| Rath said: Their wealth was the reason they became incorporated. I wonder where they get that $50M for comparable cities statistic from anyway, it's just kind of used off-hand. |
You can find the data for city budgets for most comparable cities.
Here are a few examples from Washington:
http://www.scfem.com/proof/CityBudgets.asp
In Ohio, I found a few links for cities' budgets of similar size. For example, Dayton spends about $150 million USD/yr for a city that is about 140,000 people. Springfield, which has about 60,000 people and 133,000 in the metro area spends about $40 million a year. So it would seem their estimate of $50m is very reasonable, if not low.
If you want to compare apples to apples, you can easily find the budget for other cities within the Atlanta metro area of similar size and affluence. Marietta, Georgia is very close to it and has a population smaller than that of Sandy Springs (about 30,000 less), and spends approximately $69 million USD per year not including power and water. You can find Marietta's entire budget online at: http://www.mariettaga.gov/departments/finance/budget/docs/BudgetBook2011.pdf
Back from the dead, I'm afraid.
