Last week a national organization that examines municipal and local governance concerns published a series of posts about Cobb County growth issues, especially in the years since the recession.
The organization is called Strong Towns, which I have not heard of before. It describes itself as a non-profit media organization that’s based in Brainerd, Minn., a small town with a population of 13,000 or so, not close to a metropolitan area.
On Tuesdays I like to focus on local government, since that’s when many Cobb Board of Commissioners meetings take place. Today’s meeting has been cancelled, and I thought I’d delve a little into this interesting, but flawed examination.
The five-part Strong Towns report, which has gotten some chatter on Cobb citizens social media groups, refers to Cobb as “a suburban region that epitomizes the folly of going into debt to build more and more infrastructure with no ability to pay for it.”
While that’s certainly how many locals around here feel about what’s happening in the county, I think the premise is faulty, and I’m skeptical of some of the claims made in this report.
Strong Towns misses one of the biggest points of all: Cobb remains a very attractive magnet for jobs because of its diversified economy and a well-educated workforce, the partial byproduct of another major attraction here, excellent public schools.
Cobb isn’t as “addicted to growth,” as the initial post is titled, as much as new residents and employers are continuously drawn by quality services and low taxes. A heavy pipeline of development bottled up during the lean years of the recession is taking shape.
These realities were not examined by Strong Towns, but I will link to all the posts in this series so you can read for yourself:
- Cobb County: Addicted to Growth
- Cobb County’s Triple-A Bond Rating Is A Joke
- Growing Lasting Wealth in Cobb County
- The True Cost of Debt In Atlanta’s Suburbs
- The Road Ahead for Cobb County
In an evergreen post elsewhere on its site, Strong Towns claims that many cities and counties in America are falling for a “Growth Ponzi Scheme,” which it further asserts as “the dominant model of suburban growth since the mid-20th century.”
The final post about Cobb started off with a reference to Bernie Madoff, who’s serving prison time for defrauding investors.
Really? To try to make a link between criminal behavior and the development and financial issues of a bustling suburban county, albeit one with major budget problems, borders on being irresponsible, as well as willfully misunderstanding.
I will always detest the Atlanta Braves stadium deal because the process was a total sham. But that doesn’t explain the county’s budget, tax and spending issues, which go back many years.
The county wasn’t chasing growth as much as it wasn’t sufficiently funding the growth that was already here or on the way, or was having trouble keeping up with the pace of the growth.
(Here’s a good example: When our family moved to East Cobb in the early 1970s, our home was still on septic tank, with the Sope Creek sewer line still under construction.)
There is an anti-suburban sentiment behind this report, and this is the biggest problem with it:
“Much of Cobb County . . . feels like nowhere. It has no center of gravity. It has no thriving urban core to serve as a tax-revenue cash cow.”
Ironically, the area around SunTrust may prove to be just such a place. Cobb does have many misplaced priorities, symbolized by the Braves deal, and which I wrote not long ago stripped away the illusion of supposedly fiscally conservative government.
Instead of really trying to understand the unique challenges facing a Sunbelt community that has gone from mostly rural to suburban and now urban in many spots, and in about a half-century or so, Strong Towns wants Cobb to be more like Brainerd, I guess (a place where I’ve never been).
From what I’ve read about this organization, it wants every place to be like small-town America, with bucolic downtown cores, pedestrian-friendly shops and restaurants and adaptable to a “traditional development pattern.”
While that sentiment does have some conservative support, and it’s appealing to me as I continue on in middle age, it has never really come about in Cobb, for better or for worse.
It’s a nice ideal, but it doesn’t offer any practical solutions. Strong Towns produced a lot of words about Cobb County but with little real local knowledge on the ground about its subject.
That matters.
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