The carving up of DeKalb County into cities, already a complicated puzzle bound for the state Capitol, has now graduated to wheels-within-wheels status.
On one hand, things have gotten simpler. The effort to create three new cities in northern DeKalb has been culled to two: A city of Tucker and a city of LaVista Hills. Negotiations over boundaries remain hung up on who gets the cash cow that is Northlake Mall.
A five-person legislative committee dominated by three Republicans who don’t live in DeKalb will get the final say.
But a new wrinkle threatens to overshadow that process. A group of Druid Hill residents in unincorporated DeKalb, many of whom lost a bitter charter school fight with the county school board last year, have made an overture to Atlanta: Annex the territory covered by two elementary school districts into the city.
The enclave on the city’s eastern flank includes Emory University, DeKalb County’s largest employer, and the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Both institutions are lathered in prestige, but would bring little to the city’s tax rolls – given that one is a church-oriented nonprofit and the other is a branch of the U.S. government.
Nonetheless, Mayor Kasim Reed – who has plenty of clout in the Capitol — has offered to help push legislation through the General Assembly next year to bring about the necessary referendum among the would-be Atlantans.
By land mass, Atlanta is one of the smallest major cities in the U.S., long hemmed in by racial tensions. Adding Druid Hills would be the first major expansion by the city in decades, an addition of roughly 26,000 registered voters.
Emory University has declared its public neutrality in the discussion, but has quietly told elected officials that it doesn’t want to see its campus bisected by the boundaries of a new city. “If I’m the president of Emory, I wouldn’t want to change my address to LaVista Hills, Ga.,” said Melissa Mullinax, a senior adviser to the mayor of Atlanta.
The annexation of Druid Hills into Atlanta would be both easier and more knotty than the creation of two new cities.
Advocates for DeKalb’s two new cities have had to finance $30,000 studies to prove their financial viability. The annexation of Druid Hills would require no such hoop-jumping.
The creation of DeKalb’s new cities also has no impact on that county’s school system. Attendance lines remain the same. The annexation of Druid Hills into Atlanta – and its school system —could require the redistricting of thousands of students on both sides of a new border.
“It is unfortunate that innocent school children have become pawns in this political chess match,” said Michael Thurmond, superintendent of the DeKalb County school system.
Then there is the matter of DeKalb County school system assets in the Druid Hills territory – several hundred million dollars’ worth of school buildings and a football stadium. DeKalb officials point to a state law that would require fair-market reimbursement – which would pose a huge expense to a cash-starved Atlanta public school system.
But Mullinax, Reed’s policy adviser, says that law applies to county governments – not school systems. And that a 1918 Georgia Supreme Court decision, last tested in 1981, would require the simple transfer of DeKalb school assets to the Atlanta school system – though APS might be on the hook for any bonded indebtedness associated with the structures.
Yet that isn’t the thorniest problem presented by the annexation of Druid Hills. As stated above, 26,000 new voters would be added to the Atlanta political process. About 70 percent of those voters are white.
Since the election of Maynard Jackson as mayor in 1973, African-Americans have dominated the city’s political structure. But Atlanta now sits at a racial crossroads – in 2009, Kasim Reed won his first term as mayor in a runoff against Mary Norwood, a white city councilwoman, by only 714 votes out of about 83,000 cast.
A Druid Hills annexation could determine who succeeds Reed as mayor in 2017. Which is sure to draw the attention of several people biding their time in City Hall.
Thus bringing Druid Hills into the city might increase pressure to expand the city of Atlanta southward, to negate the influx of new white voters. Some in Atlanta would view the maintenance of a racial balance as an imperative. Which would require the continued stalling of state Capitol efforts to create a new city of South Fulton on that end of the county.
So what does this all mean? In the midst of the effort to chop metro Atlanta into smaller and smaller pieces, the city of Atlanta suddenly has a path to emerge larger and stronger than ever before.
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