AROUND TOWN: Lost Mountain not all that neighborly, Marietta mayor says

Readers may recall that when the Lost Mountain cityhood proposal was still working its way through the state legislature, the proposed city’s eastern borders raised some eyebrows at Marietta City Hall.

At the time, Mayor Steve “Thunder” Tumlin told the MDJ that the would-be city, which would stretch from Paulding County in the west to Kennesaw Mountain in the east, left little room for the natural growth of Marietta. Neighborhoods that may have eventually been annexed into Marietta, or would prefer Marietta to Lost Mountain, will not have that option, should the referendum pass.

Hizzoner made clear at the time, however, that he supports the right of west Cobb Countians to incorporate, should they so choose.

But cityhood backers have seized on Tumlin’s comments anyway to accuse him of having territorial ambitions beyond Kennesaw Mountain, splashing the mayor’s comments on mailers sent out to voters.

“THE CITY OF MARIETTA SAYS IT WANTS THE ABILITY TO ANNEX NEIGHBORHOODS IN YOUR AREA,” the mailers proclaim.

On the back of the cardstock, pro-cityhood group Preserve West Cobb announces that annexation into Marietta City Schools would bring higher taxes, “instantly lower property values,” and “loss of top-ranked Kennesaw Mountain and Harrison high schools.”

Around Town caught up with the mayor before Wednesday’s City Council meeting to see what he made of cityhood folks casting him as Cobb’s very own Attila the Hun.

“Those are actually my friends,” Tumlin said with a chuckle. “So I'm flattered they think I'm that powerful.”

The idea that Tumlin wants to vacuum up Cobb School District students attending those west Cobb schools and deposit them at Marietta High is “laughable,” the mayor said.

Plus, what’s wrong with Marietta’s schools? Compare the conduct of board members in Marietta to their peers at the Cobb County Board of Education, which makes Congress look like the picture of civility and bipartisanship.

“They're jealous,” chimed in Councilman Johnny Walker, who was sitting nearby as the mayor spoke to AT.

At a recent visit to Marietta Country Club in west Cobb, Tumlin had someone jokingly ask where his bodyguard was.

The mayor compared the mailers to a game of telephone, where schoolchildren whisper a message in each other's ears until it becomes completely misinterpreted.

“We’ve been a city for 189 years,” Tumlin said. “We've never forced anybody into our city, never.”

Musing about the cityhood process, Tumlin said he still wishes the other cities in Cobb could’ve weighed in on the borders, since it affects them, too. Legislators who live dozens, if not hundreds of miles from Cobb had more say than the city of Marietta, he said. (Tumlin then called himself a hypocrite, having voted for the city of Sandy Springs as a state legislator despite opposition from some in Fulton County.)

Now in his fourth term as mayor, Tumlin previously served on the Marietta school board and in the Georgia Legislature. So he’s learned to roll with the punches, and figures the cityhood groups are going to use whatever tool they can to promote their cause.

“If I got hurt about them, then I'd get hurt about a lot of other things,” he said.

Shortly thereafter, during Wednesday’s meeting, the council unanimously denied a rezoning that would have allowed 200 apartments to be built near Wellstar Kennestone Hospital.

Representing the developer was former Cobb County manager Rob Hosack, who now works for consulting firm Taylor English Decisions. The CEO of that firm is Earl Ehrhart, husband to state Rep. Ginny Ehrhart, R-west Cobb. 

“The irony of this is, one of the framers of that, her husband is CEO of Taylor English Decisions. … That was a very aggressive density, we turned it down 7-0 and (yet) we’re the bad guys,” Tumlin said after the meeting.

Hosack also represented Pulte Homes in their effort to build higher density homes at a parcel near Lost Mountain Park. Lost Mountain cityhood opponents seized on the ties between the Ehrharts and the proposed development. At the time, Rep. Ehrhart called the issue a "nothing burger," telling the MDJ she was opposed to the development, and that her husband had no involvement in that case.

"Another employee of his company has been working with Pulte to help them with conforming to current zoning and working with the Cobb commission. It is not his client, it is someone else’s client,” Ehrhart said in March.

Always mannerly, Tumlin clarified that he’s a big fan of Earl Ehrhart, and said Hosack made a professional, if unsuccessful, pitch to the council. But, he added, ain’t it funny?

“The CEO is one of the pushers of this we-don't-believe-in-density city, but yet they come push it here. I just find that very ironic,” Tumlin said.

SECRETARY OF STATE: Sometime after the November 2020 general election, but before the January 2021 runoff for U.S. Senate, U.S. Rep. Jody Hice, R-Greensboro, got a call from Mark Meadows.

At the time, Meadows was then-President Donald Trump’s chief of staff. Last Saturday, in a packed room at the Cobb GOP headquarters off Roswell Road, Hice recalled that conversation with Meadows.

“Jody, what are we going to do about the secretary of state of Georgia (Republican Brad Raffensperger)? Somebody's got to take him out,” Hice recalled. “And I said, ‘Mark, I believe I'm the one that's gonna step up to the plate and do that.’”

Of course, two recounts and an audit of absentee ballot signatures in Cobb County found Democrat Joe Biden had, in fact, won the presidential election in Georgia.

“We conducted a statewide hand recount that reaffirmed the initial tally, and a machine recount at the request of the Trump campaign that also reaffirmed the original tally,” Raffensperger said in a statement after the audit. “This audit disproves the only credible allegations the Trump campaign had against the strength of Georgia’s signature match processes.”

But that wasn’t good enough for Trump, who, it was later revealed, had called Raffensperger to demand the secretary of state “find” the 12,000 votes he needed to overcome Biden’s margin of victory.

It wasn’t enough for Hice, either. Last year, Hice announced he was indeed running to unseat the incumbent secretary of state.

His problems with Raffensperger predate the election, Hice said last Saturday.

“He had already made the deal with Stacey (Abrams) and signed the consent decree,” he said. “As a result we've had an election disaster in this state.”

As the AJC has already reported, the “consent decree” Hice is referring to is, in fact, a court settlement between the Democratic Party, Raffensperger and the Gwinnett County elections board that “called for election officials to check with their co-workers before rejecting an absentee ballot because of a mismatched signature, and … required election workers to quickly notify voters when their ballots were rejected, as mandated by a state election rule.” The AJC goes on to say state data show the settlement had almost no effect on the likelihood absentee ballots would be rejected due to signature issues. 

Nevertheless, Hice believes the settlement allowed for mass voter fraud. If elected, he would more aggressively pursue and prosecute such fraud, he told the crowd last Saturday.

“If we don't correct it now, Georgia is going to be blue the rest of our lives,” he said. “Politically speaking, there is nothing more important than this issue.”

Assuming, for a moment, the settlement did in fact make it easier to commit election fraud, you might wonder whether there’s any evidence that such fraud actually occurred en masse. Raffensperger says it did not. Courts have repeatedly tossed lawsuits alleging it had. Well, just watch the new documentary “2000 Mules,” Hice said.

The documentary, hyped in ultra-conservative circles in recent weeks, details “evidence” of election fraud collected by an organization called True the Vote. That evidence includes surveillance video of people dropping off multiple ballots at ballot drop boxes. No videos show the same person leaving multiple ballots at different drop boxes, but cell phone tracking data obtained by True the Vote allegedly suggest those people did visit multiple drop boxes.

Of course, a person is allowed to drop off ballots on behalf of family members, which these people could have been doing. Former Cobb GOP Chairman Jason Shepherd made clear on social media this week he takes a dim view of True the Vote’s research.

“Here I am waiting for True the Vote to turn over the evidence they allegedly have on ballot harvesters to some entity that can actually use it to prosecute instead of using it as a fundraising gimmick,” he wrote in a tweet Tuesday.

“Everyone repeat after me: An illegally harvested ballot from a legitimate voter is still a legit vote,” he wrote the next day. “Only the ballot harvester go to jail. The vote still counts. If it’s not a legit ballot from a legit voter, that’s a different crime. Try learning the law next time.”

One last thing, from a recent New York Post story: “Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows was removed from North Carolina’s voter rolls this week amid a state investigation into allegations that he committed voter fraud in the 2020 general election.” Meadows, it seems, voted absentee "using the address of a single-wide mobile home in Macon County, where there is no evidence he ever lived." 

ON THE LEFT: At the last Donuts with Democrats meeting before the May 24 primary, Jacquelyn Bettadapur, chair of the Cobb Democratic Party, gave the crowd a pep talk.

“Cobb County has never been more consequential than it is now, so we need to get to work and make this happen again because we've seen the results, the rewards for winning these elections,” Bettadapur told the group gathered at the Switzer Library in Marietta last Saturday. 

One of the rewards for winning elections, she said, is that Democrats got appointments to Cobb County Board of Elections.

“We now have four Democratic appointees out of five on that Board of Elections. They have worked tirelessly to make sure that early vote capacity is standardized and expanded as much as it is fully capable of doing,” Bettadapur said.

While more progress is needed, she said in 2018 there were only two early voting sites for the first two weeks of early voting before the third week rolled around, at which time four more early voting sites opened.

“And that was it. And we had four- and five-hour lines at some of those early votes sites. So now we’re in a much better position again because we won some elections in 2020. So we’ve got people working really hard to make sure we have access to the polls and that your right as a voter is protected and that’s what’s at stake."

IN THE CLINK: A rather famous inmate is in custody at the Cobb County jail – Jeffery Lamar Williams, aka Atlanta rapper Young Thug.

Thug, for those who missed it, was picked up this week as part of a sweeping racketeering indictment by Fulton County DA Fani Willis. The charges implicate him at the center of the Young Slime Life (YSL) street gang, which shares a name with Thug’s record label.

As we reported in November, Cobb began taking inmates from Fulton last year to alleviate overcrowding in the latter jail. Whether Thug is on his Marietta junket as part of that deal, or to keep out of harm’s way while in custody, isn’t clear.