ATLANTA — A federal appeals court is considering whether to dismiss a massive citywide effort to force a vote on an Atlanta-area police and firefighter training center that city attorneys say is now “substantially complete.”
The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had been silent for more than 14 months after hearing arguments in December 2023 over whether to overturn a lower court ruling that let nonresidents collect signatures as part of the “Stop Cop City” referendum effort. The facility is on land the city of Atlanta leased to the Atlanta Police Foundation. Opponents, who collected more than 108,000 signatures in 2023, say voters should be able to revoke that lease.
In the meantime, construction on the 85-acre (34-hectare), $115 million project continued apace last year. A spokesperson for Mayor Andre Dickens told The Associated Press on Wednesday that training has begun at the facility and classrooms are expected to be fully utilized by late March.
The debate over the training center embroiled the city and captured national attention, especially after state troopers fatally shot an activist protesting near the project in January 2023. Opponents say the facility will worsen police militarization and harm the environment in a flood-prone, majority-Black neighborhood. They say the city’s fight against the referendum is anti-democratic and dovetails with their concerns about a violent police response to protests and a prosecution on racketeering charges of dozens of opponents.
In response to a recent appeals court request over whether the issue is now moot, city attorneys on Tuesday urged the court to toss the issue.
The city’s attorneys wrote that police officers, firefighters and first responders have begun training at the “state-of-the-art facility” and “any referendum on the ground lease ordinance will not remove the Center from the site or prevent its use by the City for these purposes.”
Even if a referendum took place, “any outcome of such a referendum would be merely academic at this point — the Center has been built and will not be torn down,” they added.
But attorneys for four people who live outside the city and sued for the right to collect signatures say that just because the training center has been built does not negate the primary issue — whether voters can revoke the city’s 50-year lease to the Atlanta Police Foundation, the nonprofit that runs the facility.
“The lease does not terminate upon completion of construction of the training center,” the attorneys wrote. “That alone should end the mootness inquiry.”
The attorneys for the facility opponents also argued that the case has an underlying First Amendment issue that must be resolved: Can nonresidents collect signatures for a referendum effort they are not eligible to vote on?
Keyanna Jones, one of the plaintiffs, said she formerly lived near the training center site, which is just outside Atlanta city limits in unincorporated DeKalb County. She said collecting petitions was one of the few ways neighbors outside the city could fight the project.
The debate over nonresidents’ rights to collect signatures has meant the city has not begun the costly, laborious work of analyzing the approximately 108,500 signatures that activists turned in to City Hall in September 2023. If the court tosses the case, they likely never will.
Even if the appeals court does not dismiss the case because of the training center’s completion, the judges could still kill the petition drive by ruling it illegal under state law, or rule all of the signatures are void because none were submitted by the original 60-day deadline of Aug. 21, 2023.
A ruling just narrowing which petitions are accepted could also doom the chances that opponents will have enough signatures from eligible registered Atlanta voters to force a referendum, an analysis by The Associated Press, Georgia Public Broadcasting, WABE and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution found. Statistical sampling of 1,000 entries found it’s possible opponents gathered the required 58,231 signatures if all entries are counted. But excluding signatures collected after Aug. 21, 2023, or by people who weren’t Atlanta voters would disqualify 20% of potentially eligible sampled entries — likely defeating the effort.
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Associated Press writer Charlotte Kramon contributed.