Lakeside and Briarcliff Say They May Join Forces in Cityhood Effort
Decatur Metro | July 3, 2014 | 9:30 am
Decaturish reported yesterday that the one interesting tidbit out of the recent DeKalb Government Operations Task Force Meeting was…
The groups behind the proposed cities of Lakeside and Briarcliff announced that they will pursue city status together.
“We’re dating right now,” Lakeside City Alliance Chairwoman Mary Kay Woodworth said, standing next to City of Briarcliff Initiative member Allen Venet. “We’re not married yet. We’re not engaged.”
A joint effort would obviously have more chances of passing the state legislature come January, since – as the map from June 2013 shows – the two city initiatives have been interested in incorporating parts of the same area into their respective cities. A fiscal feasibility study on a city of Lakeside back in 2013 estimated the population to be around 63,000 residents, the largest city solely in DeKalb County.
A combined Briarcliff/Lakeside city (Briarside? Lakecliff?) would assumedly host an even larger population. For reference, Brookhaven’s population is currently around 49,000 residents, while Dunwoody stands at around 46,000.
As reported a few days back, Decatur is planning an Annexation Master Plan, which is in direct response to escalating desire of the unincorporated areas on the northern border of the city to create their own cities within DeKalb County.
Map courtesy of MANA website
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Well, seeing as all lakes in Georgia are artificial if they exist at all (I’ve never been able to find a lake in Lake Claire or the Great Lakes neighborhood), why not Lake Briar? Or Ocean City for that matter?
The map is making me understand a little more of City of Decatur’s motivation for annexation. The proposed conjoined Lakeside/Briarcliff looks like an upside down Pac Man about to eat the tiny City of Decatur.
I want them to just leave me alone but if they named it Ocean City it might ease the sting a little.
Ooooohhhhh. Sexy metaphor. Will they or won’t they? A classic narrative and proven crowd pleaser. Just remember that most shows go downhill once they finally consummate.
The Sam and Diane of Cityhood courting. But which city plays the part of the pretentious intellectual or often confused but tender hearted ex-ball player?
You will note the Tucker is left out of this equation, so there would still be a fight over who gets the Northlake area ITP. That was a big part of the animosity before.
Our city leaders need to get off their duff & annex to the East — Ponce to the DeKalb Farmers’ Mkt;
To the North— all of N. Decatur Rd (maybe all the way to L’ville Hwy?)
To the West — Clairmont
If these areas are going to be in a city, why should they be in a new city when we did COMMERCIAL real estate?????
Please leave YDFM out of it. I for one don’t want to pay more for groceries there simply Decatur wants to finance its lavish government services without raising taxes on existing residents.
Plus it doesn’t comply with our tree ordinance.
Plus it’s kind of an ugly property, however useful.
Lavish? I guess one person’s highly functional is another person’s lavish. I love having real, usually responsible, human beings to call when I have problems. I’m not saying that we all agree with what our City does all the time but it is darn nice to have competence. I get the sense that competence in government is a rarity in this part of the world.
Don’t worry DEM – I’m sure the good folks from Decatur would never take YDFM because they had the nerve to legally cut down all those trees on their private property!
YDFM will be annexed by one city or another, and taxes will go up on the property. That’s the inevitable result of the collapse of the DeKalb County government. Don’t blame Decatur.
yes please. where do i vote?
You guys can make all the cutesy / ironic jokes you want, but this is going to happen. We need commercial annexation, but if I owned a commercial business, especially a growing one, I wouldn’t want to be annexed by Decatur. I’m not just talking higher taxes, the fact that they’re just now forming an annexation plan while others have been progressing over the last year shows that Decatur, an already existing city, is disorganized and doesn’t take this seriously. Then you look at what they have prioritized this year, the tree ordinance, which disincentivizes businesses from wanting to locate and grow here because it makes it not only more expensive, but restricts your building size so that you can leave space for a bunch more trees. Whoopteedoo.
Knowing full well that Decatur is desperate for commercial tax revenue, I expect commercial businesses will demand a lot of variances to be ok with annexation because once the commercial property is gone, that’s it. At that point, I’ll be happy to sell my 1/3 acre property to the city for $500k to be rezoned C1. Don’t be surprised if some around here picket to just turn it into another “green space” though…
Peter, I joke in large part because I agree with you. It *is* going to happen. And I refrain from the usual debate because I don’t think, at this point, the “should we or shouldn’t we” conversation is the politically relevant one to have. The real question is how. Which scenarios hold the greatest long-term potential advantage?
I don’t expect any of these new cities to deliberately antagonize Decatur. Once we propose and adopt our plans for annexation, whatever they might be, I’m pretty confident those ambitions will be respected as the Bruckersides of the county formalize their plans.
I wasn’t joking
like a Voltron of NIMBY nonsense.
Decatur better get its act together PDQ, or one of these secessionist schemes is gonna wind up eating it whole.
Y’all crack me up. “Raise the drawbridge before the peasants storm the castle!” Or more accurately, “build the moat around the Publix before the peasants build their own castle and moat.”
I hope Lakeside, Briarcliff, and Tucker can negotiate their differences quickly so that I can start participating in a blog thread about kids riding bikes on the local sidewalks instead of blogs about waste, fraud, and corruption.
To paraphrase Roy Scheider, “Looks like we’re gonna need a bigger moat.”
+1