Hours after qualifying ended for the May 24 primary elections, Cobb District 2 Commissioner Jerica Richardson said Friday that she will be “forced” to vacate her office in January.
But in a video message on her Facebook page, the first-term Democrat vowed to fight a reapportionment map that drew her out of her East Cobb residence.
As of Jan. 1, 2023, when the new map takes effect, “I will not live in the qualifying district,” she said, referring to District 2. “I will not be permitted to vote on important county matters starting on that date.”
She said the “bigger issue” is how the new map “invalidates the will of the people and has created a conundrum on the county commission.”
Nearly 100,000 Cobb citizens, Richardson said, will not have a representative for several months” until a special election would be called.
“That is why I have made the decision to not step down as commissioner for District 2,” she said, reading from prepared remarks (you can watch the video here).
Richardson moved into a home off Post Oak Tritt Road last summer, but in February the Republican-dominated Georgia legislature redrew Cobb commission district lines to place most of East Cobb in District 3.
Incumbent Republican JoAnn Birrell has qualified to seek another term in District 3.
Richardson did not qualify for that race, and has until the end of the year to move into the new District 2, which includes the Cumberland-Smyrna-Vinings and Marietta areas and some of the I-75 corridor in North Cobb.
Richardson didn’t explain why she didn’t qualify in District 3 or say why she isn’t moving to District 2.
“I will not abdicate my position just to seek a future win for my own personal gain. . . . The real problem is the injustice and disservice this map has created for the people,” Richardson said in the video.
“I will not sit back, I will not step down and I will not just say nothing,” she said in a statement that could set off a political and possibly a legal challenge.
She didn’t mention any possible legal action, although she said she’s received legal advice while contemplating her situation.
Richardson, 32, is an enterprise transformation specialist at Equifax whose family moved to the Atlanta area from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
She succeeded three-term Republican commissioner Bob Ott in 2020, edging GOP candidate Fitz Johnson to cement the first all-female county commission in Cobb history.
Her term expires in 2024, and she’s part of a 3-2 Democratic majority on the commission, which had been controlled by Republicans since the 1980s.
“The new mapping lines fundamentally shift our county, both economically and historically,” Richardson said in the video, “and not for the better.”
She said this redistricting process has “ignored the will of the people.”
Richardson said her office has received a “flood” of messages from citizens upset with the maps, which she said were drawn without much community consultation, and that sidestepped normal courtesies to the local delegations.
Cobb Republican lawmakers submitted redistricting maps for the commission and the Cobb Board of Education over the objections of the county delegation’s Democratic leadership.
State Rep. John Carson, a Northeast Cobb Republican who sponsored the commission redistricting bill, countered that his lines would likely maintain a Democratic majority.
In January, Cobb commissioners voted along party lines to recommend a map drawn by State Rep. Erick Allen, a Smyrna Democrat and the Cobb delegation chairman, that would largely maintain the current lines.
Birrell voted against Allen’s map, saying it removed some of her East Cobb precincts. Now she’ll have most of them, running to the Powers Ferry Road corridor.
The other GOP member of the commission, Keli Gambrill of District 1 in North Cobb, was the only candidate to qualify for that office.
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