Decatur Metro

After being killed in committee nearly a month ago, the bill to create a city of Dunwoody is back on the voting block this coming Tuesday (according to the AJC). I’m not sure what prompted the quick resurrection of the bill (maybe John over at Dunwoody North will fill us in) , but if passed this time around, citizens of the prescribed area would vote on city status this November.

So, why am I writing about Dunwoody in a blog about Decatur? Because my friends, even though we may proudly proclaim ourselves residents of Decatur first, we also pay taxes to another master: DeKalb County.

And why does that matter? Because DeKalb and all of its existing cities (Decatur, Avondale, Stone Mountain, Chamblee) love to fight over our tax money.

A quick recap: Every city that exists or is created within the county takes countless millions in property taxes away from unincorporated DeKalb. DeKalb understandably doesn’t like this and fights against city creation like an overprotective mother watching her son grow up and try to move out of the house. It also has horded much of the 1% Homestead Option Sales Tax (last estimates showed that Decatur was being underpaid by a cool $500,000) that the cities say is rightfully their’s. (The GA Supreme Court should decide this 7 year battle some time this year. A date has not yet been set.)

A quick aside…The other side of this coin is that it is usually the wealthier communities (with higher property taxes) that want to withdraw themselves from county services and ultimately that leaves the county’s poorest unincorporated areas with even less available funding to repair the countless problems that plague them on a daily basis.

So, how would the creation of another city, like Dunwoody, affect those in and around Decatur? Well, as Mayor Floyd has mentioned recently in talks about annexation, if Dunwoody becomes a city, unincorporated DeKalb residents should expect taxes to go up (due to a loss in the tax base) and county services to get even worse as a result. Around Decatur, this might affect the way people in our potential annexation areas think and subsequently vote on annexation into the city.

So, keep an eye on Dunwoody’s city creation and watch for when the Georgia Sumpreme Court finally rules on the HOST dispute. I’ll obviously report on both here. If Decatur can get its share of that 1% sales tax and/or can successfully annex more commercial land into the city, property taxes should come more in line with unincorporated areas (according to Floyd) while retaining the benefit of better services.