West Ponce de Leon Ave, Decatur GA (pic submitted by Gwyneth)

Judd Owen lives in Decatur with his wife and two children.  He has served on the Enrollment Committee and Annexation Committee for the City Schools of Decatur.  He teaches political science at Emory.

            Decatur Metro directed readers last week to a brief story in the print edition of the AJC reporting that Decatur City Manager Peggy Merriss had said that “potential annexation of two heavily commercial areas outside the city limits has apparently died quietly in the legislature.”  I have been keenly interested in the push for large-scale annexation that has just died, and I’ve followed it closely since I first learned of it in October 2008. So I decided to write an obituary.

I have tried always to be even-handed and objective, but it will come as no surprise to anyone that has talked to me on the subject or seen what I’ve written when I say, “Thank God it’s dead. Rest in peace.”  Before going any further, I eagerly say that I have great respect for the City’s leadership that has built the wonderful city that attracted me several years back. They have clearly done an amazing job with foresight and will and intelligence. Decatur is not the great place it is by accident, and I’m grateful.

In returning to my obituary, however, and because it is an obituary, I will let myself be blunt.  Large-scale annexation was ill conceived from the start, and it deserves the fate it got.  The poor conception of the idea was out of all proportion to the effort and political capital that was spent to make it reality.  On June 26 2008, the AJC’s April Hunt quoted Mayor Bill Floyd as saying that, as home values plummet, more income from taxes on additional commercial and industrial real estate would help stabilize property taxes. Floyd said: “Quite honestly, you’re talking about our survival as a city, when 60 percent of our income comes from property tax.”  A consultant from UGA was hired to conduct a study.  The City Manager’s office spent many hours preparing a large-scale annexation plan.

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Bryan sends in this pic of a wild turkey in the White Oak Hills, just south of the Decatur city limits.

“Pretty rare to see a wild turkey this far inside the Perimeter”, he comments.