Dueling 'Studies' Punctuate Differences In Buckhead City Debate

ATLANTA — In the week after dueling studies for and against a Buckhead city were released voices on both sides of the issue offered their assessment of the opposing data.

A feasibility study conducted as part of the process of creating a new city showed that Buckhead had the available annual resources to adequately maintain municipal services independent of Atlanta.

But a fiscal analysis of the consequences of de-annexing Buckhead from the City of Atlanta highlighted an expensive impact on the city and on the Atlanta Public Schools system for which state law says no new public substitute can be formed.

“Overall, we consider this so-called ‘analysis’ to be classic doomsday drivel from the usual suspects,” Bill White, CEO of the Buckhead City Committee which has spearheaded the cityhood movement, told Patch.

.Billy Linville, the spokesman for the cityhood opponent Committed for a United Atlanta and a Buckhead resident, said the feasibility study did not reveal everything that people living in Buckhead should know.

“What residents of Buckhead do need to know is that they'll almost certainly pay more in taxes if there's a new Bucket City,” Linville said.

A poll released earlier this week by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the University of Georgia found that while more than 60 percent of surveyed residents eligible to vote in Atlanta opposed the cityhood question, nearly 61 percent of voters living in Buckhead — the ones who would be able to vote on the ballot question in 2022 — either strongly supported or somewhat supported the move to cityhood.

Crime and taxes were the primary motivations for supporting secession, those Buckhead residents expressed in the survey.

But the fiscal analysis pointed out that separating Buckhead from Atlanta would be difficult as bonding debt would likely come due and the creditworthiness of both cities could be compromised.

“Buckhead City leadership is committed to honoring obligations related to Atlanta’s publicly issued bonds — such as those that funded the downtown Mercedes-Benz Stadium —via a pro-rata portion of the debt,” White said.

The feasibility study touted a more than $100 million annual surplus that the proposed new city would generate. Linville suggested that a fractured Atlanta could pose a greater cost to the region, however.

“Atlanta and Buckhead would be competing for economic development with one another,” he said. “That certainly would be counterproductive and would make other cities like Nashville and Charlotte much more attractive to those who want to make business investments.”

As the poll was coming out, thousands of brochures were mailed to Buckhead residents from the BCC, claiming, among other things, that the CUA was funded by tax dollars, the online publication Buckhead reports.

“While murder, car larceny, assaults, shootings, and other criminal acts exponentially surged in Buckhead at a rate much higher than the surrounding metro area, the City of Atlanta dispatched its taxpayer-funded lobbyists to the state capitol to thwart our efforts to put the option of Buckhead City on the November 2022 ballot,” White wrote in the pamphlet made available by Buckhead.

Buckhead reporter John Ruch debunked that notion, however, by pointing out that of the three groups involved in opposing cityhood — CUA, the Buckhead Coalition and the Buckhead Community Improvement District — only the Buck CID collects self-imposed taxes voluntarily paid by its member businesses and commercial property owners. And while Jim Durrett leads both the Buckhead CID and the member-funded Buckhead Coalition, the only lobbyist, CUA co-chair Edward Lindsey, is only registered to lobby for the organization he leads, and not the City of Atlanta.