A member of a five-man review panel that evaluated the East Cobb cityhood financial feasibility study said he resigned right before the group’s final report was issued in September due to a “math problem,” not ideological differences.
Shailesh Bettadapur, an East Cobb resident and vice president for Mohawk Industries, disputed claims by Bill Green, another member of what was called the Independent Financial Group, that he had ideological reasons for stepping down.
Bettadapur’s wife Jackie is the chairwoman of the Cobb County Democratic Party.
Bettadapur told East Cobb News he resigned because he didn’t agree with the other four members of the review group on the financial conclusions in the report. He also alleged that the IFG wasn’t independent because Green “was attempting to reach a specific pro-cityhood conclusion.”
Bettadapur said he wasn’t interested in going public with his concerns until Green, speaking at a cityhood town hall meeting on Nov. 11, attributed the resignation of an unnamed fifth member to that person’s relationship with “a county party official,” who also was not identified.
“As that fifth member, I can say without hesitation that Mr. Green’s assertion is false,” said Bettadapur, who wasn’t at the town hall meeting at Wheeler High School but who said he watched a video replay of the event.
He’s also expressed his concerns to Cobb commissioners and members of the county’s legislative delegation.
Four IFG members concluded that a proposed City of East Cobb is financially feasible without tax increases, but recommended that a new municipality start without a police force until inter-governmental agreements would be hashed out.
The Committee for Cityhood in East Cobb, which spent $36,000 on the feasibility study conducted last year by Georgia State University researchers, is proposing community development, police and fire services.
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Its proposed City of East Cobb would include more than 100,000 residents with an expanded map that includes the Pope and Lassiter high school attendance zones.
State Rep. Matt Dollar of East Cobb has introduced legislation at the behest of the cityhood committee, which has spent tens of thousands of dollars on lobbyists. The bill must be passed by the Georgia General Assembly next year for a referendum to take place later in 2020.
Bettadapur was the only member of the group who voted against the final IFG report because of “fundamental” issues he said he had about financial assumptions. He resigned two days before the report was released, saying he wanted the others to be able to “speak with one voice” about its conclusions.
Green offered him a chance to write a dissenting report, but Bettadapur said he thought the original report was too long, and “this isn’t a court case. I didn’t see the point.”
Math or ideology?
When contacted by East Cobb News, Green said he stands by his belief that Bettadapur had ideological—but not necessarily partisan—reasons for leaving the group.
“It’s because he didn’t do any of the math,” said Green, a retired financial executive with a cloud computing company.
“He never contributed a darn thing to the group’s efforts. He just didn’t do squiddly-diddly. He was there to obstruct.”
Green said Bettadapur may claim he’s impartial on cityhood, but says he observed a clear Democratic presence at a town hall meeting in March at the Catholic Church of St. Ann, with some wearing purple shirts bearing the name of Stacey Abrams, the 2018 Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate.
Green said he thinks Democrats eventually “are going to be opposed, but if you split the Republicans you don’t get cityhood.”
As for the IFG’s partisan affiliations, Green said he identifies as Libertarian-Republican, while the other three are Democrats, and two of them are mostly independent: “Our team is not ideological.”
Bettadapur acknowledged his wife’s political activities, “which is something that the Cityhood committee would have known at the time I joined. It obviously did not matter then, but became the scapegoat when I resigned.”
He said the Cobb Democratic Party is not taking a position on East Cobb cityhood and that he still doesn’t have an opinion.
Bettadapur said he doesn’t see how the cityhood group’s claims of providing better services for the same or lower tax millage rates can be accomplished.
He said when he joined the IFG, he told cityhood leaders David Birdwell and Rob Eble that he was neutral on cityhood.
Arguing over numbers
“I viewed, and still view, this primarily as a math problem,” Bettadapur said. “I started with the thesis that you could not add a layer of government and administration and obtain the same or increased quality of services without also raising taxes and fees. Yet, I was open to being persuaded otherwise. Nothing I’ve seen so far has done that.”
Bettadapur said each of Cobb’s existing six cities have higher millage rates than the unincorporated county, so “why would East Cobb be different?”
The IFG stated in its report that Cobb County government is committing double taxation with what it’s charging cities for providing county services. “The notion that a City of East Cobb could negotiate a transfer higher than the other six cities is, in my view, not credible,” Bettadapur said.
In particular, he thinks the IFG’s claim that a city of East Cobb would be able to get $11 million from the county for police services in the inter-government agreement (instead of a $2.5 million estimate in the feasibility study) is unrealistic.
He also questioned cost estimates for new city to purchase firehouses (at around $5K each) and suggested that the county would likely include older equipment in those purchases.
And he disputed Green’s claim at the Wheeler town hall that “there’s a tax cut to be had” should a new city of East Cobb be formed.
“It’s just nonsense,” Bettadapur said. “It’s not going to happen.”
Green defended the IFG’s calculations, “saying the numbers look good,” and took issue with financial claims made by cityhood opponents, including the East Cobb Alliance. “Any numbers we can come up with, we can blow them out of the water.”
He said he wishes Bettadapur well and admitted “he’s a smart guy” whose primary value to the review group was offering a differing point of view to avoid groupthink.
While Green countered that if Bettadapur “ever does the math, let me know,” Bettadapur said that he remains “sympathetic to the idea of local control. But local control doesn’t mean it’s going to be cheaper.”
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