Cobb Cityhood referendums

Editor’s Note: Why the rush for Cobb Cityhood referendums?

by

State Rep. Matt Dollar
With the resignation of State Rep. Matt Dollar this week, his East Cobb cityhood bill is being carried by lawmakers from Acworth and North Fulton.

By this time next week, a bill calling for a referendum to create a City of East Cobb may have passed the Georgia legislature and would await with the signature of Gov. Brian Kemp.

After only 10 days of legislative action, HB 841 easily has flown through the House and a seven-member Senate committee, and likely will be acted on by the full Senate this week.

Although the East Cobb bill was submitted nearly a year ago, that the legislation has taken on dramatic and confusing new dimensions since November, and especially in the last three weeks.

After filing an initial bill with a “city light” set of proposed services—planning and zoning, code enforcement and parks and recreation—then-State Rep. Matt Dollar brought a substitute bill with him to the State Capitol when the 2022 session began.

Instead, it included police and fire services—a controversial part of the initial East Cobb cityhood bill that was abandoned in 2019—along with planning and zoning and code enforcement.

Those were services that were evaluated in a financial feasibility study conducted by Georgia State University researchers and released in November.

That was the first surprise. Cityhood leaders said at the time that there was “unilateral” support for police and fire services from citizens they surveyed over several months, but they never bothered to tell the public about it until the study was done.

After a House committee approved Dollar’s substitute in mid-January, the East Cobb Republican lawmaker came back to the same panel to amend his bill a week later.

That’s because his bill would move up the referendum date to allow voters in the proposed East Cobb boundaries to decide on cityhood from November to May.

So would the three other cityhood bills in Cobb County—Vinings, Lost Mountain and Mableton—that are currently before the legislature.

After the initial committee meeting, Dollar also was questioned extensively about a governance structure that would have six city council members, who would choose a mayor from among themselves every two years.

So Dollar amended his substitute bill yet again, to still have six council members—with two each living in one of three districts—and a mayor elected directly, citywide.

The House Governmental Affairs Committee also heard from Cobb Commission Chairwoman Lisa Cupid, who said the county was still assessing the financial impact of cityhood and that she wanted voters to have more complete information.

While the county has had more than a year to prepare for this moment, the significant change in services in East Cobb, plus additional changes since the bill has been considered in the legislature, should prompt a pause.

What’s the rush to having a referendum in May? Not just in East Cobb, but in the other three proposed cities?

They comprise more than 200,000 people, or roughly a quarter of Cobb’s population, and voters are being asked to consider significant changes to their local governance. These shouldn’t be rammed through the legislature and then onto the May 24 primary ballot.

Dollar—who abruptly resigned his seat in the legislature this week after the House transferred his bill to the Senate—said it was to avoid having a special election in early 2023 for city council elections, should an East Cobb referendum pass in November.

But Cobb taxpayers will soon be footing the bill for a special election to fill the rest of Dollar’s unexpired term, with his successor likely serving only in a caretaking role after the legislative session is over.

At a Senate committee hearing on Thursday, State Rep. Ed Setzler, an Acworth Republican who’s sponsoring the East Cobb and Lost Mountain bills, was asked if he would delay the East Cobb referendum to November.

“The consensus among the community was to get moving,” Setzler said, not bothering to explain who those community members may be.

Another committee member who wanted to see the proposed city council districts that haven’t been released in map form asked to table a motion to favorably report the bill, but that failed.

Most of those doing the questioning on Cobb cityhood bills in the legislature have been Democrats. But Republicans easily control the Georgia legislature, and since Democrats took control of the Cobb Board of Commissioners last year, GOP members of the Cobb delegation have been busy with cityhood bills (the Mableton bill has two Democratic co-sponsors, one of whom voted for the East Cobb bill).

Concerns over controlling development and growth are the focal points of those bills. When the East Cobb bill was filed last year, I thought it was a vast improvement over the 2019 effort, which never made sense with its focus on police and fire services.

The GSU feasibility study for the current bill is scant on details about how an East Cobb city of about 60,000 people could afford and fund full-service public safety services. There would be one police precinct and two fire stations, but the financials are basically line items about annual revenues and expenditures.

The main revenue source would be the 2.86 mills in the current Cobb Fire Fund.

There’s not much in the study about the true cost for salaries and benefits (including pensions) for 71 police officers and an unspecified number of firefighters. Nothing is in the study about expenses needed to train and equip them.

Those aren’t the only areas where the feasibility study conclusions just don’t add up. That’s why the East Cobb bill should be amended to push back the referendum to November.

Voters deserve the time to educate themselves about the issues and to be able to question the lawmakers and cityhood supporters who are putting this before them.

That hasn’t happened since late last summer, before public safety services were added to the financial study, and before the fast-moving event taking place now at the Gold Dome.

There should be public, in-person or hybrid town halls—not the virtual-only meetings that have taken place over the last year—for those purposes. They could be done this spring and fall, as the previous cityhood group did in 2019.

But those pushing the East Cobb bill in the legislature don’t seem to be interested in that.

(None of whom, by the way, actually live in East Cobb with Dollar departed. State Rep. Sharon Cooper is a co-sponsor of the bill and voted for it in the House, but didn’t speak during floor debate. State Sen. Kay Kirkpatrick is more supportive than two years ago but she is running for re-election in a district that doesn’t have the proposed city of East Cobb and is not a sponsor of the bill.)

East Cobb cityhood supporters have been making the repeated point that that citizens deserve the right to have a referendum.

I agree that they do, but the feasibility study they commissioned is flawed and the legislation that is built around it has changed a lot in such a short amount of time.

It needs to be improved before those voters go to the polls.

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