Five city of Mableton residents have sued the nascent city in Cobb Superior Court, alleging the legislation which enabled the creation of the city is unconstitutional.
The suit was filed Monday by Mableton residents Deidre White, Ronnie Blue, Judy King, Tanya Leake and Robert Swarthout. It challenges the constitutionality of House Bill 839, calling the law “unconstitutional and fatally defective.”
Mableton was enabled by HB 839, which passed the state legislature and was signed by Gov. Brian Kemp last year. The city was created after a slim majority of Mableton voters approved incorporation in last November’s referendum.
The lawsuit alleges the bill is unconstitutional because it created both the city and community improvement districts.
Georgia’s CIDs are special districts which fund infrastructure improvements within their borders by levying an additional tax on commercial property owners. Cobb has three of them — Cumberland, Town Center and Gateway Marietta.
HB 839, the suit alleges, violates the state constitution’s single subject rule because it “creates legally separate units of local government in one act.”
The bill is also unconstitutional, the plaintiffs argue, because the ballot question posed to voters included both the creation of the city and the CIDs.
That violates legal precedent from a 1908 Georgia case, the suit says, by not “providing the opportunity for the electors to address the propositions separately.”
The state constitution, the suit adds, lays out a method for creating CIDs that allows them to be included in a city charter, but HB 839 didn’t follow that method.
“Had HB 839 simply authorized Mableton to create CIDs, it would have passed legal muster,” the suit says. “But that is not what the bill does. Instead, it improperly creates CIDs in the same bill that creates the city, as is…
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