Sounds like Druid Hills is getting pretty serious about considering becoming its own city.

Anne sends along the agenda for the Druid Hills town hall meeting scheduled for next Tuesday night, August 20th from 7p-9p.  The Druid Hills website provides some detail…

The agenda has been set for a Town Hall Meeting on Cityhood & Annexation to be held on August 20, 7-9pm. Speakers will include Allen Venet, chair, City of Briarcliff Initiative; Duriya Farooqui and Hans Utz of the Office of the Mayor, City of Atlanta; Lee May, acting CEO, DeKalb County; and Matthew Lewis of the Druid Hills Charter Cluster.

Presenters will be available to answer questions from the audience, said Mike St. Louis, chair, Committee to Explore Druid Hills Cityhood Options.  The meeting will be held in the sanctuary of Glenn Memorial Church. Please attend and bring your neighbors!  This issue is critical for our community!

Read through the full agenda after the jump…

Read the rest of this entry »

The property owners at 416 Eastland Drive live on a great invisible fissure of bureaucracy.

One parcel of their property falls within the boundaries of a city with a junkie’s obsession on the “walkable”, pushes its school system to be the best in the northern hemisphere and has weekly trash pickup.  The other side of their property sits in a unincorporated county that can’t keep its police officers happy, is recovering from a major Superintendent scandal, and has trash pickup twice a week.

Who wouldn’t want resolution?  Taxes inside of Decatur are confusing enough!  (Not to mention the thrice weekly trash pickup.)

The other, more important reason the owners of 416 Eastland are looking for Decatur to annex the DeKalb parcel is for clarity regarding access to the school system.  According to a letter to City Manager Peggy Merriss (page 15 of meeting materials PDF), Meisha and Vance Shofner say that they were originally told by the school system that their daughter could attend CSD.  But more recent maps on the school’s website no longer include 416 Eastland inside the CSD school zone.  The residents want full annexation so that school jurisdiction is totally clear.

DeKalb has raised no objection to the single parcel, .43 acre annexation.

The Decatur City Commission meets tonight to take up the issue as well as confirm the 2012 schedule for meeting.

Annexation isn’t just a topic of conversation around Decatur.  Though our city has long been toying with the idea of expanding its limits in order to increase its commercial base, there hasn’t yet been the almost necessary outcry by surrounding residents looking to trade their DeKalb-run services for Decatur to make it happen.

However, it’s a different story further north. The initial benefits of the newly-minted city of Dunwoody – which captured millions of dollars of DeKalb County property tax revenue after its late-2008 creation – has other northern residents weighing the benefits of more local city government services and functions.

Georgia State Rep. Mike Jacobs recently wrote on his blog he’s been hearing “increasing discontent with DeKalb County Government: rising tax bills, fewer services, inefficient government, and a lack of confidence that things are going to get better at the county.”  As a result, he’s introduced House Bill 428, which allows for “adjacent municipalities to annex neighborhoods in an “unincorporated peninsula” (an unincorporated area that is 75% or more surrounded by cities) after the adoption of a city council resolution and the passage of a referendum by the citizens in the unincorporated area.”  The bill also takes away the County’s unilateral veto power in preventing such annexations, according to Jacobs.

Whether this currently unincorporated peninsula would become part of Dunwoody or its own “City of Brookhaven” is far from being addressed, let alone decided, however these renewed talks about yet another northern annexation leads to a very serious question:  How much more annexation can DeKalb County take before its only option is even more massive layoffs and reductions in services and/or large tax increases?

In response to this new Brookhaven annexation push, the DeKalb Officers blog flatly stated recently “We believe if either of theses happen, annexation or the formation of another city, Dekalb County will collapse. The Northlake/Oak Grove/Emory area cannot sustain today’s spending and looting.”

If not totally collapse, what would a DeKalb with little northern property to call its own look like?  Will taxes rise to a point where the current lower tax-rate advantage is eliminated and everyone begins calling for annexation by the nearest city?  Or will the county be forced to scale down to a point where services are much more meager than they even are today?

Almost two years ago to the day, residents living north of Decatur’s borders were sharing their new found neighborly relationships with the AJC, stemmed from their new common enemy – Decatur.

Decatur’s vast annexation plan of 2007-2008, initiated in an effort to off-set the residential tax burden by bringing more commercial property inside Decatur, looked to grow the city limits to the north and east.  While many neighbors on the southeastern edge of the city openly hoped for annexation, the voices on the north-side were almost unanimously opposed.  (The AJC article linked above cites a survey where only 14 of 200 area residents were in favor of being annexed into the city of Decatur.)

But now two years later, the landscape has shifted.  DeKalb County Schools looks destined to close the neighborhood’s elementary school, Medlock, and murmurs indicate that some of those same northern neighbors may now be a bit more open to Decatur’s higher taxes in exchange for it’s coveted school system.

But even if northern residents are more amenable to the idea, there are still other substantial hurdles to overcome.  Back in 2008, the other major opponents to the Decatur’s large-scale annexation plan were many of the city’s current residents.  Two in particular, Judd Owen and Pat Herold, uncovered calculation errors in how the school system’s contractor estimated increased school enrollment.  All attempts at revised estimated enrollments were much higher than the original assumptions, throwing the whole process into turmoil, as it was generally thought that any added commercial property tax, wasn’t enough to offset the cost of school enrollment increases.

So here we are in early 2011 – the year in which the City Manager recommended that the City Commission revisit this annexation question – and it looks like the playing field has changed a bit.  The major challenge for the city – if it still wishes to pursue this – will be to craft an annexation area that has more than enough commercial property tax to offset any student populations around it.  And since nearly all of the unincorporated commercial property the city has eyed in the past is to the north/northeast of the city limits, a more supportive northern population could be just what the pro-annexation faction ordered.

“Density & annexation” might not be the best overall descriptors for Goal #9 of Decatur’s Strategic Plan, but I felt compelled to use the most incendiary words possible in the post title.

FYI, I’m skipping Goal #8, which is located on page 38 of the Plan, because it’s essentially “support the Cultural Arts Master Plan“.

Goal 9: Expand and diversify the city’s revenue base

Task 9A: Find opportunities to redevelop existing commercially zoned properties to their highest and best use.

Task 9B: E xplore annexation options in partnership with the City Schools of Decatur that expand the property tax base and enhance school operations.

Task 9C: Support the redevelopment of the former Devry University property with a mix of uses that will serve the community.

Task 9D: Promote other revenue sources in addition to property taxes, such as increased sales tax revenues.