A plain-language guide to who runs Augusta, what is on the ballot, what is being built, what is being paid for, and how citizens can organize to actually be represented.
This is a master document. It collects six interactive guides, each focused on a piece of how Augusta works — and how it has worked across more than a generation.
Each guide is short, plain-language, and built to be read on a phone. Together they give you enough background to understand the upcoming election, the projects your tax dollars are paying for, and the longer-running pipeline of money, land, and influence behind both. The last guide is a methodology — how communities actually build enough power that the government has no choice but to represent them.
Pick a topic below to read it. Each guide opens in place, with a button at the top to come back here.
Augusta has not had a serious local information source in years. Most residents do not know what is on the ballot, what SPLOST 9 actually pays for, who sits on the boards that decide development, or how to push back. This document is an attempt to fix that — without asking anyone to trust a candidate, a party, or an institution.
Three guides on the structures already in place — the construction, the people, and the funding.
Two guides on the immediate decisions in front of voters.
A methodology — what it actually takes to build community power that lasts.
Everything else is context. Those two are decisions you are about to make. The rest of the guides explain why those decisions look the way they do, and the last guide explains what to do after election day so the same dynamic does not keep repeating.
Share this document. Print pieces of it. Talk to your neighbors. Nothing here is private, partisan, or paid for — it is a citizen-built reference.
Augusta Starling's Guide to Augusta