Roswell pushes plan to run own election

Officials, residents worry about planning timeframe

By DELANEY TARR delaney@appenmedia.com

ROSWELL, Ga. — The Roswell City Council has unanimously agreed to push forward on plans to have the city conduct its own municipal elections.

At a special called meeting Jan. 30, the council drew from discussions raised at a Jan. 23 work session and Jan. 24 committee meeting to avoid increasing election costs from Fulton County, which has run municipal elections for years. In 2019 and 2021,

Fulton County charged cities $2.96 per registered voter to manage their elections. In December 2022, the county proposed a new fee, $11.48 per voter.

The Fulton County Board of Registrations and Elections pushed back against the price hike and negotiated the county charge down to $9.38 per registered voter for this fall’s elections.

The number was still too high for Roswell officials.

On Feb. 1, Fulton County commissioners passed a resolution that may drop the charge to cities more by budgeting the same amount of money for elections as it did in 2021, $5.2 million. The new number complicates the city’s move to run their own polling.

With the updated cost, the city will likely pay more than it did in 2021, but the cost will be significantly less than Fulton County’s original proposal.

Roswell is one of several North Fulton County cities pushing to split from the county-run arrangement.

Milton set things in motion in December when its City Council voted to bring municipal elections in-house. Milton officials said the move would save the city close to $90,000 for the fall 2023 municipal election.

Alpharetta and Johns Creek followed Milton’s lead, with recent meetings to delib-

See PLAN, Page 14

QBE determines the cost to educate a full-time, public school student. It uses that figure to calculate how much a district “earns” each year in state funding.

With nearly $11 billion of state revenue budgeted for public schools this year through QBE, getting the formula fully funded and fair is important.

“It’s a plurality of the state budget,” said Stephen Owens, education director at the Georgia Policy and Budget Institute. “But it’s in the [Georgia] constitution as a primary obligation to provide an adequate public education free of charge.”

In developing the “per pupil” cost each year, QBE considers a variety of factors including grade level, teacher staffing and experience, class size, special services, like special education or gifted classes, student-teacher ratio and other direct and indirect costs of education.

While QBE determines how much a school earns in state funding each year, the state’s economy and budget determine how much the school systems actually receive. Since 1985, the QBE has rarely been fully funded,

See FUNDING, Page 14

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