There has been a lot of discussion – particularly among Democratic legislators -- about just forgetting this whole question until next year (or two years, or four years…). What does that mean?
That’s like asking if it’s OK to skip a year of school. Your child will only be a year behind where they could be. What would that mean in the grand scale of things? Well, actually it means a lot!
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It’s like saying “I’m going to start my diet tomorrow, or next week, or next month.” Or, “I’m going to start exercising (fill in some date in the future)”. It’s a way of saying “I really don’t want to do anything.”
Ask it the other way around: Would I like to get started now on park improvements, sidewalks, and street improvements, and better policing; or maybe it would be OK to wait another year; or to some future time.
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And exactly what does it mean to say, “Let’s wait for a while”? Are you suggesting that something will change; or maybe that people won’t care in the future. Or maybe Jupiter will be aligned with Mars…
There is a famous quote of Bobby Kennedy “If not now, when?”
One possible “advantage” of delay has been described as “Let’s do a coordinated plan of creating cities throughout DeKalb County, so that everyone can have the advantages of their own cities.” But some areas, and some people, feel the value of a city for their communities; and some don’t. Some communities think it’s a bad idea. Suggesting that the County government, or the State legislature, knows what’s best for the individual communities is one of the reasons people want to create cities. We have a better idea of what’s good for us! And maybe other areas of the county have an idea of what’s good for them.
Another problem with the theory of delay is that it probably won’t work. There is a city proposal out there sponsored by a Republican legislator in a Republican-controlled House and Senate. If all the Democratic legislators sit by and say “Let’s delay our proposals”; then the Republican proposal (Lakeside) will pass, and everyone else will be delayed for several years. And in fact, it will be difficult for any other city proposals to work in the future, because Lakeside will take significant amounts of the commercial property. That’s a death wish by those legislators for areas outside of the Lakeside map.
I say: Let’s get working! We’ve got a lot of work to do in our area; the time to start is now. I don’t want to look at this in five years and have to say: “Well, we still haven’t done anything, but maybe things will get better some day.”