The most important moment of Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms’ career came in May of 2020, when she told Atlantans in the streets to go home after protests turned violent and threatened to rip the city apart.
She defused a moment of existential peril by telling Atlanta, “We are better than this as a city. We are better than this as a country.”
When she announced that she would not run for reelection, I wrote at the time that I could understand a mayor calling it quits after the last three difficult years. And If she gave only that speech, I said, that would be enough.
But I didn’t imagine at the time that would actually be the last major speech she would give.
Although the mayor has continued to do the nuts and bolts of running City Hall, she seems to have stayed behind the scenes during the city’s most visible challenges, especially violent crime.
And as the Buckhead City movement has grown from a surprise bill at the General Assembly to a loud, expensive, grassroots movement, she’s hasn’t stood up to speak out loudly against it.
It may strategically end up to be the right play. But it’s hard to see why someone with the talent to connect wouldn’t do it now, with so much on the line.
It’s important to say that Mayor Bottoms is unequivocally against Buckhead leaving Atlanta.
Her spokesman, Michael Smith, said in a written statement, “Mayor Bottoms continues to underscore the value of Buckhead as a part of the City of Atlanta. A better use of energy would be to work together to address the challenges we face, not to divide Atlanta.”
But her individual statements have been easily overcome by the behind-the-scenes maneuvers, and aggressive P.R. blitz, coming out of the Buckhead City Committee.
Without outspoken pushback from City Hall, the idea is now barrelling ahead with a momentum all its own.
“Buckhead City” now has a logo and a podium and a mayor-in-waiting in the form of Bill White. The tailored bulldog of a pitchman declares to residents and reporters alike, “It’s happening.”
When I wrote a column this week about White’s presence at “Stop the Steal” rallies in Georgia last year, he retweeted the piece three times, telling Atlanta to stop stealing from Buckhead instead.
“Shameless” doesn’t quite do justice to White’s approach to Buckhead. It also happens to be working. The public campaign is galloping ahead.
Along with the outside sales job, the Buckhead City Committee has gotten a head start on lobbying the General Assembly. They’ve landed 11 GOP co-sponsors for a bill to create the new city and completed the required viability study. Even though the study doesn’t address the costs of actually starting and running the proposed city over time, it checks the box.
But maybe more than anything, White & Co. have shown up in Buckhead, over and over, and told residents their worries are legitimate and important. So far, they are the only ones.
Without Bottoms speaking out early and often, a group of Buckhead business leaders formed the Committee for a United Atlanta in May and started making the case against Buckhead City on their own.
They retained Ed Lindsey, the former state representative for Buckhead at the General Assembly, and Billy Linville, a longtime Atlanta P.R. guru, to head up lobbying and communications.
Like the Buckhead City Committee, the Committee for a United Atlanta is funded by private donations and not, despite White’s assertions, paid for by Atlanta taxpayers.
With hearings for Buckhead City now expected in November, pro-Atlanta lawmakers and business leaders tell me they’ll soon step up their opposition to the proposal.
The powerful Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce will mobilize against it at the state Capitol. And on Sunday, the Committee for a United Atlanta will publish a list of hundreds of high-profile Buckhead residents and Atlanta business leaders who say they don’t want to see the city split apart. It will include Arthur Blank, Robin Loudermilk, Tommy Holder, Steve Selig, and other names you’d recognize.
Capitol insiders who understand the gummy nuance of the process involved think passing legislation to put Buckhead City to a 2022 referendum is a longshot for lots of reasons.
But it’s all happening in the absence of a message that only the mayor of Atlanta, with all of the weight and history of that office, can deliver.
If Bottoms had one speech left to give, she should make it an address to the people of Buckhead, not because they’re wealthy, and not because they’re leaving, but because they’re still Atlantans.
She should say that as much as the debate about Buckhead City is about bonds, and schools, and police headcounts, it is also about the legacy that the Atlantans of today will leave for the Atlantans of tomorrow.
She should tell the people of Buckhead that breaking the city apart was the one thing that Atlanta’s leaders during the Civil Rights era, from Dr. King to Mayor Ivan Allen to Robert Woodruff, would never allow.
Unity, more than anything, made Atlanta the modern, thriving, new South capital that it became.
Are they ready to be the ones to give up on Atlanta now?
If Buckhead were to go, Bottoms should point out that it would likely be the first part of Atlanta to breakaway, not the last.
Why would the residents of Midtown stick around to pay the city’s bills if Buckhead doesn’t? Or Morningside and Virginia Highlands? Grant Park and Inman Park might want to have their own mayors, too?
Nothing could be worse for the Atlantans who remain.
Don’t let leaving others behind to fend for themselves become the new “Atlanta Way.” We are better than this as a city.
Buckhead, she should say, don’t leave Atlanta to go it alone.
The people of Buckhead might forge ahead anyway. But it wouldn’t be because their mayor didn’t tell them that Atlanta is still their home.
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