Oliver W. Porter

Oliver W. Porter is the architect of the public-private partnership that created Sandy Springs, Georgia, the first American city designed from the outset to buy in nearly all of its municipal services rather than staff them.

Residents voted about 94 per cent in favour of incorporation in June 2005 and the city came into being that December, the first new city in Georgia in half a century. Porter chaired the charter commission and served as volunteer interim city manager, organising twelve task forces of some 120 volunteers to define what the city would need and then putting the work out to tender. Sandy Springs opened with only a handful of direct employees: police, fire and the courts were kept in house, and everything else, from finance and human resources to parks, transport and community development, was delivered under contract.

The model was copied across Georgia and studied abroad, and it was also partly unwound. In 2019 the city brought 183 contract workers onto its own payroll, keeping a smaller number of functions outsourced. Porter has written about the experiment in Creating the New City of Sandy Springs (2006), Public/Private Partnerships for Local Governments (2008) and The Contract City, and has advised four further Georgian cities, communities in other American states, and municipalities in Japan considering the model.

He is a retired AT&T vice president, a registered professional engineer with a degree in civil engineering and an MBA, and has served as national chairman of both the National Kidney Foundation and the Combined Health Appeal of America. His work is the nearest thing the Free Cities argument has to a completed municipal experiment in the United States, including the part where a city changes its mind about it.