;

– One member from the City of Atlanta.

Give that nine-member board the authority to hire its own transit director. Give it the right to call upon the Atlanta Regional Commission for planning support, and the right to call upon state agencies, including GRTA, for bonding assistance. Make its members accountable to the taxpayers and the transit users whom they serve.

In short, drop the political power plays and allow the regional Transit Governance Council to actually govern transit in the region. Give authority to officials who embrace transit and want to make it work, rather than to those who treat the concept as an rattlesnake that must be held at arm’s length lest it bite them.

The project will run through the downtown tourist district, connecting Centennial Olympic Park with the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site.

The streetcar is being funded through a $47.6 million federal grant, the largest federal allocation to the city of Atlanta for transportation other than MARTA or Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport in more than a decade.

“Today’s launch of the Atlanta Streetcar project is the first step in a project that will transform our downtown corridor,” Reed said.

Home prices in Atlanta fell for the fourth straight month in November, with a 2.5 percent decline that followed a 5 percent drop in October, according to the widely watched Standard & Poor’s Case-Shiller Home Price Indices.

“Atlanta continues to stand out in terms of recent relative weakness,” said David Blitzer, chairman of the index committee at S&P Indices.

Nationwide, 19 of 20 cities covered by the indices saw home prices fall for the second month in a row. Case-Shiller set a baseline home price index of 100 in 2000, so an index of 125 would reflect an increase of 25 percent. Atlanta’s index fell to 88.93 in November. Its peak was 136.47 in mid-2007.

Since then metro Atlanta’s index has drifted steadily down despite mild rebounds during summer months.

Metro Atlanta’s index for November was the second-lowest among the 20 cities, with only Detroit faring worse at 70.66. Washington D.C. had the highest index at 184.75, meaning prices there were still nearly 85 percent higher than in 2000.

Foreclosures have played a significant role in bringing down Atlanta home prices, said Maureen Maitland, vice president of S&P Indices.

In December, the average metro Atlanta home sales price was nearly $178,000, down roughly 12 percent from December 2010, according to the Atlanta Board of Realtors.

Some metro regions such as Phoenix, which suffered from overbuilding, may be seeing a slight improvement but only because they have hit bottom, Maitland said. Phoenix’s Case-Shiller index rose about a half-point to 101.12 in November.

“They’re not out of the woods,” she said.

In 2011, foreclosures and short sales — when a property is sold for less than is owed on it — made up roughly 60 percent of all sales in Atlanta, which will continue to see similar numbers this year, according to Prudential Georgia Realty.

Still, “We see very different results in many areas of metro Atlanta where short sales and foreclosures have slowed dramatically,” said Dan Forsman, president and CEO of the real estate firm.

“The inventory is getting very low, which is good news for sellers.”

Nationally, there are no signs the market is headed in a positive direction, Maitland said. The economy is turning around slowly but unemployment remains high; meanwhile, the national gross domestic product has grown only slightly, she said.

In 2010, he promised to cut crime. Already, Reed said Jan. 19, he’s done it.

“We have cut crime across every single zone in the city of Atlanta by between 10 percent and 16 percent, depending on the zone,” Reed announced.

Every zone? The Truth-O-Meter loves a good crime statistic, so we wound it up and let it whirl.

The Atlanta Police Department posts weekly crime data on its website. We clicked through it and found that while crime is down 11 percent across the city, it’s not down in all of the city’s six zones.

Ordinarily, we would check a claim like Reed’s by comparing the number of incidents in each zone for 2011 and 2009, the year before the mayor took office.

For this fact check, we took a slightly different approach. The department changed its zone boundaries on Dec. 13, 2011. If we used the standard method, a zone’s crime could appear to rise if its borders shifted to include a higher-crime neighborhood.

Instead, we looked at total incidents starting the first week of January 2011 to the week ending Dec. 10, 2011, the last full week before the switch. We compared it with the same time period in 2009.

We analyzed what the Federal Bureau of Investigation calls “Part I” offenses, or murders, rapes, robberies, aggravated assaults, burglaries, auto thefts, thefts from automobiles and larceny. Researchers think tallies of these crimes tend to be a good reflection of the actual number of incidents taking place.

This is what we found:

Zone 1: Crime declined 10 percent in this west Atlanta zone. The biggest drop was in thefts from cars, which fell 23 percent. Robbery fell 20 percent.

Zone 2: Crime dropped 16 percent in these northern neighborhoods, led by a 26 percent drop in thefts from cars.

Zone 3: This area includes areas on the city’s south side. Crime increased 2 percent, led by a 26 percent rise in larceny.

Zone 4: Crime declined 4 percent in these southwest Atlanta neighborhoods. Robberies, burglaries and thefts from cars all dropped by double digits while larcenies rose 18 percent.

Zone 5: Crime dropped 14 percent in this zone, which covers parts of downtown. Burglaries plummeted 35 percent.

Zone 6: Crime declined in these east Atlanta neighborhoods by 27 percent, led by a 45 percent drop in thefts from cars. Burglaries and aggravated assaults dropped by more than 30 percent.

Crime is down in Atlanta, but Reed mangled the specifics.

It’s down in all zones but one. And in the case of east Atlanta, where crime dropped 27 percent, the decline is far more dramatic than the 10 percent to 16 percent decrease Reed mentioned in his State of the City address.

In a written statement to PolitiFact Georgia, Reed acknowledged that the city has more work to do, but the lower overall crime rate is a sign of progress.

“One of our goals is to say with confidence that crime is down in all zones, and I believe we are moving in the right direction,” Reed said.

The family of Nancy Toffolini Benoit has waged a legal battle against the pornographic magazine since it published the photos after she and her son were killed in 2007 by wrestler Chris Benoit. Her family said she never gave the magazine permission to print the photos.

“The decedent is an adult black female, consistent in age with reported missing person Stacey English,” said chief medical examiner Randy Hanzlick, though it remains unclear whether the body is that of the missing Buckhead woman.