by SHAILA DEWAN, New York Times

ATLANTA — Kasim Reed, a former state legislator with a narrow lead in Atlanta’s mayoral race, began announcing plans for his administration on Wednesday, even as his opponent in the race, City Councilwoman Mary Norwood, called for a recount of the runoff election.

With all precincts reporting after the runoff on Tuesday, Mr. Reed led Ms. Norwood by 758 votes, a margin of less than 1 percent of the total vote. Under state law, a margin that small allows Ms. Norwood to call for a recount, and she said she would do so if the margin remains that small after 560 provisional ballots — the only votes that have yet to be counted — are tallied on Thursday evening.

Mr. Reed said he would cooperate with the recount, but noted that there were too few provisional ballots to make a difference in the outcome. As a result, he said, it was time to focus on governing Atlanta for the next four years.

“The swearing-in of Atlanta’s next mayor will take place in just under one month and it’s crucial that our city’s next mayor use all of that time to build an administration that is ready to govern on Day 1,” Mr. Reed, 40, said in a statement issued Wednesday afternoon. “While I respect Mrs. Norwood’s request for a recount in this election, I must move forward and focus my energies on building an administration that is going to address the serious challenges facing Atlanta.”

He said his first priority would be hiring a police chief with expertise in dealing with organized gang activity, a problem he said was plaguing the city.

Ms. Norwood, on the other hand, urged her supporters to leave their yard signs up until a recount was completed, possibly as soon as this weekend.

The runoff marked a surge of interest in Atlanta’s future as voters turned out in higher numbers than they did for the general election.

Mr. Reed was aided by a combination of forces that included his own focused get-out-the-vote operation, which his campaign spokesman said employed 20 vans and buses and made 50,000 calls on Election Day.

But an important factor in his popularity at the polls was the political establishment’s opposition to Ms. Norwood, 57, who had voted against a tax increase to end furloughs of police officers and firefighters and who had constantly attacked the current administration over crime and what she called the city’s “Enron-style accounting.”

Mr. Reed was supported by the current mayor, Shirley Franklin, and a past mayor, Andrew Young, as well as a host of other elected officials and pastors including the Rev. Raphael Warnock of Ebenezer Baptist Church, a symbol of the city’s civil rights history.

Some political analysts said he was helped in the end by a reinvigoration of the so-called machine that dominated city politics in the decades after Maynard Jackson became the city’s first black mayor. Others called his victory the machine’s last gasp.

“The future transformation of Atlanta’s electoral politics is well under way,” said Michael Leo Owens, a political scientist at Emory University, who pointed out that another of Tuesday’s victors was Alex Wan, the first Asian-American elected to the City Council. “In a black majority city, Kasim Reed barely won. One can sit back and say, Whew, that was so close, but one has to ask himself, Why was it so close?” He added, “Because there is no machine.”

Turnout increased not only in Mr. Reed’s strongholds but also across the city, and the highest turnout of any area was in City Council District 8, Ms. Norwood’s home turf in Buckhead, the wealthy, largely white north section of the city.

Broadly speaking, the voting did break down along racial lines, with Mr. Reed’s deepest support coming from the largely black south side and Ms. Norwood’s supporters concentrated on the north side. But there were nuances.

In District 8, Mr. Reed picked up more than four percentage points over his tally in last month’s primary, going from 8 percent to more than 12. He may have gained those voters who initially chose Lisa Borders, a black candidate and the City Council president, who endorsed Mr. Reed after coming in third in the general election.

Mr. Reed won far more votes, as many as 28 percent, in more liberal mostly white neighborhoods in the central and eastern sections of the city. Ms. Norwood, who built her campaign on a multiracial coalition nurtured by years of small attentions like attendance at neighborhood meetings and helping with trash pickup, fell short of the 25 percent of the black vote analysts said she needed. But she did several points better with voters in poorer black neighborhoods than in middle-class and affluent black neighborhoods, meaning her strongest support over all came from conservative whites and poor blacks who may have felt taken for granted by the black political elite.

To read the full article visit: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/03/us/03atlanta.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=atlanta%20mayor&st=cs h

For more information about Mary Norwood, visit:

http://www.marynorwoodformayor.com/