Buckhead secession movement gains steam — and gets heated
September 12, 2008 at 12:11 am by Thomas Wheatley in NewsWith a belly full of grouper and anger, a Buckhead resident stood before his neighbors at 103 West in the affluent north Atlanta community and unleashed his frustration.
“When is someone going to have them indicted and taken to trial?!?” he barked, eliciting head nods from fellow disgruntled taxpayers picking at their three-course lunches.
The “them” he refers to is the Atlanta municipal government — namely, the public school system, mayor, city council and bean counters who helped dig the $140 million hole in which the city finds itself. The angry man’s audience consists of more than 200 Buckhead residents, a well-to-do group of citizens in the city’s most well-to-do community.
The occasion? The Fulton County Taxpayers Foundation’s luncheon to discuss the controversial — and extremely complex — notion of Buckhead severing ties with Atlanta, a city full of confusion that Glenn Delk, an attorney and 20-year resident of the community, said is subsidized by he and his neighbors’ largesse.
Delk, whose study about Buckhead’s possible cityhood has kickstarted a serious look into the matter, informed the audience right away that he neither intended to run for political office nor owned commercial property in Buckhead. He appears to simply be a person who doesn’t like paying high taxes for what he considers to be subpar services. Plus, he doesn’t trust the money management skills of City Hall. To him, and to many in this room, the time has come to break free.
“You will hear some people say this is about race and money,” he said. “There’s only one color that matters in this debate — and that’s the color green.”
The crowd ate this up. The city was broken, Delk said, and the same woes it faces today it faced in the past. And as Delk rattled through a laundry list of statistics — the community comprises 15 percent of Atlanta’s population yet generates 45 percent of its revenue; a city of Buckhead could be run on $150 million, half the taxes residents pay today to the city — the crowd of predominantly white men and women nodded their heads in agreement.
Housewives who appeared to travel in packs rolled their eyes at the exorbitant sums Delk says the community pays for poorly performing public schools. Gold Dome lobbyists listened intently, shook hands, and sniffed out a potential client they could lead through the legislative obstacle course to cityhood. Senior citizens said aloud how they wanted a break from the portion of their property taxes that pay for public schools.
The list of gripes ran long. Zoning decisions are made downtown. Business permits take too long to approve.
And if things don’t change soon, Delk said, the Buckhead community will be in an even more dire situation when their children come of age.
There are two ways out of the mire, the attorney told the crowd. Residents would have to either vote for fiscal-minded city and school board leaders or split from the city. He also advocated a complete switch to charter schools and privatizing some public services. He praised Mayor Richard Daley’s recent offering of Midway Airport for $1 billion and said it would fund the Windy City’s workers’ pensions and leave it with a reserve. Jackson-Hartsfield International Airport would generate an estimated $4 billion for the city, he said. (I’m checking if that’s even legal.)
State Rep. Ed Lindsey, R-Buckhead, told the crowd that a secession and attempt at cityhood would be complex and politically difficult. Any move first must be approved by the Atlanta delegation in the House — of its 15 members, 14 are Democrats who don’t live in Buckhead, Lindsey said. State Rep. Wendell Willard, R-Sandy Springs, reminded residents of his recently created city’s 30-year slog to cut away from Fulton County. He said it wasn’t impossible, but they needed to be prepared for a long battle.
Tempers flared during the luncheon, as residents accused Lindsey of allowing the citizens of newly created John’s Creek and Milton to become cities, but turning its back on Buckhead. He said those situations were different because the cities broke away from the county.
Jim Daws, an Atlanta firefighter and president of the local union, said a city of Buckhead — which, by the way, can’t exist in name, as there already is a Buckhead, Ga. — would be hard-pressed to find public safety officials if it didn’t provide pensions. Atlanta’s salaries are already 25 percent lower than the national average, he said. Delk and Dawls engaged in a heated debate in which Delk floated the idea of increasing salary and allowing the workers to decide how to spend or save their income. The back-and-forth continued until Delk said the two would most likely not come to agreement on the issue.
One woman cut off mid-speech John Sherman, the foundation’s president, and demanded the city convert Underground Atlanta to a casino in order to raise revenue. (Lotta raised eyebrows on that one.) Delk kindly blasted the idea, saying mo’ money means mo’ problems. He said increased revenues wouldn’t solve the underlying problem: The mismanagement of funds down at City Hall.
All in all, this was a surreal experience. Councilmember Mary Norwood, the lone member of the municipal government who dared enter the belly of the beast, said late Thursday night that the complaints she heard in Buckhead were echoed later in the afternoon at a community meeting in West End. Services were down, crime was up, code enforcement wasn’t being enforced. She said she introduced legislation at the last council meeting that would determine how taxation and services delivered correlate.
“The city’s not working well for any of us,” Norwood said. “And it’s got to work for us all.”
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