At the Taste of East Cobb festival earlier this month, Craig Chapin, the chairman of the Committee for East Cobb Cityhood, was approached by an irate citizen.

Less than three weeks before the East Cobb Cityhood referendum, tempers and allegations were flaring over what has been a contentious issue ever since it first arose in 2018.

With a vote looming over carving out a slice of a vast East Cobb community into a city of around 60,000 people, emotions were going into overdrive.

(Monitoring just a sliver of the cityhood chatter on NextDoor, a social media platform for people for whom Facebook apparently isn’t unhinged enough, is a vivid reminder for Internet oldies of the Wild West days of early Web message boards.)

Mindy Seger, Chapin’s counterpart with the anti-Cityhood group East Cobb Alliance, said she was called over “to help defuse the situation.”

She said they “discussed how heated things were getting and wanted to show our ability to share space.”

In between debates the two groups had agreed to—and before a forum at Pope High School that turned a little nasty— there was good-natured conversation, and the above photo-op.

“Craig and I agreed Top Gun Maverick is going to be a great movie, we both love BBQ and Righteous Q is one of the best, and that it is possible to be kind to people you disagree with,” Seger said Thursday, two days after the cityhood referendum was soundly defeated.

She and what the Alliance claimed was a grassroots collection of citizens across political and social lines were gratified not just by the victory, but by the margin.

All but one of the 17 precincts voted handily against the referendum. It was a thumpin’, as President George W. Bush memorably described a midterm election that torpedoed his fellow Republicans.

More than 73 percent of those casting votes in the East Cobb referendum rejected it, a 46-point gap and by far a larger spread than defeated cityhood votes in Lost Mountain (58 percent voted no) and Vinings (55 percent opposed).

All three votes were, among other things, the victims of sloppy, poorly managed legislation that further riled up the citizenry and a chastened Cobb County government alike.

Instead of November referendums, they were pushed up to May. The East Cobb bill changed several more times, including how the mayor would be chosen and residency requirements for city council candidates.

Republican lawmakers responding to the new Democratic majority of the Cobb Board of Commissioners made a coordinated, and at times ham-handed, attempt to create the chance for more local control in the county’s most conservative areas.

Minutes after the Georgia House passed the East Cobb Cityhood bill, State Rep. Matt Dollar, its main sponsor, abruptly resigned, and non-locals were left to carry the bill.

State Rep. Sharon Cooper, a co-sponsor of the bill, and State Sen. Kay Kirkpatrick, whose seat was redrawn out of the proposed city, voted for allowing citizens to have a referendum, but neither spoke to the legislation during floor debate.

The East Cobb bill, predicated on the notion that our neighbors are best-suited to decide things like density and quality of life issues, was tellingly deflected by our neighbor-lawmakers.

Cobb County government set up a web portal on cityhood and held town hall meetings, in particular honing in on what they said would likely be slower response times for public safety calls in East Cobb.

The Cityhood group twice accused the county of campaigning against the referendums, and while those calls were ignored, it’s clear Cobb’s role was vital to their defeat.

In the final week of the campaign, Cobb public safety agency heads appeared on a Zoom call organized by the East Cobb Alliance, rehashing previous concerns.

Most of all, Cobb’s cityhood referendums were swamped by everyday citizens of communities who never bought the argument that there was a need to change their form of local government, and in the case of East Cobb, to create expensive police, fire and 911 agencies.

When East Cobb cityhood was revived in March 2021, the new focus was to be on planning and zoning and controlling growth and development.

Those were issues I thought could make for a stronger cityhood campaign, as I wrote when the first effort was abandoned in 2019.

But when a required financial feasibility study was released in November, it included public safety services. That study left a lot easy financial holes for opponents to poke at, and even shred.

Cityhood leaders said police and fire “kept coming up” when they met with citizens, but they never offered specifics.

Just as in the initial East Cobb cityhood campaign, however, there never was much of a groundswell for cityhood. It was a secretive initiative that blindsided the community when it first arose nearly four years ago and lacked any kind of grassroots appeal.

That some behind-the-scenes leaders had development interests fanned the flames of suspicion.

An East Cobb resident I spoke to in late March who supported cityhood felt even then it was ill-fated.

“Too much emotionalism,” he said, adding that as a small-government advocate, he’s leery of a Democratic-led county commission and thinks a City of East Cobb would be preferable on a number of fronts, not just development.

While that’s a novel way to make the case for smaller government, those against cityhood turned up their calls that a new city would add another layer instead.

This citizen also questioned the county’s financial estimates of the cost of losing cities, and the numbers and claims being peddled by the Alliance.

But East Cobb Cityhood was always a hard sell, and its public-facing proponents, while well-meaning, were fighting a multi-front war on multiple issues. All three of the failed referendums in Cobb (another comes in November, in Mableton) also were the subjects of lawsuits that were ordered to be set aside until after the elections.

In trying to press for the need to better control zoning and development, East Cobb cityhood advocates spent too much time and energy defending why police and fire services were necessary.

After receiving documents via an open records request, the Alliance contended that transferring the county fire fund millage rate was the only way to make a City of East Cobb financially viable.

The Cityhood group disputed that charge without elaborating, and resorted to some dog-whistle rhetoric that Cobb Commission Chairwoman Lisa Cupid and federal Democrats in Washington, notably the Biden Administration, were pushing policies “to incentivize states and localities to buck market forces to increase housing density.”

It smacked of desperation, and was meant to appeal to voters who’ve been concerned about zoning density and a proposed Unified Development Code in Cobb County.

Near the end of the campaign, the Cityhood group insisted it wasn’t obligated to file a financial disclosure report revealing who was funding its efforts.

That harkened back to the early days of Cityhood, when the group explained that it wasn’t identifying its donors or others involved for fear of harassment from their “enemies” and the media.

To repeat such an arrogant, even paranoid refusal to be modestly transparent reflects disdain for the citizens of a community whose blessing they needed to realize their vision for local control.

This was a case study in how to rub a community the wrong way while seeking its vote.

The East Cobb Cityhood group may eventually be right about the development and housing concerns it raised.

“East Cobb will be under increasing growth and tax pressure from Cobb County to urbanize our community,” the Cityhood group said in a post-referendum statement, as it scrubbed its website.

Their issues may, like Sandy Springs and other North Fulton communities that are now cities, resonate over time and gain adherents to a new effort to create a city.

Cupid’s handling of zoning matters—especially the Dobbins case that prompted a rare protest from the Cobb Chamber of Commerce—has sounded some understandable alarm bells.

The theme of the East Cobb Alliance has been that it likes East Cobb “just the way it is,” but this community isn’t static.

It’s not merely a bedroom community any more, just as a once-rural area became an affluent, in-demand suburban hotspot for great home values, schools and quality of life several decades ago, when I was growing up here.

If you remember the Parkaire airfield, and farmland where retail centers and million-dollar homes stand, you understand how different East Cobb looks and feels now, and how it can change again.

From the outset, the masterminds of the East Cobb Cityhood effort never understood or seemed to care about what it takes to create a winning grassroots campaign.

They had money and political influence to get a referendum bill passed in the legislature, but that’s about it. During the second campaign, a more concerted attempt was made to garner community support, and did they did make some headway.

Broader public support was essential, but ultimately they didn’t trust the public enough to come clean about who they are, or to build authentic community connections.

If there’s to be another attempt, there’s got to be the kind of ground-up impetus that prompted successful cityhood efforts elsewhere.

A revived East Cobb Cityhood effort also would need to be rid of its original parties, who while sowing visceral skepticism, inadvertently gave rise to a new brand of community activism they could learn from.

“Many in this community stepped out of their comfort zones by attending meetings, wearing buttons, knocking doors, and waving signs on street corners,” Seger said. “Not only did we find a way to work together sharing various skills, we made some unexpected friendships along the way.”

Seger said there’s an interest in trying to “raise the bar for Georgia’s Cityhood process. The community has the mic, we hope those in authority are listening.”

She said while she doesn’t have contact information for Chapin, with whom she momentarily tried to demonstrate some local goodwill, “I hope we can connect in the spirit of community.”

Related:

• East Cobb Cityhood referendum precinct-by-precinct votes
• East Cobb Cityhood group: ‘Our polling told a different story’
• East Cobb Cityhood referendum defeated in landslide
• As East Cobb Cityhood vote nears, recent votes have sputtered
• East Cobb News Cityhood information page

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