Remember this story?

How Avondale shut down the Christ Liberty Family Life Center because the church was operating without a permit and didn’t meet the city’s requirement that all houses of worship be located on a minimum of three acres and have 100 feet of frontage for parking?

Well, now the church is filing suit in federal court against the city over its three acre minimum, which applies exclusively to places of worship.  Here’s their press release…

AVONDALE ESTATES – Christ Liberty Family Life Center filed suit today in federal court against the City of Avondale Estates to reclaim its liberty of religion under the U.S. Constitution. In late April, Avondale Estates shut the Church down because the City requires that religious facilities must be located on at least 3 acres of land. Avondale Estates puts this onerous requirement only on religious facilities and not on other places of public assembly.

For almost three months, the Church has been forced to assemble in various temporary meeting places for worship, each ill-suited to conducting church services. Dr. Emma Byrd, spokeswoman for the Church, has witnessed the burden first hand. “It’s been devastating for us. We haven’t been able to get a stable location,” said Dr. Byrd. “The congregation has been bleeding members and money.”

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600 block of Sycamore Street, Decatur, GA (pic submitted by Contessa)

PBS’s Blueprint America recently featured Atlanta’s Buford Highway as an example of the relatively new nationwide issue of having a majority of your low-income populations living in the car-dominated suburbs.

According to PBS, 30 pedestrians have been killed along Buford Highway in the past decade.  That’s an average of three people a year.

h/t: GOOD

Deputy Decatur Police Chief Keith Lee sent along a press release announcing the re-certification of Decatur’s Police Department by the Georgia Association of Police Chiefs. Here’s a snippet from the letter DPD recently received…

“Congratulations for achieving Re-Certification. This accomplishment establishes your agency as one of the top agencies in Georgia. Less than 15 percent of law enforcement agencies eligible to achieve State Certification have accomplished this objective. You can clearly be proud of this achievement.

State Certification is neither easy nor simple.  In fact, achieving State Certification requires a great deal of effort and commitment to a complex task, which requires a compliance with a solid and complete set of policies that cover all of the areas found in the standards for certification. These standards cover eight distinct areas of law enforcement, including the agency’s role, organization and management, personnel, legal, operations, support services, communications, and holding areas…..

As reported here by various commenters in the last couple weeks, NAVO church has moved out of its current digs of the old “Big H” property at 630 East Lake Drive in Oakhurst.

The DNO reports this morning that the church is moving its services to the AMC movie theater at North DeKalb Mall, leaving the former grocery store space empty yet again.

Let the calls for a Trader Joe’s commence.