Atlanta Local News

It felt like last summer on the floor of the Georgia House of Representatives on Friday. Legislative Democrats and one disgruntled Republican got a chance to re-air their complaints about the new House map GOP leaders pushed through the General Assembly during a two-week redistricting session last August. The occasion was a new bill containing a couple of changes to the House map adopted last summer. The bill, which passed 101-53 and now moves to the Senate, would reduce the number of House districts taking up portions of Hall County – Republican Gov...

Aquilex Holdings LLC completed its restructuring, is now majority owned by affiliates of Centerbridge Partners LP and its CEO has stepped own. Atlanta-based Aquilex Holdings is the parent of Aquilex Corp., which provides maintenance, repair and industrial cleaning products and services to the energy industry. The company said it cut debt by more than $300 million through an debt-for-equity exchange and an $80 million equity investment. Bill Varner retired as president and CEO. Aquilex also named Donovan Boyd chairman...

Atlanta Business Chronicle, Atlanta Board of Realtors and RealValuator.com on Thursday held the inaugural Atlanta Real Estate Summit. The 90-minute event at The Home Depot Inc. headquarters featured analysis of market trends from 2011, industry panel and keynote discussion of strategy and planning for 2012. Click the photo on the right for a slideshow of the event. Tom Bell, chairman of Mesa Capital Partners and chairman of the U.S. Chamber’s Executive Committee, gave the keynote address, entitled “On The Horizon...

Jack London cozies up to Frederick Nietzsche in “The Grey,” a sweaty-palmed action film about survival of the fittest... on every imaginable level. En route to an oil rig in Alaska, Liam Neeson and a snack tray of assorted humans crash-land somewhere in the Great White North. There they must survive wolves, weather and each other. Neeson becomes the de facto leader because… well, because he’s Liam Neeson. But also because he is a sharpshooter by trade who was hired to protect the rig workers from assorted predators...

The Georgia House of Representatives passed a mid-year budget Friday that would help fund additional toll lanes and aid farmers worried about the impacts of the state’s new immigration law. The $18.6 billion budget, which will cover state spending through the end of the current fiscal year, was approved unanimously. The House made few changes in the mid-year budget recommended by Gov. Nathan Deal last month, adjustments that would result in a net increase in spending of $255 million. The most significant changes included a mid-year adjustment in K-12 spending to reflect enrollment increases in Georgia public schools...

As Georgia’s economy shows signs of recovering from the recession, rural Jackson County is emerging as the state’s big winner in the race for jobs. The latest example: the Jan. 31 announcement that Toyota Industries Corp. will invest $350 million in a new manufacturing plant in Pendergrass, Ga., one of Jackson’s nine communities dotting the farmland and rolling hills along Interstate 85, a 45-minute drive northeast of Atlanta. Toyota follows two projects announced in December: Kubota Corp...

The U.S. unemployment rate fell in January for a fifth straight month, to 8.3 percent, as the economy added nearly a quarter-million jobs. The jobless rate -- down from December’s 8.5 percent -- is the lowest in almost three years. The rate is now eight-tenths of a percentage point under what it was last August, the U.S. Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics reported. BLS’ separate survey of employers showed that nonfarm payroll jobs rose by 243,000 last month, with businesses adding 257,000 positions and a slight drop in private-sector employment...

Atlanta-based Kilgannon has merged with fellow ad and PR firm Dalton Agency. The merger’s financial terms were not disclosed. The joined companies will operate under the Dalton Agency banner with Kilgannon serving as the newly expanded group’s Atlanta office. The Dalton Agency currently has offices in Jacksonville, Orlando, Savannah, Ga., and Columbia, S.C. The companies said the combined Jacksonville, Fla.-based agency has about $35 million in invoiced billings and employs about 100 people...

A 1860s period film now in production, “Abraham Lincoln vs. The Zombies,” is being shot in Savannah and at Fort Pulaski, Ga., reports the Savannah Morning News. “It’s a historical horror film set in 1863 about Abraham Lincoln’s secret mission to the South to defeat the undead,” line producer Devin Ward told the newspaper. Honest Abe is president by day, zombie killer by night, in the production by Los Angeles-based Score Films, the newspaper reports. The film has a budget of less than $1 million, and is intended for distribution by DVD to outlets including Red Box and NetFlix, rather than theaters, Ward said Filming started Jan...

Officials with the company that owns the Georgia State Fair announced Thursday the event will return to Macon's Central City Park this spring, reports the Macon Telegraph. The 150-year-old event faced cancellation after the Macon Exchange Club voted in August not to hold a fair in 2012. Universal Fairs of Memphis, Tenn., which bought the fair, will host the fair April 27-May 6, the newspaper reports.