On Monday, the Atlanta city council adopted new rules to move forward with the referendum process, allowing the public to vote on the “Cop City” project. Organizers of the campaign to halt the construction of an Atlanta police and first responders training center, convened at the Atlanta City Council hearing, on Monday, Feb. 5, to protest city officials’ attempts to disallow thousands of petition signatures and squash the effort for a referendum on the Cop City project.
The vote took place amid protests against the council’s adopted methodology for signature matching. Critics argue that the methodology the city intends to use allows the city to block a public vote on the controversial project.
Ahead of the 10-5 vote adopting the ordinance, three people who called for removing the signature matching element were escorted from the council chambers.
Democracy or chaos is the ultimate choice. At a hearing, Tim Franzen asked city councilmembers, “Which one do you support?” before being briefly hustled from behind the dais during a protest. Today, the focus is not on a public safety center. Whether democracy is effective is the central question.
Last spring, the construction of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, which now costs $110m, commenced.
The commencement of this project followed contentious hearings in which activists raised concerns about its expense, location in woodlands outside the city, and the circumvention of public input by the city. In 2022, protests started to intensify, gaining national attention following the killing of activist Manuel “Tortuguita” Teran near the construction site of the center in January 2023. The incident occurred shortly after a state trooper was injured by gunfire.
The Atlanta City Council in a 15-0 vote in September approved the first step in the process of verifying 116,000 signatures in petitions submitted to begin the process for a referendum that would allow voters to…
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