Jack Krost sends along this announcement…

It’s time to celebrate in Decatur’s Oakhurst neighborhood. The neighborhood is 100 years old. Oakhurst was founded as its own town back in 1910, at a time when it was a small streetcar suburb of Atlanta. It was later annexed by the city of Decatur.

To mark the occasion, a host of free activities are being planned for Saturday, October 30, around Harmony Park at Oakview Road and East Lake Drive, south of College Avenue.

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Posted on the City Schools of Decatur website…

The Board will hold a Worksession on Tuesday, October 12, 2010 at 5:30 pm to begin a month of discussion regarding the Redistricting Maps for K-3 schools. This Worksession allows Board members to hear information and ask questions, but there is not a time for public comment. The Board will set two dates for Board listening sessions that will happen over the next 30 days before the intended final vote on a preferred map at the regularly-scheduled Board meeting on November 9, 2010. Once these listening sessions are scheduled, the dates will be broadly communicated to the Decatur community.

The 7 maps being considered can be viewed at http://fiscalresearch.gsu.edu/decatur/. For community members that would rather read a narrative description of the enrollment zone, these details will be posted shortly before the Worksession.

Following the Board meeting, the individual map websites will be activated to include a comment box. All comments will be aggregated and compiled for the Board to consider.

Dr. Edwards has published a memo to the Board detailing the process and the assumptions underlying this future work.

I’ve never owned a home in the city of Atlanta, so I was completely unaware that adjacent property owners are responsible for repairing the city’s sidewalks.  Oh golly!

Not surprisingly, this guest column on Saporta Report by Sally Flocks of PEDS reports the program isn’t working out all that well.

The City’s program is politically unpopular, especially in low-income areas, and has been ineffective city-wide. The annual budget includes no funding for sidewalk maintenance or enforcement, which ties the hands of Public Works officials. Few people voluntarily repair sidewalks, and everyone who walks suffers as a result.

The 2008 State of the City’s Infrastructure report estimates that 18 percent of the City’s sidewalks need to be repaired or replaced, at a cost of $79.4 million.

In 2004 the City launched a campaign to educate property owners about their responsibility to repair sidewalks. During the four years that followed, the City collected just $200,000 from property owners for sidewalk repairs. At that rate, addressing the City’s backlog of broken sidewalks would take sixteen centuries.

Imagine if we tried to employ this method of maintenance and repair to roads.  Now THAT would be humorous!

Oakhurst Arts & Music Festival (pic submitted by Kris)

Neighborhood Newspapers reports that last week the DeKalb County Commission approved the county’s second crematory.   A.S. Turner & Sons on Winn Way, just outside of the Decatur city limits, will now operate a 112-square foot crematory on-site.

Apparently up until now, restrictive ordinances had limited the number of crematories in the county to one; located in Stone Mountain. But according to the paper, those ordinances were recently relaxed by the commission, allowing the emergence of other crematories in the DeKalb.

h/t: Georgia Zoning Blog