Talk of merging Hall, Gainesville reignites

[Zanarkand A East]

Maybe then Georgia won't have 1,000 counties.

[primaltech]

If all the unincorporated area around Lawrenceville with a Lawrenceville address, with its 4 large zip codes (30043-46), were to incorporate as Lawrenceville- overnight its population would be comparable in size to Atlanta, if not actually even larger. Wouldn't that be interesting.

At least until Atlanta annexes a chunk of South Fulton and the Druid Hills/ Emory area, which it has been trying to do.

[cwkimbro]

Originally Posted by primaltech

If all the unincorporated area around Lawrenceville with a Lawrenceville address, with its 4 large zip codes (30043-46), were to incorporate as Lawrenceville- overnight its population would be comparable in size to Atlanta, if not actually even larger. Wouldn't that be interesting.

At least until Atlanta annexes a chunk of South Fulton and the Druid Hills/ Emory area, which it has been trying to do.

Note quite that much...

Closer to about 230,000.

Gwinnett has lots of cities, so other city's zip codes still take a good amount of people. Lwarenceville's zip codes are expansive, but it still borders Lilburn, Duluth, Grayson, Dacula, Snelleville, Buford, and Auburn zip codes that take up a sizable chunk of the central parts of of Gwinnett too.

Marietta would be slightly bigger with close to 300,000.


For the OP, despite being a old now, one topic that needs to be discussed in detail is what happens in the future. I can see some potential in-fighting and divisions that could grow if this happens.

Gainesville is a large city in its own right separate from Atlanta, but the southern part of Hall County is really more of continued suburban growth of Atlanta and is more characteristic of a suburb of Gwinnett. This is also the rapidly growing portion of the county. I'd say it accounts for just shy of about 50,000 people, but in 20 years this number can grow quite larger.

This is why the GDOT has given so much attention to places like Friendship Rd. There is a great deal of residential development near Chateau Elan.

The main reason I mention this is the central and northern areas of the county and the southern 1/3 of the county will likely need different funding goals going into the future. Gainesville will need more urban support, support for the chicken packing industry and will face slow to moderate growth. The Southern area will likely have rapid growth, be very suburban in nature, and will likely need a great deal of road development with strong links to Gwinnett. It would be very easy for skepticism to pop-up about where the money is coming from and where it is going to.

Now this still exists now, but there is an advantage to letting the southern part of the county have its own cities (that can annex more land in the future) and Gainesville to be separate. This would leave people with some type of funding mechanism separate from each other to accomplish goals the other part of the county doesn't care about going into the future.