IF your image of a city hall involves a venerable building, some Roman pillars and lots of public employees, the version offered by this Atlanta suburb of 94,000 residents is a bit of a shocker.
The entire operation is housed in a generic, one-story industrial park, along with a restaurant and a gym. And though the place has a large staff, none are on the public payroll. O.K., seven are, including the city manager. But unless you chance into one of them, the people you meet here work for private companies through a variety of contracts.
Applying for a business license? Speak to a woman with Severn Trent, a multinational company based in Coventry, England. Want to build a new deck on your house? Chat with an employee of the Collaborative, a consulting firm based in Boston. Need a word with people who oversee trash collection? That would be the URS Corporation, based in San Francisco.
Even the city's court, which is in session on this May afternoon, next to the revenue division, is handled by a private company, the Jacobs Engineering Group of Pasadena, Calif. The company's staff is in charge of all administrative work, though the judge, Lawrence Young, is essentially a legal temp, paid a flat rate of $100 an hour.
"I think of it as being a baby judge," says Mr. Young, who spends most of his time drafting trusts as a lawyer in a private practice, "because we don't have to deal with the terrible things that you find in Superior Court."
With public employee unions under attack in states like Wisconsin, and with cities across the country looking to trim budgets, behold a town built almost entirely on a series of public-private partnerships a system that leaders around here refer to, simply, as "the model."
Cities have dabbled for years with privatization, but few have taken the idea as far as Sandy Springs. Since the day it incorporated, Dec. 1, 2005, it has handed off to private enterprise just about every service that can be evaluated through metrics and inked into a contract.
To grasp how unusual this is, consider what Sandy Springs does not have. It does not have a fleet of vehicles for road repair, or a yard where the fleet is parked. It does not have long-term debt. It has no pension obligations. It does not have a city hall, for that matter, if your idea of a city hall is a building owned by the city. Sandy Springs rents.
The town does have a conventional police force and fire department, in part because the insurance premiums for a private company providing those services were deemed prohibitively high. But its 911 dispatch center is operated by a private company, iXP, with headquarters in Cranbury, N.J.
"When it comes to public safety, outsourcing has always been viewed with a kind of suspicion," says Joseph Estey, who manages the Sandy Springs 911 service in a hushed gray room a few miles from city hall. "What I think really tipped the balance here is that they were outsourcing just about everything else."
Does the Sandy Springs approach work? It does for Sandy Springs, says the city manager, John F. McDonough, who points not only to the town's healthy balance sheet but also to high marks from residents on surveys about quality of life and quality of government services.
But that doesn't mean "the model" can be easily exported Sandy Springs has the built-in advantage that comes from wealth or that its widespread adoption would enhance the commonweal. Critics contend that the town is a white-flight suburb that has essentially seceded from Fulton County, a 70-mile-long stretch that includes many poor and largely African-American areas, most of them in Atlanta and points south.
The prospect of more Sandy Springs-style incorporations concerns people like Evan McKenzie, author of "Privatopia: Homeowner Associations and the Rise of Residential Private Government." He worries that rich enclaves may decide to become gated communities writ large, walling themselves off from areas that are economically distressed.
"You could get into a 'two Americas' scenario here," he says. "If we allow the more affluent to institutionally isolate themselves, then the poor are supposed to do what? They're supposed to have all the poverty and all the social problems and deal with them?"
The champions of Sandy Springs counter that they still send plenty of tax dollars to the county and that race had nothing to do with the decision to incorporate. (The town's minority population is now 30 percent and growing, they note.) Leaders here say they had simply grown tired of the municipal service offered by Fulton County.
"We make no apologies for being more affluent than other parts of the metro area," says Eva Galambos, the mayor of Sandy Springs. And what does she make of the attitude of the town's detractors? "Pure envy," she says.
NOTHING about Sandy Springs hints that it is one of the country's purest examples of a contract city. Even those city hall employees betray no sign that they work for a jumble of corporations. Drive around and you'll see a nondescript upscale suburb, where the most notable features are traffic lights that seem to take five minutes to turn green. There is no downtown, or at least anything that looks like a main street. Instead, there are strip malls with plenty of usual-suspect franchises although one strip mall, oddly enough, includes a small museum that tells the story of Anne Frank.
The town is home to offices of United Parcel Service, Hardee's and other corporations, and it also serves as a bedroom community for Atlanta. Residents include Herman Cain, members of the Atlanta Braves and the Atlanta Falcons, and executives at Delta Air Lines, CNN and other companies. This is also home to the rapper and producer Akon, whose opulent tastes were featured in an episode of "Cribs" on MTV.
"A few years ago, I got a call from his head of security," says Kenneth DeSimone, the deputy chief of police, who is giving a tour of the town one May afternoon. It turned out that somebody had stolen a pistol and a laptop from Akon's home.
"He seemed really focused on the laptop and I was looking around this guy's house thinking, 'What is the big deal with this laptop? He can afford another one.' Turns out, there was a bunch of new Lady Gaga demos on it. Worth millions."
That crime was solved when an informant helped lead the police to some young people who, Mr. DeSimone said, had no idea whose home they had entered and what was stored on the computer.
The car driven by Mr. DeSimone says "Sandy Springs" on the side, which is one reason that this town can't claim to be the most outsourced city in the United States. That distinction probably belongs to Maywood, Calif., eight miles southeast of Los Angeles, which in 2010 fired all but one employee, its city manager. Maywood is now operated, from top to bottom, through contracts. The police officers are members of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, paid a combined $3.5 million a year to patrol the streets, according to Felipe Aguirre, a council member.
But Maywood was pushed to extreme measures after it flirted with bankruptcy and lost insurance coverage for its public work force. Sandy Springs went the public-private partnership route by choice, and it evangelizes about its success.
Few have more zeal than Oliver W. Porter, a founding father and architect in chief.
With his gray beard and thick gray hair, Mr. Porter is a beatnik version of John Updike with a Southern drawl and a pipe. He is sitting one morning in a tiny room in his basement, which has a small desk, a chair and a psychiatrist's couch. A parachute is spread out along the ceiling, like a canopy, and a mural of an ancient Roman landscape Mr. Porter's handiwork adorns one wall.
This unassuming nook is where every element of Sandy Springs was conceived and designed. With the title of interim city manager, Mr. Porter drafted requests for proposals and fielded calls here, often from people who imagined him in charge of a small battalion of employees.
"One day a lady called and said: 'Oh, Mr. Porter, I didn't mean to interrupt you. May I speak to your staff?' " he recalls. Reliving the moment, he picks up the phone, puts it to one ear and then switches to the other.
"Staff speaking," he told the caller, in a slightly deeper voice.
Mr. Porter, a retired AT&T engineer, was an advocate of the town when it was a hopeless cause, during the many years when Democrats blocked efforts to let a largely Republican and white suburb cleave itself from Fulton County. One Democratic legislator vowed that Sandy Springs would incorporate "when pigs fly," a phrase that Mayor Galambos has since adopted as the name of her blog.
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