State lawmakers heard the message loud and clear at a hearing on the city of Brookhaven: Supporters want the right to vote while opponents want the cityhood movement to slow down.

It was a standing room only crowd Jan. 31 at the House Governmental Affairs Committee’s second hearing on the proposed city of Brookhaven. The Governmental Affairs Committee has scheduled its next hearing for Feb. 7.

Rep. Mike Jacobs, R-DeKalb, who authored the bill to create the city, told the committee briefly about the proposed city and why there is a movement to incorporate it. He said that along with lower taxes and better services, people want more local control.

“At the end of the day, this is about your neighbors making decisions about your local services,” Jacobs said.

Rep. Elena Parent, D-DeKalb, who represents a portion of the proposed city, said many of her constituents have concerns about the city of Brookhaven.

Parent has sponsored a bill, along with fellow DeKalb Reps. Mary Margaret Oliver, D-Decatur and Howard Mosby, D-Atlanta, that would, among other things, change the process for creating cities to include more study of the impact on the surrounding county and existing cities.

City supporters are pushing for a July referendum to vote on the new city, which would be bounded by the cities of Chamblee, Dunwoody, Sandy Springs and Atlanta and by I-85, Clairmont Road and the DeKalb-Peachtree Airport.

A study by the Carl Vinson Institute at the University of Georgia found financing a city in the area would be feasible without raising taxes above levels charged by DeKalb County for similar services in the area. Jacobs argues the city could operate with lower taxes.

Parent said for many, July is too soon to hold the vote. She said there are a lot of questions about police services, the impact the new city would have on DeKalb County and how incorporation would change government services.

“A lot of my constituents view having to vote in July as a lose-lose.  If the questions I’ve just laid out for you aren’t answered and if the charter isn’t fully vetted, they’ve lost the opportunity to form Brookhaven the right way, regardless of how they vote. They also lose opportunity to consider alternatives to incorporation such as annexation into existing cities,” Parent said.

“So it’s really not just about letting people vote. This is about foisting a bad choice on many citizens who are opposed to making that choice before they’ve had time to fully vet it. As policy makers we bear some responsibility for vetting this process and not just passing the buck onto citizens.”

A group of Brookhaven supporters chartered a bus to the Capitol and wore stickers asking for the right to vote.

Linley Jones, a member of the advocacy group BrookhavenYES, said if residents don’t have the opportunity to vote on incorporating a city in July, it may be too late because neighboring cities have expressed interest in annexing the property included in the Brookhaven boundaries.

“We just want the chance to vote,” Jones said. “We believe it’s July 31 or nothing. We believe a delay would be death for our cause. We ask you to support us in our right to vote, to choose an opportunity for self-governance, to choose an opportunity for self-determination. It’s just American.”

DeKalb County Commissioner Jeff Rader told the committee he worries that if a city of Brookhaven is incorporated, it could hurt the rest of the county.

“Basically, we need to look carefully and make good decisions,” Rader said. “I sponsored a resolution that has been distributed to you that calls for a comprehensive study not only of the impact of annexation on the unincorporated county but also what would be rational boundaries for cities; not just Brookhaven but elsewhere in DeKalb County. So should incorporation occur, there would be equilibrium in DeKalb County so we wouldn’t create situations where there would be insufficient tax base to deliver services.”

Glianny Fagundo said she doesn’t buy the argument that the process has been rushed. If DeKalb County wanted to conduct a study about incorporation, she said, it should have started when Dunwoody became a city or when the idea for a city of Brookhaven was first proposed.

“This has been everywhere in the media,” Fagundo said.  “I live in DeKalb, I like my county, I like my representatives, but they keep saying they want more time for a study. Why didn’t they get started back then?”

But more than 15 residents asked that the Legislature approve the July vote on the proposed city.

“I’m not here to say yes for a city or no for a city. Like everyone else, I’m just here to say please give us the right to vote,” said Jeff Kellar, a member of Citizens for North DeKalb. “We respectfully ask that you give us that right. Let the political process run its course, whichever direction it may go.”

Jim Eyre, who lives in the Ashford Park neighborhood, said there are too many questions to move ahead with the creation of a city.

He called the feasibility study “flawed” because it uses the recently created cities of Dunwoody and Johns Creek as comparisons.

“These peer cities are much younger,” he said. “The older things are, the more they break. Clearly the feasibility study did not reflect the cost to maintain the older infrastructure in Brookhaven.”