In the annals of tough political assignments, following Eva Galambos as mayor of Sandy Springs has to rank up there.
Galambos, 85, steps down in December after eight years running metro Atlanta’s second-largest city, a city that she fought for three decades to found. That success sparked a movement that spawned six other metro cities in the seven years since.
And while nearly all of them have borrowed something from Sandy Springs — the wording in its charter, its cap on property taxes — none has been able to copy Galambos.
She pioneered a public-private form of government that allows Sandy Springs to build parks, fix streets and pour millions of dollars into a city center project designed to transform Roswell Road and give residents a hometown identity — all on a balanced budget and without borrowing a dime.
As Galambos departs, the city of 93,000 still faces questions about its future — how to address traffic gridlock on Roswell Road, whether its $100 million city center project will remain on track and how to preserve neighborhoods while promoting large commercial growth.
Residents and business leaders say inertia from Galambos' style will continue as the city faces future challenges.
Tom Mahaffey, president of the Sandy Springs Perimeter Chamber of Commerce, said there are concerns in the business community that new leadership may weaken local efforts toward trade relations with China, a staple of the Galambos administration.
For the past five years, Sandy Springs has courted the Chinese city of Taicang as a business partner. Local officials say they’re close to tying an economic knot that could prove beneficial for both sides.
“We have a huge international community, and Eva’s been very good at promoting internationalism,” Mahaffey said. “Some of our smaller and medium-size businesses are concerned that we’re not going to put as much emphasis on that.”
City Councilwoman Karen Meinzen McEnerny, who is not seeking re-election in the fall, said she hopes changes to the leadership will not reignite some of the public squabbles that occurred during the first four years of the city’s life.
“That was addressed, and the positive and respectful tone of the second four-year term was much more appropriate, with very limited exceptions,” she said.
McEnerny said she is also wary of the city’s commitment to its green space, calling the current tree ordinance “largely ineffective.”
Rusty Paul, a former councilman and currently the only declared candidate to fill the mayor’s seat, sees other concerns.
Paul, a former assistant U.S. secretary of housing and urban development, places a high priority on the city’s aging apartment inventory.
Sandy Springs has 74 apartment complexes containing some 20,000 dwelling units. These units represent 43 percent of all housing units in the city. About 11,000 of these apartment units were built between 1960 and 1990.
“If you’re not dealing with deteriorating apartment complexes, you’re creating an environment where crime and other pathologies are going to take over,” he said.
Long before Sandy Springs incorporated, Paul said he had to move his family from an apartment complex because of regular gunfire at night.
“I know what deteriorating apartment complexes can do,” he said. “The problems don’t just stay there, they spread out into the broader community.”
But the problems of development don’t stop there, resident Dick Farmer said, adding that the city allows development to trump zoning codes designed to protect neighborhoods.
“The mayor is neither pro-development nor pro-business,” he said. “She’s pro-tax digest.”
By allowing development and density to increase, he said, the city is taxing its public utilities, its roads, its stormwater system, and residents are going to pay for it.
Some residents are more optimistic.
Tachi Blad with the Greater Branches Neighborhood Association, said the mayor’s reputation as a friend to neighborhoods and the responsiveness of city staff will continue.
“I think she’s established some foundational support between the structure of how they develop this city and the intangible structure of the community,” she said. “That’s a lasting legacy.”
That sense of community rings true for Mark Sampl, who represents homeowners along the busy Roswell Road corridor and heads the Sandy Springs Council of Neighborhoods.
Sampl’s personal hope is that the city’s $100 million downtown project along Roswell Road matures into a small-town sense of place that attracts people from throughout metro Atlanta.
Galambos, herself, said she thinks the city is on the right path, but she would like her successors to step outside their province and work with Fulton County’s school system to advance education.
“I don’t think our elementary schools are at the highest level, or the middle schools for that matter,” she said. “I’d like to see a huge army of retired people — and it’s something I might do when I have more time — to teach these little kids how to read.”
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