Fulton County is coming apart. Over the past decade, four new cities have been carved out of the Georgia county, which is dominated by the county seat, Atlanta. As a result, Fulton County now provides a full set of services to fewer than 10 percent of its 920,000 residents. All but one of the new cities are in the northern part of the county, which is both more affluent and more white than Atlanta and the rest of the county. Northern Fulton residents have always felt that they receive less than their fair share of county services. Now that they depend on the county for so little, with their new cities providing most core services, they believe more than ever that their tax dollars are simply underwriting other county residents.
Not surprisingly, then, there’s constant fighting when it comes to matters such as divvying up tax revenues or choosing representatives to sit on the regional transit board. More than that, there’s a movement afoot among the northern communities to break off from the rest of Fulton County entirely, by reconstituting Milton County, the territory that went broke and was absorbed by Fulton back during the Great Depression. “There are certainly people working actively on splitting the county,” says Joe Lockwood, mayor of the city of Milton. “There’s a sense that the county’s so big -- it’s 70 miles long -- that it’s inefficient and an unfair share of resources are going from one part of the county to another.”
To read the original article: Counties: An Outdated Concept or the Future?
