Moving into June
Tuesday, June 2— Welcome to June, and to Pride Month! If you are looking for festivals and fundraisers to attend, here are a few ideas. You can also check out the annual Pride Film Series at Midtown Art Cinema.
🚊 Starting this week, getting around the Beltline will be a little easier. Check out our story on ATL Spoke, a driverless community shuttle that opens this Friday on the Westside. We also have more on volunteers who are beautifying Downtown in time for the World Cup (along with another opportunity to pitch in), and a look at how gas prices will be affected by the expiration of the tax suspension.
➵ Tomorrow is the launch of “The Reset,” a new Rough Draft newsletter focusing on health and wellness from award-winning lifestyle journalist, Laura Scholz. You can sign up to subscribe here.
And, if you are interested in financial literacy, “Savvy Senior: Empower Your Financial Wellness Journey” takes place at 8:30 a.m. on June 18 at St. James Community Church of Alpharetta. You can register for the free event here.
And now for a few headlines:
📰 Atlanta Civic Circle, a nonprofit newsroom covering affordable housing, labor, and city government, announced it is closing, citing an inability to secure consistent funding.
💵 The City of Tucker has tentatively adopted a millage rate of 2.036 mills for fiscal year 2027, unchanged from the 2026 rate, while the City of Dunwoody is proposing to keep its millage rate steady at 3.040 mills, which includes a reduction for all homestead properties.
🧶 Scraplanta, the creative reuse store, is raising funds after being forced to temporarily close due to a leak that caused its ceiling to collapse.
🕓 Here’s what’s in today’s newsletter.
• ATL Spoke launches Friday
• Volunteers beautify Downtown
• Gas prices set to rise
AND
• Stories of Atlanta | Lance Russell
Atlanta Beltline launching ATL Spoke autonomous shuttle service on Westside
🚊 The Atlanta Beltline will launch ATL Spoke, a free autonomous – that’s driverless – community shuttle on the Westside, this Friday.
The shuttles’ initial route will have stops at MARTA West End Station, Joseph E. Lowery Boulevard at Beecher Street, and two stops within the Lee + White district: the Food Hall on the west and Boxcar/Wild Heaven on the east. Service operates seven days a week from noon to 10 p.m., with a shuttle arriving every 12-15 minutes.
Every shuttle is staffed by an onboard attendant and is ADA-accessible.
🦼 Find out more about the 12-month pilot project here.
RELATED
💰 The Atlanta City Council unanimously voted to fund an $8 million deal to build a .06-mile trail to connect the Westside Beltline Connector trail and the PATH Parkway trail, which runs through Georgia Tech’s campus.
Seniors Helping Seniors® In-Home Care Services Expands in Georgia
SPONSORED BY SENIORS HELPING SENIORS
❤️ Lara Smith, a former Publix pharmacist and longtime Brookhaven resident, has expanded Seniors Helping Seniors to serve Buckhead, Brookhaven, Chamblee, Decatur, Dunwoody, Stone Mountain, and Tucker. Her mission is to provide compassionate, relationship-focused care that helps local seniors remain independent and engaged at home.
Seniors Helping Seniors® provides non-medical in-home care services with a unique peer-to-peer caregiving approach. By hiring active older adults as caregivers, the company fosters meaningful connections, companionship, and trusted support between seniors and the people caring for them.
Volunteers work to beautify Downtown Atlanta ahead of FIFA World Cup
🤝 Under overcast skies, around 600 volunteers from more than 20 companies came together on June 1 to beautify Downtown Atlanta ahead of the FIFA World Cup.
Led by the Blank Family of Businesses in collaboration with Hands On Atlanta, the City of Atlanta, and business partners, the “Together for Downtown” Community Day initiative covered over 25 city blocks and included efforts like landscaping, mural painting, trash pickup, and graffiti removal.
The energy was high as volunteers gathered under the Falcon sculpture at Gate 2 of Mercedes-Benz Stadium. Included among the pre-event speakers were CEO of AMBSE Rich McKay, CEO of SoDo Atlanta Jon Birdsong, Deputy Chief of Staff for Mayor Andre Dickens Austin Wagner, and President and CEO of Hands On Atlanta Naomi Green.
“That is what happens when people from around our city decide to roll up their sleeves and rise up together,” Green said.
🌿 Learn more about “Together for Downtown” here.
RELATED
⚽ Want to volunteer in support of the FIFA World Cup? Find out about training for an additional opportunity here.
Gas prices set to rise as Georgia tax suspension expires
⛽ Gov. Brian Kemp’s office announced that he will not renew the gasoline tax suspension when it expires tonight, June 2, at 11:59 p.m.
Kemp suspended the tax in March as gas prices climbed due to the ongoing war in Iran. He signed an extension in May, which is now set to end.
Gas prices are expected to rise by around 33 cents per gallon for regular and 37 cents per gallon for diesel. According to AAA, the average gas price in Georgia on June 2 is $3.80 with the tax suspension in place, so motorists are likely to see gas over $4 per gallon when they fill up on Wednesday.
🛢️ Read more on this story here.
‘He Got the Picture’ Stories of Atlanta by Lance Russell
VIA SAPORTAREPORT
✍️ One of the challenges of our 21st-century lifestyle is trying to process the unprecedented amount of information available at any given moment. We are subjected to so much input on so many different topics that it is hard for us to imagine how people got along before the invention of instantaneous communication.
It helps, when thinking about how previous generations consumed information, to remember that instant gratification was not on anyone’s list of expectations. People were used to having to wait for information and, subsequently, any improvement in the speed of communications immediately attracted attention.
Such was the case for a magazine called Harper’s Weekly, which saw its readership dramatically increase during the Civil War because of the illustrations it printed depicting battles and troop maneuvers. Harper’s hired artists to travel with armies and document what they saw. Illustrators were to the 19th century what photographers became once the technology of photography had been perfected.
And while the camera ultimately replaced the illustrator as the preferred means of capturing images, that did not mean that life was over for illustrators. In fact, one illustrator who experienced a very successful wartime career discovered that three decades after the end of the Civil War his talents were still very much in demand.
🖌️ Learn more about who that illustrator was, and how he influenced fellow German artists, on this week’s Stories of Atlanta.
🖋️ Today’s Silver Streak was edited by Julie E. Bloemeke.
