Zoning changes by a Georgia county that some residents say threaten one of the South’s last Gullah-Geechee communities of Black descendants of enslaved people can’t be challenged with a referendum, an attorney said Monday in a letter to the judge considering a petition by local voters.
Though Georgia’s state constitution allows citizens to force special elections on some decisions by county governments, it doesn’t give them the power to overturn county zoning decisions, wrote Ken Jarrard, an attorney representing McIntosh County commissioners.
Jarrard’s letter to McIntosh County Probate Court Judge Harold Webster comes a week after Black residents of Hogg Hummock filed a petition seeking a referendum on the commissioner’s decision last fall to weaken zoning restrictions that for decades helped protect the tiny Hogg Hummock community.
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