City up the county
Georgia government confuses me. I understand the basic ideas behind the home-rule mentality: there is the state, deriving its power from the United States Constitution (several sections, most notably Amendment 10), and there are a billion and a half counties, deriving their authority from the Constitution of Georgia (Article IX), as well as another billion and a half municipal corporations, defined in the same Article, which, though subject to certain of the county’s regulations, are also able to override the county in certain areas and create local regulations of their own. It’s all kind of long and complicated. The end of Article IX also defines Community Improvement Districts and a means for counties and municipalities to create them. Basically, they allow for a local government to regulate a certain subsection of their area separately from the remainder, so that the strip of land over by the mall can get special money for road improvements and have more restrictive sign ordinances.
Two community improvement districts familiar to many in or near Atlanta are Sandy Springs and Dunwoody, sister non-cities around the top end of 285. There are two things that make Sandy Springs and Dunwoody confusing: Sandy Springs is becoming a city and extending its borders in the process, and Dunwoody claims to be in both Fulton and Dekalb. I was able to find the definition of Sandy Springs as a set of overlays in the Fulton County Code of Laws, and it was actually a lot smaller than I expected. There are four districts defined: Main Street, centered on Roswell Road and including and area from just inside 285 to just north of Mount Vernon; the Urban district, which surrounds the Main Street district and goes roughly from Glenridge on the south to Abernathy on the north, the Village district, which is a narrow strip of Roswell Road around Mount Paran and Wieuca, and the Suburban district, another narrow strip of Roswell Road from Abernathy to the Roswell border at Azalea road. The Urban district gets close to 400 at points, but never touches it. The new improved Sandy Springs, however, according to the city council district map provided by the Sandy Springs society, is everything from the Chattahoochee to the Dekalb county line, stopping, as far as I can tell from these incomplete maps, only when it hits Roswell on the north and Atlanta on the south.
Dunwoody, though, is a little more confusing. The Dunwoody Homeowners Association appears to be the most meddlesome of the groups with interests in the area, and they provide some information on local governments, but I can’t for the life of me figure out just whom they petition for their radical new ideas on sign ordinance enforcement. Their overlay map defines a roughly square shape within 400, I-285, the ‘hooch, and PIB, and they explicitly mention the Fulton County portion, so it’s not just a matter of being lazy about border definition. The Dekalb Code of Laws defines the Dunwoody Village Overlay District, but I can’t find the map they were supposed to include or any legal definition of the borders. Why is part of it in Fulton? Is there going to a fight to the death when Sandy Springs marches over 400 to claim the land? What’s going on?
References:
[1] DHA overlay map
[2] Code of Laws, Fulton County
[3] Code of Laws, Dekalb County
[4] Sandy Springs council districts
[5] Constitution of the State of Georgia