(DEKALB COUNTY, Ga.) — The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that four residents of unincorporated DeKalb County have filed a lawsuit with the City of Atlanta and State of Georgia. If successful, the suit would grant DeKalb residents the right to collect signatures for the petition on the public safety training center, dubbed ‘Cop City’ by its critics.
After the Atlanta City Council voted to allocate additional funding to the $90 million facility, opponents launched a campaign to have the matter put to a referendum in the fall. They must collect 70,000 signatures from residents of the city who were registered to vote in Atlanta before the 2021 elections, in the presence of another Atlanta resident who also meets those criteria.
The residents of DeKalb, who live closest to the facility and would be the most directly impacted, are barred from voting on the petition, and barred from organizing canvassing teams.
In the lawsuit, plaintiffs Lisa Baker, Jacqueline Dougherty, Keyanna Jones, and Amelia Weltner say that “Even though their own community bears the immediate impacts of the Training Center, ecologically and otherwise, Plaintiffs only ability to directly impact the City of Atlanta’s decision-making process is through acting as circulators of this petition.”
The official countdown on the rush to 70,000 started on June 21, when organizers got the first official copies of the petition from interim Municipal Clerk Vanessa Walden. The suit includes terms which would reset that clock and give organizers more time and more people to reach their goal.