Form the new cities

Residents of unincorporated south Fulton County are just a few weeks away from a critical vote that will dramatically influence the future of their homes, neighborhoods and communities. Residents are currently scheduled to vote June 19 whether to remain a apart of unincorporated Fulton County or to become the new City of South Fulton and the new City of Chattahoochee Hills. I’ve heard a million reasons pro and con when it comes to forming new cities, but as I see it, the residents in unincorporated south Fulton have no real choice but to form the City of South Fulton and the City of Chattahoochee Hills. I came to that conclusion some time ago and, today, I am more convinced of this than ever. So below you will find three simple but overwhelmingly important reasons why the new cities should be voted in.

The overriding reason to form new cities, the biggest bottom line, is local control! As new cities, South Fulton and Chatt Hills will have their own locally elected mayor and city council that will appoint planning and zoning commissions made up of their own neighbors. At first glance this might not seem particularly important, but it is. You may certainly run into Commissioner Bill Edwards at any time in south Fulton, and maybe at-large Commissioner Rob Pitts. But with locally elected mayors and councils and a locally appointed planning and zoning boards, you are much more likely to bump into a host of them on the produce aisle in the grocery store or in the church parking lot or coming out of a local restaurant. Think about that for a minute. Think about what it means. It means that developers wanting ever higher density will have to deal directly with the elected and appointed citizens put in office by their neighbors. And if I’ve learned anything about the residents of South Fulton and Chatt Hills, it is that they will not sit by and watch their local officials screw up the works by allowing anything less than quality development inside their city limits.

Another bottom line is money. The latest, freshly-crunched figures show that the City of Chatt Hills and the City of South Fulton are both financially in the black. They are in the black even after all of last year’s annexations. These numbers came from Georgia State’s Prof. Robert Eger, of the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies.

A further bottom line is power. Beyond the power to control their own destiny through local control, there is another kind of power available only to cities. That power was crystal clear during the annexation period of 2006/2007. Where issues such as annexation are concerned, Georgia law gives complete, total and preferential advantage to cities. Hence, county residents simply do not have the legal power to stop annexations by cities. This becomes blatantly evident when a few large landowners with industrial property or other property ripe for development can make Swiss cheese of an area through the 100 percent method of annexation. This happened in some cases. And in its wake, residents were powerless to do anything about it. Fulton County was also powerless. Even if it had wanted to do so, the county could not have prevented the annexations. In my mind, and given current state law, that makes county residents little more than second-class citizens who are still required to pay taxes but who are not allowed to control their own destiny. The only recourse for unincorporated residents is to acquire equal power by forming their own cities.

This is a new day in the ever-increasing Atlanta megalopolis. South Fulton County, the Diamond of metro Atlanta, is positioned pivotally in the crosshairs of those that would have those rolling hills for their own municipal or corporate gain. The only clear choice for voters on June 19 is to form the new cities.