The Real Problem with the Lakeside Cityhood Effort

Reminder:  GTCO-ATL is bringing some relevant news about Lakeside City to our readers because we were the very first ones to publically recognize that certain members of a community calling themselves 'Lakeside' were actually moving on their own agenda which would become a threat to the Tucker community.   And, once again, we were right.  

Many blog trolls tried to discredit the people from the Save Tucker! movement during the very early stages of their engagement with the Tucker community. But, in their haste to connect the dots between Save Tucker! and Get the Cell Out Atlanta, they got ahead of themselves and made a big mistake.  They connected the cell towers and the city movement long before anyone else did.  They actually helped to point us in the right direction and even placed a T-mobile employee on the board for Tucker 2014, the for profit group that had many Tucker residents convinced would help them become a city.

Before many people knew that there were any plans for a Lakeside City, before there was even a Tucker 2014, founding members of the Tucker group asked to meet with Save Tucker!  At that meeting, they participated in a very odd and contrived conversation about cell phones and how much they loved T-mobile.  It could have been straight out of a commercial except for the fact that T-mobile's commercials are much cooler and edgier than this cheesy version of "coffee talk" about great customer service and the exciting news about the Iphone being available on a new platform.  (give us a break!)   It was clear at that point that there was a connection between Tucker and Lakeside, but we did not think the residents of Tucker would fall for it.  While some of them did, unfortunately, they also became more skeptical as time went by.  The Tucker team did not listen to much feedback and had secret partners with other areas outside of Tucker.  Their agenda may have been more about making sure Tucker failed than it was about helping it succeed.

Once the blog trolls drew the lines for us, we looked at the placement of the cell towers and it all makes sense.  The cell towers intended for our schools fit perfectly into a map revealed at the end of the legislative session as being the agreed upon map for a city of Lakeside.   So, the plan all along was likely the same  plan that had been rolled out in Brookhaven, the city most recently formed in our area.  That city has an e-911 system and cameras atop every traffic light.  The goal:  reduce overhead costs and back out of pension plan commitments with police officers and teachers.  Save yourself and leave the rest of the county to figure things out for themselves.  The zoning control was wanted so that they could place more towers around the area without the hassles of permits and protests, even though more and more research is showing evidence every day that there is a connection between cell phones and cancer.

If you have not been faced with this issue in your own neighborhood or your own school, do not blow it off as something that happens "somewhere else."  If you don't suspect it, you could very well be the next target.  Cell tower and antennae proliferation is happening all over the U.S. and it seems no one is heeding the warnings of medical professionals or even concerned about following the rules and limits put in place by the FCC.

Learn what you need to know now so that when and if this issue comes to your back yard, you will be prepared and you will know what to do.

Here's an insightful opinion from Steve Perkins, a member of the Democratic National Party in Georgia:  

In my opinion, The cityhood movement in DeKalb has never been an organic grassroots based, virtuous effort led by civically minded leaders wanting to organize for a unique municipal identity out of elements already in place. Were it that it would have been a far more inclusive movement. Boundaries would not have been drawn to exclude certain populations either for the immediate needs of passing the referendum or the logical long term interest of a definable community, let alone the fiscal viability of the maps that were drawn. 

There are logical boundaries of any community. That is why they call it "Community."  

The truth of it is if Lakeside had organic roots rather than AstroTurf, had it been defined by the magnets and barriers that typically define communities (shopping and schools and traffic patterns and a business district), I am not convinced it would have passed at all. Those elements, the things that naturally carve out a community, are why Dunwoody made sense and Brookhaven less so.

Grievance can be an element of community development as well, but grievance alone will never sustain a community and is certainly not a reason to rush into cityhood. 20 years hence, it if not ten, migration patterns would have likely meant that the LCA-defined map (and its multiple iterations) would have rendered Lakeside a complete anachronism. 

The problem with Lakeside is that it was driven by largely short term vision. and was always more about "self-determination" than than it was about community. It was problematic from the start when it tried to gobble up Tucker and stretched its borders well beyond a resolvable footprint and sought to exclude areas that were within it sphere. 

Any municipality has to be defined for the long term and not the short. Perhaps Lakeside leaders could have built that winning coalition through inclusive civic engagement of the community that shared schools and grocery stores and houses of worship, rather than political machinations and gerrymandering maps to achieve a particular outcome. 

Again "Shared grievance" alone is not enough to form a city particularly when the grievances are both transient and not solved through creating a non-nonsensical, formulaic, exclusive and inorganic. 

When we seek to define our geographic community and split election precincts and school district or say that people who shop a the same grocery stores are not part of our self-defined community such a municipal organism opens itself up to legitimate criticism. 

Lakeside has been about the grievance of the few, manufactured by a handful of people and stirred to full broth. It is not even that the grievances were wholly contrived and illegitimate, because at certain levels they were and perhaps are legitimate -- at least some of them. The problem is that the "City of Lakeside" was a reaction to a set of short term circumstances by a small subset of people rather than a dialogue between all those who share the same community. 

There was a lot of determination and a lot of "self" in the cityhood movement. Their grievances may well be completely legitimate. But this was not, as some would have you believe were the first shots fired at Lexington and Concord. It was Fort Sumter. It was a fairly transparent attempt to secede rather than build either coalition or community and was thus divisive rather than helpful. 

I think a City of Lakeside may ultimately be inevitable, but the Greater Lakeside Debate is Over. Thanks to Tucker and Thanks to Briarcliff. Lakeside will be much smaller. There are still political Shenanigans going on even with the latest map. We need to be vigilant. More so, we need to be organized. 

Ultimately this is going to come down to a referendum and that is going to mean political organizing as opposed to lobbying. I for one am all in!