A Georgia Town Takes the People’s Business Private

By artappraiser on Mon, 06/25/2012 - 3:29am |

By Dave Segal, New York Times Business, June 23/24, 2012

SANDY SPRINGS, Ga. [....]

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 [....]

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