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Look out Lake Burton Civic Association, there’s a heat-seeking missile heading your way up I-85. Buckhead Bill White is exiting the civic soap opera he fueled in Atlanta and is moving to an elegant lake house.
White, the face — and mouth — of the Buckhead City movement has deduced there’s nothing more he can do for the fine secessionists in Atlanta. The movement is kaput. At least for now, he figures, after Gov. Brian Kemp doused the flames White continually fanned.
The idea of carving out a new city from Atlanta’s ritzy north side has bubbled for years, although a chunk of an existing city has never pulled away to create its own fiefdom. It’s horrible policy and could undermine all existing cities. In essence, such a trend could create a municipal race to the bottom in cities statewide with fierce debates about money, class and race.
White moved to Buckhead at a time when all that is needed to carry the day is grievance and bluster. He plugged into ongoing resentments that Buckhead is a piggybank for Atlanta. He convinced his old New York buddy, Donald Trump, to publicly support the idea of Buckhead pulling away from Atlanta, got a gaggle of rural Georgia pols to back the movement and even had a platform on the highly rated, yet malignant, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” show on Fox News Channel.
Largely, cityhood died a month ago when Gov. Brian Kemp tossed a wet blanket on the movement, circulating a letter with a host of unanswered questions about the complicated — and uncharted — matter of removing an existing portion of a city and starting anew.
Of course, the fact that White was publicly a huge backer of former U.S. Sen. David Perdue, who ran unsuccessfully against Kemp in the 2022 Republican primary, kind of ensured Kemp wouldn’t be too keen on Buckhead City.
White, still stinging, told my colleagues, “When the governor inserted himself in a shady, sleazy, backdoor kind of way, then the result was clear.” Totally sounds like a man packing his bags for Florida.
Councilman Shook agrees city services for Buckhead are still lagging, although Mayor Andre Dickens still enjoys a “honeymoon” with a large chunk of Buckhead.
The talk of cityhood, he said, “is never going to go away. It never has gone away. But without Bill White, it’s no longer a three-alarm fire.
“We’re now going back to regular programming,” Shook added. “People will talk about it, but we won’t go back there.”
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