This editorial originally ran in the May-June 2026 edition of James Magazine.
This spring, as the General Assembly met under the Gold Dome, cities across our state were doing what they always do: solving problems.
The problems are as varied as the cities themselves. In Johns Creek, city officials are working through what it means to prepare for electric aircraft: the zoning questions, the landing sites, the safety considerations for technology that's still young. Two hundred and thirty miles away, Tybee Island is losing its beach. Sixty percent of its shoreline has disappeared since 2020, and the city is pursuing all available resources to address the issue. Both are Georgia cities, but beyond that, the challenges they face, and the solutions they need, look nothing alike. That’s true for most of Georgia's 536 cities:
- Savannah is a port city and tourism destination with a history unlike anywhere else in the South.
- Winder and Auburn figured out how to turn a former rock quarry into a regional reservoir holding more than a billion gallons of water.
- Alpharetta is reviewing a proposal to redevelop a mall site into a mixed-use entertainment district.
- Leesburg just launched its first farmers market and is nurturing its downtown revitalization one entrepreneur at a time.
- Rome is building a $200 million water treatment plant to address contamination, and a dozen smaller cities are pursuing grants to address the same problem.
To me, that variety is Georgia's greatest strength. It comes from places that are genuinely different from one another, led by people who understand those differences and make decisions accordingly. I've spent my career watching cities at work. There are lessons learned from city to city, but a solution that fits one rarely fits another perfectly. State and civic leaders, as well as pundits and commentators, should remember this.
One Size Doesn’t Fit All
Each year, state lawmakers wrestle with questions about local decision making, local standards, and who is best positioned to make decisions for communities as different as the ones I've just described. Those are fair questions and they deserve honest answers. Georgia's cities are not perfect. Local decisions sometimes fall short. Standards get bent under pressure, and it's the residents who pay later. Nobody knows that better than the local officials who have to answer for it from neighbors and fellow residents.
But local challenges deserve local solutions, backed by state support, not uniform standards that sound reasonable in Atlanta but land wrong everywhere else. A policy designed for Pooler, which has added 40 percent to its population in a decade, looks nothing like what works in Albany, where the focus is on downtown revitalization through a creative local financing tool. The how looks entirely different from city to city.
Cities do their best work when the state gives them the right tools to address their specific local challenges. The Rural Workforce Housing Initiative helped cities like Cairo finance workforce housing they couldn't have built alone. GEFA financing gave Winder and Auburn the means to pursue a regional water solution nobody else would have thought to try. Cities in Georgia's growth corridors are managing explosive growth; cities in rural Georgia are trying to attract it. Those aren't variations on the same problem.
Love of Place
In 2003, Senoia's historic downtown had five businesses on Main Street. Scott Tigchelaar and a partner purchased 22 vacant lots there and made a deliberate decision not to fill them with whatever the market would bear. He calls it his 401(k), a lifetime investment, not a transaction. He was careful about what he built and how it looked, and the downtown that grew around his work now has more than 100 businesses. "It's taken 20 years to become an overnight success," he said recently. He became mayor this past January because he kept hearing the city couldn't afford basic things residents wanted done.
That's local governance at its best, where people step up for the places they love. Georgia has 536 cities with people like that. They deserve partnership, not preemption and second-guessing.
Georgia's strength has never come from uniformity but instead from ingenuity, the drive of its people, and the variety of the places we each call home. Our cities are the incubators of new ideas and job creation, and shape the neighborhoods, parks, and downtowns that define our quality of life, but no two are the same. And those differences are shaped by the people who choose to lead them.
If you feel called to make your city even better, show your love by action, not just reaction, and consider running for local office, like Scott Tigchelaar did. I promise you... it's harder than it looks, but it's worth your time.
