The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Latest Buckhead crime? Legislation for new city
A crime is underway at the Georgia Capitol, where lawmakers from Cataula, Tyrone, Grovetown and Newnan are engineering a multibillion-dollar theft against taxpayers all over Atlanta.
They’re dressing their crime up as two bills, Senate Bills 113 and 114, to allow voters to de-annex the Buckhead neighborhood away from Atlanta and then create a separate city. They have lobbyists and fundraisers and legislation that sounds legitimate, but what they’re doing is stealing all the same.
When I first heard about an idea for a separate city of Buckhead about two years ago, I wasn’t completely opposed. People were being shot in the neighborhood every day and in every way. A jogger. A little girl. My friend’s mother dodged bullets in front of our grocery store on a Friday afternoon. It wasn’t all in our heads.
Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms was literally phoning it in during her last year in office. How much worse could a new city be?
The answer, we’ve learned over the last two years: It could be a lot worse.
The numbers inside the legislation are laughable — there’s no other word — starting with the $225,000 starting salary the conservative lawmakers set for the hypothetical mayor of Buckhead. That’s more than the governor of Georgia makes.
Then there is the lawmaker-mandated garage sale of Atlanta city assets in the neighborhood — $5,000 for a fire station, which cost $13 million to construct; $1,000 for every city building; and parkland for $100 per acre when an acre of land in Buckhead can sell for $1 million or more at market rates.
Why stop at $100? Why not sell it for a penny if you’re letting people take for themselves what the entire city has been paying for?
Finally, the water and sewer systems would go for $100,000 each. Who says shopping in Buckhead is pricey? Those systems are currently being paid for with bond obligations of $3 billion.
Along with the fire sale, the legislation also would stop the construction of the city’s planned police and fire training center, since it would require the sale of the land underneath it. All while promising Buckhead residents that crime will go down, taxes will be reduced, and homelessness will be eliminated “pronto!”
It’s all being pushed by the secretive Buckhead City Committee and the not-at-all secretive Bill White, the bombastic, friend-of-trump bullhorn running the committee and likely candidate for mayor of “the City of Buckhead City” if this thing goes through.
The sponsor of the bills, Cataula Republican state Sen. Randy Robertson, argued this week that the people of Buckhead at least deserve to vote on his legislation.
But what the people of Buckhead deserve first is the truth — about who is behind the effort, how it would work, what it would really cost, and at which schools, if any, residents of the new “City of Buckhead City” would drop their children off on the first day of school.
And how would all of those changes reduce crime when criminal cases in Buckhead will still go to the same Fulton County prosecutors? All of that remains unanswered.
The Senate State and Local Government Operations Committee passed both bills earlier this week.
The next move belongs to the newly installed Lt. Gov. Burt Jones. The Republican from Jackson has been a largely quiet second-in-command since taking office in January. He co-sponsored the Buckhead bill last year and was the beneficiary of lavish fundraisers and donations from the Buckhead City Committee.
At an October fundraiser for Jones, White lamented the state’s last lieutenant governor, Geoff Duncan, who killed the Buckhead separatist bill in 2022 almost as quickly as it was introduced.
“We found out what a lieutenant governor can and can’t do,” White said of Duncan, with Jones to his right. It will all be different the next time around, White promised, when Jones is the lieutenant governor instead.
In his new role, Jones now has the power to decide which legislation gets a vote on the Senate floor and, in many cases, which bills pass or fail.
He has said Buckhead isn’t his priority, but it is his responsibility now.
Whether the breakaway effort is successful this year or not will be the direct result of Jones’ decisions over the next week.
Behind the scenes, GOP senators say they know the Buckhead legislation is bad policy. Business leaders have warned it would unleash “chaos.” The mere threat of the de-annexation of Eagles Landing from Stockbridge in 2018 led bond agencies to put Georgia’s AAA bond rating on watch.
The precedent lawmakers set in Atlanta today would open the door to similar efforts from Midtown to Macon to Savannah and all across the state.
But the GOP politics are tough, too. U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a friend of Bill White’s, tweeted at lawmakers Monday to “vote FOR freedom.” Can a Trump tweet be far behind?
People who know Jones from his days as an iconoclastic state senator say they still don’t know what kind of statewide leader he will be, and specifically whether he’ll lead the GOP Senate caucus — or whether the increasingly conservative caucus will lead him instead.
As one Senate leader told me recently, “I’m really hoping the lieutenant governor becomes the Lieutenant Governor.”
And although he’s barely been in the job for three months, Jones is also known to have higher ambitions. It’s hard to see how anyone can get elected governor of Georgia in 2026, if he’s also known as the man who broke Georgia’s capital city apart this year.
Will Jones stop the crime of Buckhead City or be an accomplice? Will he lead his Senate caucus or be led by it? We’re about to find out.