In trying to persuade their fellow East Cobb citizens about the benefits of creating a new municipality, the leaders of an East Cobb Cityhood effort invited their peers from South Cobb to a town hall meeting at Walton High School Monday night.
While there were skeptics among the 400 or so people gathered in the school cafeteria, the message they got was that Cobb County has grown so much that county government can’t adequately provide services.
“I kind of see how it doesn’t quite work,” said Galt Porter, who’s part of the South Cobb Alliance and a member of the Cobb Planning Commission. “We have more people in unincorporated Cobb than the city of Atlanta.”
For the last two years, Porter and others have been meeting with citizens interested in forming what could become the City of Mableton.
Like the East Cobb group, they’ve had a bill submitted to be taken up by the Georgia legislature next year that would call for a referendum.
The point they tried to drive home to the East Cobb audience was that local government needs to be much more local than it is now.
“While we have different things that we’re asking for, everyone is looking for representation closer to home,” said Tre Hutchins of the South Cobb Alliance, who attended elementary and middle school in East Cobb.
The five-member Cobb Board of Commissioners is governed by a chairman elected countywide, and four commissioners who represent around 190,000 people each.
In the East Cobb legislation, the city would be governed by a mayor elected at-large to cover a population of around 96,000 and a six-member city council representing districts with around 16,000 people each.
That means more local control over zoning and planning, code enforcement, public safety and roads, the services the East Cobb group has put forward for a city to provide.
A feasibility study conducted by Georgia State University concluded that a City of East Cobb is financially viable without a tax increase beyond the proposed 2.96 mills, and would even start with a $4.2 million surplus.
“We’re not recreating the wheel here,” said East Cobb cityhood leader David Birdwell, noting that only one of the 10 cities created in metro Atlanta since 2005 has raised taxes.
He said he contacted friends in five of those cities, “and not one has said it wasn’t a good thing to do.”
Audience members could ask questions only by writing them down on index cards, and some were dubious of the motives behind cityhood.
Questioning motives
The first questioner wanted to know if anyone involved in the cityhood effort would refrain from running for mayor or city council, at least for the first eight years of a City of East Cobb.
Porter was dumbfounded.
“All these people, who have volunteered their time and worked so hard, you would want them to just walk out?”
“Yes! Yes!” cried a few citizens.
At that point, Rob Eble, another cityhood leader, stood up on crutches (he recently suffered a leg injury at work) and tried to inject some tongue-in-cheek humor.
“Hell no! We don’t want to do it!”
Birdwell said he has no interest in running for political office. Karen Hallacy, a state PTA leader, legislative lobbyist and appointee to the Development Authority of Cobb County, echoed Porter.
“If we tell them that they have no chance of running,” she said, “you’ll disqualify people with a lot of talent.”
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Later, a questioner wanted to know where an East Cobb City Hall would be located. Hallacy said the current East Cobb Government Service Center on Lower Roswell Road would be a possibility, at a reasonable cost, and could also house the city’s police and fire headquarters, since those operations already exist there.
“It’s small,” a citizen shouted out.
“We plan to keep government small,” Hallacy said, to some wild applause.
The art of persuasion
Allen Gilly, who’s lived near Walton for 45 years, is the kind of citizen the cityhood group needs to convince. He said after the meeting he hadn’t heard about cityhood until his sister-in-law told him about it.
He’s never seen a need for East Cobb to have its own government. He admitted “I heard some positive things but I still have some concerns and questions.”
What he liked was the message of more local control, even though he thinks Cobb government is “great.”
But Gilly does wonder about the speed of the cityhood process. If legislation is approved next year, a referendum would take place in November 2020.
“Do we have to do this next year?” he said. “If we’re going to do it, let’s do it right.
“Show me how it’s better, and if it’s better, I’m all in.”
The cityhood group will appear next week before the Powers Ferry Corridor Alliance. That meeting is Wednesday, May 8, at 7 p.m. at Brumby Elementary School (815 Terrell Mill Road).
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