As he ends his 38 years of community service in Sandy Springs, Council Member Tibby DeJulio has some advice for his successors.
“They have to remember that serving on the city council is a public trust, and they have a fiduciary responsibility to the citizens when they serve on the city council,” DeJulio told Rough Draft. “Nobody’s ever gotten, or going to, get rich serving on the city council of Sandy Springs.”
Council members are paid $26,000 a year. DeJulio said when calculated on an hourly basis for the work performed, it doesn’t amount to much. The group serves on the city council for everybody else’s benefit, not their own.
DeJulio should know about serving others after working with former Mayor Eva Galambos for 18 years to convince legislators to give the community the choice to incorporate. He followed that effort with 20 years of service on the council.
When DeJulio moved into Sandy Springs in 1983, the area was controlled by Fulton County. He got involved with Galambos and the political process, while living on High Point Road. Across the street from his home, a developer wanted to tear down five or six single-family ranch homes to build 300 apartments.
DeJulio didn’t feel apartments were appropriate along High Point, with apartments already built or under construction on Glenridge Drive and Roswell Road. He spoke against the project before the Fulton County Commission, and the community was successful in defeating the proposal.
High Point Road has remained single-family residential to this day, he said, calling it his greatest accomplishment. In the process of fighting the apartment proposal, he met Galambos and learned of her goal of cityhood.
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“When the City of Atlanta wanted to take over Sandy Springs back in the ’80s and ’90s and early 2000s, all they were concerned with was the revenue that Sandy Springs was going to provide to the City of Atlanta,” DeJulio said. “And I was involved in these discussions, remember. And never once did they ever say what they were going to do to help the city of Sandy Springs. It was always to bring them more revenue.”
Before the city incorporated, it was part of a special services district. A study done for the Sandy Springs cityhood committees by the Carl Vincent Institute revealed that Sandy Springs provided $65 million in tax revenue in return for $32 million in services.
“Our tax dollars were not going to provide services for Sandy Springs. They were providing services county-wide that had nothing to do with Sandy Springs,” he said.
DeJulio said Galambos struggled to keep the cityhood movement afloat, as every time funding was needed, she had to approach local businesses to seek donations for the cause. He convinced Galambos that they needed a war chest to maintain the momentum.
A fundraising ball was held with silent and live auctions with the help of the Sandy Springs Society, which netted $88,000 after expenses. DeJulio said after the successful incorporation effort, the committee donated $55,000 to provide the start-up city with some operational funding.
Sandy Springs’ brand-new city council had a big problem, as the Georgia Constitution requires a city to provide services immediately after incorporation. DeJulio said they thought about contracting with Fulton County for services, but its poor performance in the past made this an undesirable option.
The committee members thought about contracting out municipal services like public works and engineering to a private entity, but struggled to find a working example anywhere in the United States.
The group decided to put out requests for proposals to several companies to provide public works and administrative services. DeJulio said the city chose CH2M Hill, the winning bidder, for both contracts.
Later, the economics worked better for the city to run its own operations. DeJulio said many members of the CH2M Hill staff were hired by the city.
The five-term council member has told his colleagues that they need to be careful and not spend beyond the city’s budget. When the city council decided to build a new city hall and, years later, a new police station, it was justified based on the amount they were paying for rent for the old city hall building and the former police station.
DeJulio said his emphasis had been on keeping the city fiscally sound. The city has run a surplus every year and has maintained a 25-percent reserve fund.
“The city has turned out not as we expected, not as we had hoped, but better than we could have ever dreamt that the city would turn out. The city has been such a magnificent success,” DeJulio said.
