Smyrna sits wholly inside Cobb County, and a final plat clears the planning commission and the mayor and council before it is recorded. Boundary surveys, plats, as-builts and construction staking, sealed by a licensed Georgia surveyor.
Smyrna lies wholly within Cobb County, and no adjoining county touches the city line. Its subdivision ordinance says as much in its own definitions: a final plat is one that is suitable for recording in the office of the clerk of the superior court of Cobb County. So the recording question is settled before it is asked, and the work moves straight to the ordinance itself.
That clerk keeps the Real Estate Division at 10 East Park Square, Building C, in Marietta, about seven miles north-northwest of Smyrna, and the court and administrative divisions at 70 Haynes Street. Deeds go to the counter. Plats do not: Georgia has required every plat to be filed electronically through the Georgia Superior Court Clerks' Cooperative Authority, with the content rules set by O.C.G.A. 15-6-67. Recorded documents come back out at research.cobbsuperiorcourtclerk.com. To look up a parcel first, use the Cobb County Board of Tax Assessors for ownership and valuation, and the Cobb County GIS portal at gis.cobbcounty.gov for the recorded plat reference.
The subdivision ordinance itself is old and still governing. The council adopted it on December 29, 1975, effective February 1, 1976, and it is carried as Appendix B of the city code. It sets the sequence a plat has to move through: preliminary approval from the planning commission, then final plat approval from the planning commission and the mayor and council, before the plat can be recorded. A lot combination or replat that results in the same number of parcels or fewer is reviewed by the planning commission alone. One that creates additional parcels goes through the full route. The ordinance also requires tract boundaries to be determined by accurate survey in the field.
Meeting dates matter when a closing is waiting. The Planning and Zoning Board meets the second Monday of each month at 6:00 p.m., and the Mayor and Council the first and third Monday at 7:00 p.m., both in the council chambers at City Hall, 2800 King Street. Rezoning and variance applications are filed with the Community Development Department, advertised, and posted with a sign on the property itself listing the hearing dates.
Terrain gets its own rule. A Smyrna preliminary plat has to show existing ground elevations at contour intervals no greater than five feet, based on sea level datum or a datum plane the city engineer approves, and tied to one or more benchmarks the city engineer approves.
Flood questions are answered elsewhere. Smyrna's subdivision ordinance defines the governing floodplain ordinance as the Cobb County ordinance that identifies the areas of the county subject to flooding, so a Smyrna lot near a drainage way is evaluated against county mapping even though the plat is approved by the city.
The zoning framework shapes the rest. Smyrna divides itself into zoning categories based on proximity to roadways, community facilities and natural boundaries, and those categories set minimum parcel sizes and setbacks alongside building design, parking, landscape and signage rules. Minimum lot size and setback are survey questions before they are permit questions. An addition, a detached garage, a pool or a fence gets measured against a line that has to be located on the ground first, and on closely built lots that line is rarely where a fence or a hedge suggests it is.
S&S Land Surveying works out of 549 West Ave in Cedartown. Bart Sims is the licensed Georgia land surveyor who signs and seals the plat, and S&S is licensed in Georgia only.
Setback checks, fence lines, additions and replats are the everyday work inside the city, and every one of them starts from the same field-run boundary.
Cities in Cobb write their own plat specifications on top of the state requirements. Acworth's ordinance, for example, allows a closure of one to 5,000. Worth checking before the plat is drawn.
Send the address or the Cobb parcel number, and say whether the plat is headed to the Planning and Zoning Board, a closing table or a building permit. That changes what has to be on the drawing. Estimates are free.
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