An interesting development indeed…

Amongst the supporting documents for Monday’s city commission meeting is a letter from Midway Road residents who, despite the failed annexation effort earlier this year, want in to the city.  The block of 11 households in question sit immediately adjacent to the current city limits and therefore can request annexation from the city of Decatur.

The letter from residents, which is on page 11-12 in the materials section for the June 1st meeting, states that they have between 72%-78% support for annexation, which exceeds the 60% threshold necessary to make the request.

Needless to say this should be very interesting for a couple reasons.  First, despite what some have said, the annexation effort failed due to a lack of adequate data that demonstrated the school system could handle the increase AND unanswered questions about whether the city could make money off the effort.

Therefore, an 11 household residential annexation puts our city commissioners in an interesting position.  Up until now, they’ve been pretty willing to accept individual applications for annexation, however this one may just be large enough to get the old opposition riled up again.

Interestingly enough, the letter to the commission does address the dreaded “school age children” question under the “No Undue Burden on the CSD or City of Decatur Services” section… “There are only 6 children (2 of which currently/plan to attend the Waldorf School) in the annexation area; 5 of the 6 children are 5 or younger.”  Unfortunately, that statement kind of misses the major point of concern for current residents who aren’t as worried about the current school-aged population as what it would become once the property was included within the city limits.

How will the commission respond?  Where do your candidates for city commission stand on this?

Ready or not, the hornet’s nest has been kicked.

Well, the move to a new server wasn’t as painless as I had hoped, but ultimately it could have been much worse, so overall I am quite pleased.

I’m currently using a updated version of the old blog “theme”, just to make the transition a little less painful for both you and me.  I actually like it quite a bit.  But there’s still a lot of work to do…apparently I’m going to have to rebuild the entire “Links” section again, but it’ll be totally worth it.  This new setup will give me a lot more flexibility with the site and allow me to offer a lot more fun and helpful features.  For example, I’ve already added a “Top 5 commentaters” list to the sidebar, (congrats to the other four top DM addicts)

One minor hiccup is that while all the comments from the old site followed us over here, it doesn’t look like the “threading” formatting did…so some threads are a bit out of order now.  Also, the comment count off the main page is a bit hinky for old posts.  I’ll continue to fix these as I have time.

Lots more to come (I gotta figure out this picture header obviously), but for now hopefully the new layout will suffice to the site going strong while I make improvements in the background.  Cheers!

Active Living Director Dan McGee writes in to let us know that the city is offering a smorgasbord (my word, not his) of new aquatics programs this summer.  Click here for details on all of this year’s adult and kid classes along with info on pool memberships, fees and rentals.

Dan also notes that in addition to the Glenlake bathhouse opening next Friday, improvements are also coming soon to Ebster pool – the only city pool with a diving board and deep end!