Olympian Problem: Avoiding Atlanta

EXECUTIVE MEMO

Olympian Problem: Avoiding Atlanta

elecommuting isn't an Olympic sport yet-but there will be a lot of it going on in Atlanta this summer.

The 1996 Olympics will have such a stranglehold on Atlanta-including the congestion caused by 15,000 athletes, thousands of staffers and countless fans-that federal agencies feared their 13,000 employees would find it impossible to get their work done.

So the General Services Administration, the National Performance Review and Atlanta's Federal Executive Board (a regional, multiagency coordinating panel) decided on an alternative-moving federal employees to remote sites.

On May 1, the Gainesville, Ga., federal courthouse, built in 1910, was formally reopened as the first of an expected four out-of-Atlanta telecommuting sites. Up to 35 percent of Atlanta's federal workforce is expected to work at the satellite offices during the Olympics.

The agencies whose work will be affected by the Olympics include the departments of Agriculture, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development and Justice, along with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Social Security Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers. Not all of the agencies with operations in Atlanta plan to relocate their employees. Some, such as a Veterans Affairs Department medical center, will stay in place and hope for the best.

It's not the first federal telecommuting experiment. After the 1994 Los Angeles earthquake, government officials installed a telecommuting center in Valencia, Calif. The idea was such a success that the center has been made permanent. "Productivity, attendance, morale-every measure has improved," says the NPR's Mike Russell.

In a separate move, Attorney General Janet Reno has decided to conscript 1,000 non-law-enforcement federal employees to handle such tasks as operating metal detectors and screening spectators for weapons during the Olympics. A law passed after the terrorist attack on Israeli athletes during the 1972 Olympics in Munich gave the attorney general the power to use the employees of any federal agency to contribute to Olympic security efforts. The total number of security personnel in Atlanta is expected to be about 30,000- twice the number deployed in the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics.