A broad coalition of groups in Atlanta has launched a referendum to give voters a chance to say whether they want the controversial police and fire department training center known as “Cop City” built in a forest south-east of the city.
The effort requires organizers to collect about 70,000 signatures from Atlanta registered voters in 60 days. Then the question of the city canceling its agreement with the Atlanta Police Foundation to build the $90m center can be added to municipal election ballots in November.
The push comes after an estimated thousand people who showed up at City Hall on 5 June proved insufficient to stop Atlanta’s city council from approving about $67m for Cop City. Meanwhile, machines have already begun clear-cutting trees on the project’s 171-acre footprint in South River Forest.
The referendum faces what one organizer called “an atmosphere of repression” – including two activists being charged with felonies last week while putting up fliers, bringing total arrests since December to 50.
The largest group of arrests, on 5 March in a public park in the forest near where the project is planned, was followed by local government closing the park, in effect shutting off tree-sitting protests by “forest defenders” that had gone on for more than a year.
“We’re at the stage where they’ve pushed people out of the forest, they’ve arrested people … they’ve fenced off the forest, they’ve even begun clear-cutting,” said Kamau Franklin, founder of local group Community Movement Builders. “We’re at the stage where the most direct, legal mechanism to stop this project is by referendum.”
Cop City came to global attention after police shot dead Manuel Paez Terán, an environmental protester, in a January raid on the forest – the first incident of its kind in US history. The state says Paez Terán shot first and a special prosecutor is evaluating the case.
Meanwhile, the movement opposing the project has drawn a wide range of people locally, nationally and internationally who oppose police militarization, urban forest destruction amid climate change and environmental racism. Most residents in neighborhoods surrounding the forest are Black.
Most of the organizations driving the referendum are also Black-led, including the regional chapter of Working Families Power, Black Voters Matter and the NAACP. Officials from the Georgia governor, Brian Kemp, down to the mayor have consistently referred to opposition against the center as the work of white “outsiders”.
“That narrative is false,” said Britney Whaley, regional director of Working Families Power. “This has been national, but it’s also been community-grown for a few years now.”
Ashley Dixon, an Atlanta-area organizer, has led canvassing efforts to inform neighborhoods around South River Forest about the center for nearly a year. Her team has spoken to more than a thousand people. About 80% opposed the project once they knew about it, she said.
The only academic poll on the issue to date, from Atlanta’s Emory University, showed slightly more Black respondents opposed the project than supported it, with the opposite being true for whites. Atlanta’s population is 48% Black.
The idea for the referendum came from one that succeeded in stopping a spaceport from being built in coastal Georgia, said Will Harlan, founder of Forest Keeper, a national forest conservation organization. “To me, Cop City is the most important issue in conservation in the south-east,” Harlan said. “A referendum is the smartest, most democratic solution … [and] a way to find resolution and closure.”
Although the 2022 spaceport referendum affected a county of only 55,000 people, similarities between the two controversies point to the role voters can play when other efforts fall short.
In that case, local officials “dug their heels in” and stopped responding to press requests or providing transparent information to the public, said Megan Desrosiers, who led the referendum. In the case of Cop City, the Atlanta Police Foundation has stopped answering press requests for at least a year, and the city of Atlanta was recently discovered to be understating the project’s cost to taxpayers by about $36m.
The project is planned on land the city owns that is located in neighboring DeKalb county. Because of Atlanta’s ownership, only Atlanta voters can participate in the referendum.
Although the city’s voters haven’t seen an effort like this before, California has a long record of asking voters to decide on environmental issues, said Keith Mako Woodhouse, author of The Ecocentrists: A History of Radical Environmentalism.
Over time, industry and political opponents have wielded tactics ranging from creating competing propositions to airing ad campaigns to discredit environmentalists, he said.
“There’s always going to be scary counter-arguments. It’s a matter of coming up with clear messaging” to be successful, he added.
Organizers of the Cop City referendum pointed to the state’s heavy-handed approach to protesters as a primary concern. There have been 42 domestic terrorism charges to date. A bail and legal defense fund’s members were also arrested and the state added fundraising to its criminal description of the training center’s opposition.
In that context, it took about a dozen attempts at finding a legally required fiscal sponsor for the referendum, which may need as much as $3.5m to reach success, said spokesperson Paul Glaze.
Cliff Albright, co-founder of Black Voters Matter – one of two organizations that agreed to take the sponsorship role – said the recent Atlanta Solidarity Fund arrests were done “to send a message, in hopes it would have a chilling effect. We’re not naive about what the threats are – but we believe our community cares about this issue.”
Getting into Atlanta’s communities will take a massive campaign, said Mary Hooks, national field secretary for Movement for Black Lives and part of the team overseeing the signature gathering. Hooks hopes to get canvassers into at least 200 of the city’s 243 neighborhoods, and said more than 3,000 volunteers had already signed up.
“This is an opportunity to protect direct democracy … when so many people are being left out,” she said.
