The last of four Cobb cityhood bills to pass the Georgia legislature this year was the only referendum approved by voters.
After cityhood bills failed in May in East Cobb, Lost Mountain and Vinings, a majority of voters in the proposed city of Mableton voted to create a new municipality on Tuesday.
It will the first new city in Cobb in more than 100 years and also the county’s largest city, with around 77,000 residents.
Voters approved the measure 53-47 percent (full results here), and by about 1,487 votes.
The reason the Mableton referendum didn’t get on the May ballot is because the bill took longer to make its way through the legislature.
The three failed Cobb cityhood referendums were pushed through in quick order by Republican lawmakers who wanted to accelerate the referendum date to May 24, the date of the Georgia primaries.
But that’s not the only different set of circumstances separating the Mableton cityhood effort from the others.
The South Cobb Alliance, created to support cityhood, began holding town hall meetings and other community events in 2015. Its leaders, unlike organizers in East Cobb, weren’t reluctant to be in the spotlight.
Also unlike East Cobb, Mableton cityhood leaders weren’t proposing expensive public safety services.
They included Galt Porter, at the time a member of the Cobb Planning Commission, and Tre’ Hutchins, who’s now a member of the Cobb Board of Education.
In early 2019, they were invited to speak at an East Cobb cityhood town hall meeting at Walton High School, and extolled the benefits of more local control.
Their message was that their area wasn’t getting proper services from Cobb County government, especially development.
The proposed services in Mableton are planning and zoning, code enforcement and sanitation.
The East Cobb and Mableton cityhood groups revived their efforts in 2021, and vocal opposition arose in those communities, as well as in Lost Mountain and Vinings.
Cobb government officials also held town halls in all four communities, insisting they were impartial, but drawing objections from pro-cityhood groups.
The Preserve South Cobb group, which opposes Mableton cityhood, says it may be pursuing a deannexation process in precincts of the new city in which 70 percent or more voted against the referendum.
A full transition to cityhood will take two years, with Gov. Brian Kemp appointing a transition committee to get the process started. Mableton will have a mayor selected at-large and six city council members elected by districts (see map).
Those elections will start next March, and they will be non-partisan.
Mableton was a city from 1912 to 1916, then became unincorporated after flood damage was too cost prohibitive in the city’s budget. No other cities in Cobb have been created since.
More on Mableton’s next steps from the Cobb County Courier.
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