Content area
Full text
At a time when Georgia's metropolitan areas have sprawled over once rural land to create seemingly endless suburbs, another very different trend is at work: the rebirth of the city.
Across the state, residents are shining, polishing and rebuilding their downtowns. In suburban Atlanta, people are forming their own cities. Cities are re-emerging as centers of culture, community and civic spirit.
Four Georgia cities have merged with their county governments: Augusta-Richmond, Athens-Clarke, Columbus-Muscogee and Cusseta-Chattahoochee.
Although counties are created by the state constitution, cities are created by charters that must be approved by the state and by residents of the proposed city. The main difference is simply that cities are closer to home, smaller and more directly under the control of local citizens, who actually pay more in taxes in order to get additional services.
"It's cultural. It's political. It's a sense of place," says Al Outland, policy and communications director of the Georgia Municipal Association.
It's all that and more in the case of Sandy Springs, the Atlanta bedroom communitv that became its own city this past year - after a 30-year struggle to incorporate. "Sandy Springs felt like they were the cash cow that didn't get a lot of service but provided a lot of resources," says Jim Higdon, executive director of the GMA. "They wanted better control over their own destiny."
When Sandy Springs residents first began talking about forming a city - initially to avoid being annexed by Atlanta and then to be able to set their own rules and manage their own resources - they formed a committee and named as its president Eva Galambos, a Ph.D. in economics who worked part time consulting because she had three young children.
State laws prevented Sandy Springs from becoming a city. One law said no new city could incorporate within three miles of any other city. Efforts by Sandy Springs' Republican legislators to change the law were blocked by the Democratic controlled House of Representatives year after year. But Sandy Springs never gave up.
"My children thought it was a pipe dream and 'Mama's crazy,' " Galambos recalls. But, she adds, "I could tell there was a huge reservoir of support in the General Assembly. It was just politics. And politics do...