ATLANTA -- In one of her last public appearances here, Atlanta Parks and Recreation Director Deborah O. McCarty faced controversy over a plan to build a stone path atop a pretty knoll in historic Piedmont Park.
She could have led the meeting about the park, but stayed in the background. That was vintage McCarty, and exemplified the approach she'll bring next month to her new job as president of the Columbia Association.
In a career here that has taken her from community organizer to the City Council to chief of parks and recreation, McCarty has developed a reputation as a quiet conciliator and consensus builder: not a charismatic leader, but someone who develops loyalty by answering the phone and taking care of details.
The move to Columbia, where she will be the planned community's equivalent of a mayor, will complete a personal transformation for the 45-year-old McCarty -- from inner-city activist to suburban soccer mom.
"Debby came here like most of us -- energetic, idealistic and bent on changing the city," said Bill Adams, a longtime community activist and real estate agent in Grant Park, a historic neighborhood where McCarty started her political career -- a white woman representing a mostly black district.
"Then, we all had kids and moved out to the suburbs. The land of wall-to-wall carpet, mini-vans, soccer moms and sameness," he said.
McCarty said of her career: "I started out as a neighborhood volunteer and ended up as a politician, an administrator and then a mom. It's all coming full circle."
Columbia Council members say the management skills she developed in running one of Atlanta's most neglected departments made her attractive for the CA president post -- a $125,000-a-year position running one of the largest homeowners groups in the country, overseeing a $44 million budget for the closest thing Columbia has to a town government.
She will replace the only president CA has ever had, Padraic Kennedy, appointed to the post 26 years ago. As the council talked about finding a successor, its members wondered if Columbia no longer needed a visionary activist in the job, but instead was ready for a professional manager. In McCarty, they seem to have found someone who has moved from one role to the other.
A native of Houston -- the daughter of an electrical engineer and a housewife -- McCarty graduated from Southwestern University Georgetown, Texas, and came to Atlanta as a VISTA volunteer. "I grew up thinking you just participated in your community," she said.
Saving a neighborhood
She worked with a group trying to save the neighborhood of Grant Park, one of the first to attract preservationists in a city that at that time had little interest in saving anything from its relatively brief architectural history.
"We were all renovation-minded, young, naive dreamers," said Eileen Rhea Brown, founder of the Atlanta Preservation Center.
As James Rouse was trying to turn rolling farmland into a diverse, economically balanced community some 600 miles to the north, McCarty had bought a dilapidated bungalow in crime-infested Grant Park.
She led the effort to improve housing codes for the elderly,
launched community groups to encourage people to invest in their neighborhoods and renovate abandoned houses, and lobbied for zoning that protected homes from commercial development.
She and several other newcomers to Grant Park stood in front of a bulldozer to stop the city from tearing down a historic home with housing code violations. They saved the house.
'A lot of compassion'
"She's got a lot of compassion for neighborhoods," said the Rev. Houston Wheeler, a community organizer and head of the Southern Ministry Network in Atlanta.
McCarty helped establish a nonprofit real estate entity that used its commission fees to start a federal credit union and food co-op in the neighborhood.
The accomplishments of those years are McCarty's fondest memories.
"I think the best thing any of us could do is to affect the neighborhoods we live in," she said. "That has been my own little piece of the world."
In 1977, at 25, she was urged by her fellow activists to get into politics. McCarty quit her job helping to end housing discrimination in the city -- she was associate director of Neighborhood Housing Services, a private agency -- and launched a door-to-door campaign for a seat on the Atlanta City Council.
She ran as a Democrat against an incumbent black Republican leader in her majority black district of 35,000. With little money, she spent a sultry summer knocking on every door in Carver Homes, one of Atlanta's largest housing projects.
Railroad tracks divide the district, which covers the southeast corner of the city, from Turner Field to the airport.
On the north side is Grant Park, the neighborhood that attracted the renovators. The park is home to Zoo Atlanta and the Cyclorama, a renowned Civil War exhibit that portrays the Battle of Atlanta. Old warehouses were eventually renovated into trendy restaurants and antique and vintage clothing stores.
Across the tracks is the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, one of the country's largest, scattered used car and tire lots, check-cashing stores and three of Atlanta's largest housing projects.
Building black support
As a white woman, McCarty stood out. She developed a strategy of gaining the support of some of the community's older, respected black leaders such as Asberry Fears. A longtime activist in the Thomasville neighborhood, Fears, now 82, turned from being a staunch supporter of the black incumbent to helping lead McCarty's campaign.
"We'd sit up all night, until 1 and 2 a.m. working on fliers and talking to get her elected," Fears remembered.
"Her husband would tell us, 'Y'all better go to bed.' We'd just say, 'You better go to bed, we have to win,' " Fears said.
McCarty won that election and four consecutive terms.
"People always asked me why I was black and supporting a white woman in a black district and I always told them it was because she could get the job done," said Fears, who credits McCarty with helping his community get a park, ballfields and benches during her City Council tenure.
As a city councilwoman, she rewrote the city's housing code to encourage renovations to aging, historic homes and fought -- unsuccessfully -- to block a metal container facility from coming to the mostly residential neighborhood.
'She's a good negotiator'
Among her constituents, she is most often remembered for the little things: the time she got an elderly man's trash can fixed, getting the power company out when a storm knocked down utility lines, finding out whom to call to pick up a dead dog in a front yard, or getting water turned back on for a poor, elderly couple.
"You may have called Debby's office and left a message with her assistant, but it was always Debby -- herself -- who called you back," said Michael P. Fears, Asberry's 48-year-old son who lives in the Thomasville neighborhood.
"She isn't flamboyant. She doesn't talk in lofty ideas," said John F. Sweet, an attorney and former Atlanta city councilman who served with McCarty. "She's not a good leader. She's not a good follower. She's a really good negotiator."
Her former husband, Vern McCarty, who eventually took over the district's council seat -- they remain on good terms -- said his ex-wife's popularity is something of a mystery.
"She's renowned as being popular among her constituents, but nobody really knows why," he said.
"She's a woman. There's a lot of poor women in her district and the theory was that they could identify with her."
Her current husband, John R. Myer, an Atlanta attorney, said: "She's a consensus-builder. She's got an extraordinary ability to find common ground."
In 1993, then-Mayor Maynard Jackson appointed her commissioner of the Parks and Recreation and Cultural Affairs Department. "She's a really down-to-earth person," said Carol Alonza, who runs a renovated recreation center in southeast Atlanta. "What really stood out to me is that she listened."
As parks commissioner for five years, McCarty is credited with building and renovating some of the city's recreation centers, creating an endowment fund for an inner-city youth camp program and increasing recreation funding from $8 million to $11 million -- even as the department's budget has been depleted over the years to pay for Turner Field, Atlanta's new baseball stadium.
Critics question effectiveness
Some critics say she did little to preserve Atlanta's ailing parks, which many argue need to be better maintained. To these critics, what her supporters call a quiet, low-key "calm diplomacy" is a sign of poor leadership.
In recent years, McCarty's personal focus has shifted. She has three sons from her second marriage, ages 5, 3, and 7 months. She has moved from Grant Park to an upscale subdivision of newer homes. Now she says most evenings and weekends are spent not at community meetings but at T-ball and soccer games.
McCarty made one venture back into politics last year, quitting the parks job to run for president of the City Council. She lost, just missing a runoff as the second-highest vote-getter when Robb Pitts garnered just over 50 percent of the vote.
The experience left her with ambivalent feelings about contemporary politics.
"One of the things that was so discouraging about the City Council president race was that campaigns these days are about money and media," she said. "My love of politics is from the days of when the experience comes from grass-roots campaigning."
It also put one of the few marks of controversy on her career. After the election, Mayor Bill Campbell re-appointed her to the parks job.
Since then, Pitts has threatened to block her confirmation and launched what he calls an investigation of her department.
He alleges that under McCarty, the department gave city contracts for uniforms and T-shirts to an Atlanta T-shirt company partially owned by parks and recreation employees. Pitts also alleges that parks employees received kickbacks from money for student registration fees in sports programs. No evidence has emerged to support his charges.
Though some say that Pitts' continuing feud with Campbell is behind Pitts' charges, he says that McCarty never was qualified for the parks job.
"She has no skills in the area of running parks," Pitts said. "She has only chaired the Human Resources Committee as a city councilwoman which oversees the parks department."
'A question of management'
Others agree. "It's not a question of mismanagement with Debby and her parks department," said Ruth Wall, a longtime Atlanta activist and preservationist. "It's a question of management."
McCarty acknowledges she had few management skills when she took over the parks department. She had spent 16 years on the City Council, earning a law degree along the way, augmenting her salary of barely $20,000 a year with stints as a law clerk, campaign manager, housing advocate and associate theology professor at Emory University.
"I had a lot of learning to do," she said. "I said I wanted to know everything."
McCarty says she knows as little about Columbia now as she did about parks and recreation then, but plans to do what she has always done -- listen.
That skill was evident at the meeting about building the walkway in Piedmont Park. As tensions rose among environmentalists, conservationists and advocates for the disabled who would need the path for access, McCarty watched from her seat in the back.
"These guys are pushing to get this fancy, big wall and the handicapped don't even have adequate bathrooms or water fountains," said Wall, an opponent of the project.
Then, in a quiet interjection -- almost like a kindergarten teacher calming unruly students -- McCarty urged everyone to try to work together. She speaks in a soft, gentle voice, gesturing with her hands.
"We've got two sides here," she said. "We're trying to find consensus where each side may not get what they want, but we get something we all can live with."
McCarty has made three visits to Columbia. She says she sees a need for more commercial development -- especially to revitalize Columbia's ailing Town Center -- and to address a complacency she finds among Columbia residents.
"People are living there and not really doing much else," she said. "They need to be a part of it."
Pub Date: 7/11/98