ATLANTA (CN) — A petition filed by opponents of Atlanta’s planned public safety training center to let local voters decide if it should be built on the November ballot was approved Wednesday, allowing organizers to begin collecting signatures.
The approval comes two weeks after an initial petition was submitted by the Vote To Stop Cop City Coalition to the city’s municipal clerk’s office. The delay resulted in legal action against interim clerk Vanessa Waldon on Tuesday for failing to comply within a required seven day period.
While the group originally had 60 days to collect the needed signatures, they now have only 57 days till the Aug. 15 deadline due to the delays. As soon as the clerk provides the group with the official copies of the approved petition, organizers will have to collect at least 70,330 signatures from Atlanta residents who were registered to vote in the 2021 municipal election.
After the signatures are collected, the petition will be filed with the Atlanta City Council, whose members will have 50 days to review the validity of the petition. If validated, the petition will appear on the November ballot.
The group filed their original referendum petition just two days after the Atlanta City Council voted on June 5 to approve $67 million in city funding for the facility, after listening to 14 hours of public comment that was overwhelmingly against the project.
But Waldon denied the petition on June 14 for missing a line requiring Atlanta residents to validate each signature, according to the group.
The group resubmitted the petition and added the line, but argued that under Georgia law it should have been the city clerk’s responsibility to add it, not the petitioners.
On Tuesday, the petition was rejected a second time for reportedly incorrectly citing Atlanta city code, not asking signers to swear they were registered to vote in the last municipal election and for not collecting their birthdates to verify their voter registrations.
According to the coalition, two of the reasons Waldon gave for its rejection were not actually required under state law and should have been raised as concerns earlier.
In a court filing on the same day, opponents demanded that the clerk approve the petition, arguing that Waldon had seven days to approve it, but waited until the last day on June 14 and then denied the petition on "frivolous" grounds.
Construction crews have already begun clearing the forested site of the 250-acre area of unincorporated DeKalb County, but the group plans on filing an injunction seeking to halt the work from continuing once they have gathered all of the signatures, according to local attorney and legal adviser for the group, Alex Jospeh.
The group’s proposed referendum seeks to cancel the lease agreement of the land to the Atlanta Police Foundation that is expected to cost the city's taxpayers $36 million. Their efforts are largely based on a referendum that took place recently in Camden County, Georgia involving a proposed spaceport. The county supported the project, but it was ultimately voted down by residents.
The residents, who were concerned about potential fires and pollution, gathered signatures from 10% of the county’s population to force a referendum under the rarely used “home rule” provision of the state’s Constitution to stop the county’s land purchase for the project.
In February, the Georgia Supreme Court unanimously upheld the Camden County referendum, in a ruling that could potentially open the door for new citizen-backed efforts to overturn certain decisions made by local elected officials. However, it remains unclear whether the ruling applies to municipalities, which means that the Cop City Vote organizers will likely face legal challenges to their petition even if they gather the required signatures in time.
“We firmly believe that our residents deserve well-trained first responders who have access to adequate training facilities,” the statement said. “We will continue to share our view that the PSTC and the more than 300 acres of green space are the right approach to ensuring Atlanta will be a national model for public safety.”
Atlanta's Democratic Mayor Andre Dickens and the Atlanta Police Foundation, who is being backed by an array of corporate donors, say the $90 million facility is needed to replace inadequate training facilities and to retain new police officers and first responders.
But opponents, who range from local residents to activists from around the country and even internationally, say they want to preserve what is one of the urban area's largest remaining green spaces, and fear it will perpetuate greater militarization of the police nationally, and exacerbate the over-policing of poor and majority-Black communities.
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