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Old 03-11-2009, 03:41 PM
 
Location: Georgia native in McKinney, TX
8,057 posts, read 12,789,586 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by lilmusket View Post
Even existing cities could not annex to within less than 3 miles of existing cities. Now obviously annexations and incorporations that occured before the rule went into affect were grandfathered in. Obviously Decatur, Atlanta, College Park and East Point were contiguous with no buffer.
The duplication of services such as courts, etc to maintain 159 separate counties in Georgia is a drain on the budget. We truly need to consolidate some of these smaller less populated counties in the state. I beleive that the services counties provide should be very limited... primarily being the local unit for the state courts... but for most day to day services that serve a larger more dense populations... well that should be reserved for cities. I think Canada is a great model to follow how they do this.
Are you sure about the annexation rules? I know Cobb cities have annexed contiguously in the last decades. Smyrna and Marietta abut in a very odd way around the Windy Hill/Cobb Pkwy area. Kennesaw and Acworth have both annexed areas between themselves.

Long before the current North Fulton annexations, Roswell and Alpharetta annexed larger swaths than most of the other Atlanta burbs, their lines were contiguous in an odd fashion as they both raced to annex areas around North Point Mall even before it developed.

Buford, Suwanee and Sugar Hill are all tangled up together in north Gwinett, all of these annexations would be from I would guess the 80s on but before the laws were relaxed for Sandy Springs and the other fulton cities to incorporate.
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Old 03-11-2009, 04:33 PM
 
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Saintmarks View Post
Are you sure about the annexation rules? I know Cobb cities have annexed contiguously in the last decades. Smyrna and Marietta abut in a very odd way around the Windy Hill/Cobb Pkwy area. Kennesaw and Acworth have both annexed areas between themselves.

Long before the current North Fulton annexations, Roswell and Alpharetta annexed larger swaths than most of the other Atlanta burbs, their lines were contiguous in an odd fashion as they both raced to annex areas around North Point Mall even before it developed.

Buford, Suwanee and Sugar Hill are all tangled up together in north Gwinett, all of these annexations would be from I would guess the 80s on but before the laws were relaxed for Sandy Springs and the other fulton cities to incorporate.
I am pretty sure they maintained a 3 mile buffer.. up until the law was revoked a cpl of years ago. If cities were already within 3 miles of each other before the old law went into effect then they were grandfathered in. In any case the buffer law had a negative effect... because it created these "no mans lands" that could not be incorporated" and were stuck in an 'unincorprated limbo' this buffer law is one of the reasons Georgia, especially metro Atlanta has such a problem with suburban sprawl, much more so than most metro areas its size. The buffer encouraged low density sprawl rather than more compact cities and towns.
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Old 03-11-2009, 04:38 PM
 
Location: Marietta, GA
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Quote:
Originally Posted by lilmusket View Post
Georgia Law encouraged sprawl by favoring unincorporated counties rather than more densely populated cities with more strict land use zoning laws.
I don't understand that comment. How is the population density influenced by whether the municipal authority is a city or county? For that matter, how would the zoning be inherently affected?

Having lived in a state that has no counties, with every square inch of the state belonging to a city or town, it doesn't have anything to do with density. In some ways, having a larger county provides economies of scale for things like police, fire, schools, and other public works, instead of having a bunch of smaller cities providing those same services, usually less efficiently and at a higher cost. I just don't understand the big deal with regard to municipal incorporation versus unincorporated counties.
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Old 03-11-2009, 04:45 PM
 
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Because of landuse zoning.. Cities typically zone for higher density... unincorporated counties tend to zone for more low and medium densities.
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Old 03-11-2009, 05:04 PM
 
16,634 posts, read 29,319,383 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Saintmarks View Post
Are you sure about the annexation rules? I know Cobb cities have annexed contiguously in the last decades. Smyrna and Marietta abut in a very odd way around the Windy Hill/Cobb Pkwy area. Kennesaw and Acworth have both annexed areas between themselves.

Long before the current North Fulton annexations, Roswell and Alpharetta annexed larger swaths than most of the other Atlanta burbs, their lines were contiguous in an odd fashion as they both raced to annex areas around North Point Mall even before it developed.

Buford, Suwanee and Sugar Hill are all tangled up together in north Gwinett, all of these annexations would be from I would guess the 80s on but before the laws were relaxed for Sandy Springs and the other fulton cities to incorporate.
The fact...

It was not a 3-mile buffer between cities, I believe, it was that a new city could not be established within 3 miles of an existing city.

But this was done away with for the Sandy Springs incorporation.
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Old 03-11-2009, 05:24 PM
 
Location: Marietta, GA
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Quote:
Originally Posted by lilmusket View Post
Because of landuse zoning.. Cities typically zone for higher density... unincorporated counties tend to zone for more low and medium densities.
But that's based on politics, not any inherent limitation or law. Being someone without a life, I've watched the Cobb County Commission on cable, meeting to discuss zoning. In the more urban areas of the county near Cumberland, they are quite deliberate and careful and one of the hearings I caught was regarding a 33 story building that they approved for a senior center. That sounds like high density to me.

http://zoning.comdev.cobbcountyga.go...Z-006-2009.pdf
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Old 03-11-2009, 05:30 PM
 
7,845 posts, read 20,736,332 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by lilmusket View Post
Miami-Frt Lauderdale??? Not really... because Miami is so much larger.. a sidekick really needs to be of almost equivalent... I have never heard anyone trefer to Miami as Miami-Fort Lauderdale.. Same with Los Angles-Long Beach... those two cities are no where near of equivalent size... how many times have you heard Los langeles referred to as Los Angeles-Long Beach?? hardly ever. Now you have a point with Greenville-Spartanburg, and Raleigh-Durham. But to fit this definition the two cities really need to be of equivalent size (such as in twin cities) or very near in size and have their own core downtown areas. Kansas City is an interesting example... Yes there is a Kansas City, MO and a Kansas City,KS.. but the core urban area is Kansas City, MO... Kansas City, KS is mostly suburban with virtually no downtown core, and you'd have almost no idea you were in a seperate city... like you do in Raleigh-Durham, Washington-Baltimore, and Minneapolis-St. Paul.
Okay...then San Francisco-Oakland wouldn't work by your definition; San Francisco's population is almost twice Oakland's. Much like Miami's population compared to Fort Lauderdale's, and Kansas City's to Kansas City, KS.

Ask someone in KCK if it is a separate city from KCMO...or if it's suburban. I know that it isn't, but it would be fun to hear what residents have to say. KCK has been in decline for a few years, but it hasn't turned into suburbia. And...I have long heard L.A. and Long Beach mentioned together...Long Beach is a city of 500,000, slightly smaller than Fort Worth - which incidentally is sidekick to Dallas, population 1.3 million.

I would have thought that a "sidekick" would be like those in the movies - an important character with a smaller role that supports the main character...kind of a second fiddle, not a character of equal importance. Robin to Batman, Ethel to Lucy...Major Nelson to Major Healy...etc.
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Old 03-11-2009, 05:35 PM
 
1,303 posts, read 3,840,751 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by neil0311 View Post
But that's based on politics, not any inherent limitation or law. Being someone without a life, I've watched the Cobb County Commission on cable meeting to discuss zoning. In the more urban areas of the county near Cumberland, they are quite deliberate and careful and one of the hearings I caught was regarding a 32 story building that they approved for a senior center. That sounds like high density to me.
That's only because Cobb County, because of its proximity to metro Atlanta and the overall high growth of the metro region gave it a defacto higher density. Now they are trying to manage that. But overall, the most of the county is what could be described as medium sensity to low density sprawl. Then look at Marietta and Smyrna, you have compact, definable town centers, and places you can actually walk. Cumberland is an example of an "edge cityP there's an entire book dedicated to defining and exploring this concept... its not really like a city... usually it is simply an area with a high density of office and retail space, but still rather low to medium density in regards to residential. Counties tend to give developers more control.. and let them plan their developemnts... so you get more "subvisions" with winding roads and cul de sacs.. because that's what the developers design. In a city... the city planners will design the street layouts, not the developers... so the city directs the growth... and the developers fill in the spaces as defined by the planners. because of the negative affects of sprawl, metro counties are having to reevaluate how they have approached land use planning... and are looking at higher density and really behaving more like cities. For instance Arlington, VA is a County, but for all intents and purposes behaves like a city. One reason is because arlington is quite compact and completely urbanized for the most part.
But what we see happening is a reactionary approach to growth rather than planning for it... which I think cities do a better job at.
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Old 03-11-2009, 06:01 PM
 
Location: Georgia native in McKinney, TX
8,057 posts, read 12,789,586 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by aries4118 View Post
The fact...

It was not a 3-mile buffer between cities, I believe, it was that a new city could not be established within 3 miles of an existing city.

But this was done away with for the Sandy Springs incorporation.

That is what I posted earlier as my understanding. The laws inhibited new cities from incorporating but there was nothing about an already established city annexing land. It is lilmusket that thinks these laws kept cities from annexing land.

The reason the existing suburbs don't have larger footprints is that most in the metro area like their county government and don't want to be annexed. The major annexations in Cobb have primarily been pre development, the developer asks to be annexed so he can get a higher density zoning than the county will allow. When the area is already developed, it has to be approved in a vote by citizens living in the area and most people want the status quo.

The exception to this on a larger scale was Roswell and Alpharetta. Look at maps of these two from back in the eighties and you will see that they took in large swaths of land and were much larger in land area than any other suburb. This was the precursor to the current total incorporation of all of North Fulton as residents in these areas wanted to be in these cities because of frustrations with Fulton County.

If one of the Cobb cities to this day try to annex any kind of large swath, the county always fights it. That is why the metro Atlanta map is not colored in like a map of DFW or any number of metro areas in your Rand McNally road atlas. Counties in metro Atlanta are practically large suburban cities anyway.
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Old 03-11-2009, 06:07 PM
 
Location: Marietta, GA
7,887 posts, read 17,129,610 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by lilmusket View Post
But what we see happening is a reactionary approach to growth rather than planning for it... which I think cities do a better job at.
I won't press the point any more, but I still don't know what difference there is between a municipal government for 600K people that is a county and one that's a city. Sure, if you have less square mileage for those 600K people, then you'll be more dense. So what? Why is dense population somehow better or to be encouraged?

I grew up in NYC and know what it's like to be cramped in an apartment building. Do you think that's a better quality of life for children than a house with a yard on half an acre? The city apartment living is more dense, and may be great for single adults, but it's not automatically better. Cobb is a great example of a county that meets many needs in the unincorporated areas. There are urban areas, rural areas, with most of the unincorporated county being suburban in nature.

Where cities have been the better choice are the north Fulton cities and Dunwoody, where the county wasn't meeting the needs of the residents of those areas and they wanted to incorporate. That's great that they have the choice, but if residents are happy, why add another layer when none is necessary?
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