This just in from the City of Decatur’s Linda Harris…

*Media Advisory*

Who: Mayor Bill Floyd and the Mayors of 9 cities in DeKalb including Avondale Estates, Chamblee, Clarkston, Doraville, Dunwoody, Lithonia, Pine Lake, and Stone Mountain.

What: Press Conference on the steps of the State Capitol Building Washington Street side

When: Tuesday, November 9, 2010 at 11 a.m.

Why: A joint announcement related to support of the Transportation Investment Act of 2010 or HB 277 – the bill that calls for 12 regional roundtables to craft a transportation project list and then ask voters to support a 1-cent sales tax to fund the projects.

Expect this to similar to the Fulton County mayor’s announcement back in September.

I’m sure we’ll have to reference this post again on November 20th, but just so many of you are aware ahead of time, Decatur Mayor Bill Floyd passes along this announcement from MARTA officials…

MARTA will conduct a Full Scale Police Exercise at the East Lake Station and surrounding area on Saturday, November 20, 2010, in coordination with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Atlanta Police and Fire Departments, and Decatur Police and Fire Departments. These annual training exercises provide the opportunity for the MARTA Police Department (MPD), MARTA staff and other emergency response agencies to practice response and recovery operations during a simulated situation.

Closing out last night’s Decatur City Commission meeting, Mayor Bill Floyd took a moment to follow up on some of his comments from last week, when he presented the commission with a resolution concerning Georgia’s 2012 transportation referendum, which would mirror a recent Fulton Mayors’ (sans Atlanta mayor Kasim Reed) proposal.

Floyd relayed to the room that since the last commissioner’s meeting two weeks ago, the Fulton mayors had asked the DeKalb mayors to join their resolution – which stated that the County would only support a second transportation penny sales tax on top of the current MARTA penny, if Gwinnett, Cobb and Clayton County agreed to creating a regional transportation plan – instead of starting a parrellel effort in DeKalb.

The mayor mentioned that he had spoken with all the DeKalb mayors at this point, and all were on-board with his original resolution.

Though he didn’t confirm either way, it sounded like the DeKalb mayors would probably take the Fulton mayors up on their offer.  If a joining of forces does come to pass, the mayors in the two counties plan to hold a press conference at the Georgia Capitol to announce their decision.

Stay tuned.

What to do with an $1,000,000 surplus during a shaky economy?  The Decatur City Commission searched for an answer to the “good problem to have” last night, but couldn’t come up with a vote-worthy solution.

Though the roughly $70 property tax credit for Decatur residents was warmly embraced – and passed -  by all four members  of the Decatur City Commission last night (Mayor Pro-Tem Baskett was absent), the City Manager’s suggested “one-time pay period compensation adjustment” for staff was balked at by some members of the Commission.  (The $400,000+ leftover after the tax credit would be put back into the reserve fund)

Commissioner Keica Cunningham was the only member at the table who showed no hesitation in supporting the one-time bonus, which would cost the city $200,000.  Mayor Floyd seemed a bit wary, but eventually said that he thought he was “OK with doing this” if the commission was going to go ahead with a vote that evening.  Commissioner Patti Garrett gave no indication of how she would vote during the meeting.

The Commissioner with the most reservations about using the $200,000 for a one-time bonus was Fred Boykin.  Boykin, like all the commissioners, repeatedly praised the work of staff in keeping expenditures way down during the 09-10 fiscal year (over $800,000 below projected expenditures in the budget), but worried that “many folks out there” were struggling and that perhaps this was not the best time or the best economy to be giving bonuses.

City Manager Peggy Merriss defended the suggested increase by reiterating that neither the tax credit to residents or the potential staff bonus increase would have been possible without city staff’s continued efforts to keep costs down during the weak economy, and that without the bonus, staff would in effect see a reduction in pay from last year.

Mayor Floyd proposed that the Commission table the measure until the first meeting in November, when they would revisit it after further consideration.

Thomas Wheatley’s got the goods.  And I don’t just mean that in a slightly uncomfortable way.

Creative Loafing’s resident transit-psycho has obtained a 2007 analysis done for MARTA (PDF), which details all of the potential financial problems that would need to be overcome if Metro Atlanta’s Rapid Transportation Authority was ever dissolved and merged into a larger regional transportation infrastructure – as has been recently suggested by Decatur Mayor Bill Floyd and a majority of Fulton County mayors.

Among the higher hurdles that would have to be cleared:

• Any “entity” that acquired MARTA would be required to pay in full or defease (aka annul) all $1.9 billion of MARTA’s bonds and $400 million in sales tax revenue “commercial paper” notes.
• If MARTA still has withstanding “lease back” transactions on any of its railcars – Wheatley thinks that most of these have since been “unraveled” – a merger would trigger a default under the lease agreements and MARTA would be forced to give up the railcars “or require a significant termination payment”.
• If MARTA ceases to exist, the existing 1-cent sales tax in Fulton and DeKalb would also cease to exist.

Wheatley believes with an insane amount of “lawyering”, all of these issues could probably be overcome.  However, this just goes to show you, none of this is going to be EASY.

At last night’s Decatur City Commission meeting, Mayor Bill Floyd presented his fellow commissioners with a draft of a resolution (see pages 127 and 128 of the attached materials from the meeting) that would show support for the transportation referendum one-cent sales if the 10-county district would also support creation of a regional transportation system for the Atlanta metro area.

He told the commission that DeKalb’s other cities were considering similar resolutions.

Fulton County’s mayors – sans Kasim Reed – have recently proposed a similar deal, though they indicated only Cobb, Gwinnett and Clayton would have to agree to be part of the regional transportation system.

Though the resolution did indicate that he supported the penny sales tax on top of the existing MARTA penny sales tax, Mr. Floyd  expressed concern over getting the transportation referendum passed if we were saddling the greatest proponents of initiative – Fulton and DeKalb residents – with an extra penny.

He noted that conversations on the details of a regional system were ongoing and there had even been talk of “weighted voting”, where DeKalb and Fulton residents would get a greater say in regional transportation decisions if they were paying twice as much as the outer counties.

Over the weekend, cubalibre noted this in a comment…

Looking over the sites for the candidates for Attorney General, I noticed that on Sam Olens’ site, Bill Floyd, Mayor of Decatur, is listed under Olens’ “Endorsements” by city officials. Really? The mayor of Decatur supports a candidate for AG who’s already indicated that he’s going to join the AGs who are filing suit against the federal gov’t over the healthcare that passed? I’m very curious about this.

Here’s the press release that Olens put out vowing to challenge health care reform.

I contacted Decatur Mayor Bill Floyd about the endorsement.  Here is his response…

I have been a supporter of Sam Olen’s from the beginning. His leadership as chair of the ARC was extremely beneficial for all of us who live in this region. His support of the Metro Atlanta Mayors Association (MAMA) is without question, one of the things that gave the mayors organization statue in the ARC and provided us as mayors, the opportunity to participate in the discussion and decision making process of key issues such as transportation , land use and water. The detail of how his leadership and support benefited all cities, and Decatur in particular, is lengthy and I won’t elaborate, but that is the basis for my support.

Honestly, I am not well versed on the health care issue and therefore can not comment on the validity, or lack of it, of any suit against “health care reform”. But in today’s environment it is short sighted to let a position on one issue drive support for a particular candidate. This will lead, in my opinion, to disappointment. My decision to support Sam is based on character and record.

In response to an off-hand comment by the Mayor about “fees” at last night’s Decatur City Commission meeting, City Manager Peggy Merriss explained that you can actually incur a $25 fine for parking in a metered spot for more than 2 hours.

This is different than the $20 fine for an expired meter.  The City Manager explained that the 2-hour max fine exists to keep cars rotating through spots on the street.

Makes sense…though I’m not sure most people realize that they could technically be fined for returning to a meter and inserting more coinage to continue on their 2+ hour bender.

For more fee fun, check out pages 47-53 of the supporting materials from last night’s meeting!  Like did you know it’s only a $500 fee to sell beer or wine wholesale, but a $5,000 fee to sell “spirituous liquors”?? Or that it’s only $25 for a publication vending bin (aka the Mayor’s worst enemy) permit ??

Before the final vote on the 2010-2011 budget at tonight’s Decatur City Commmission meeting, Mayor Bill Floyd began a conversation with his fellow commissioners about the projected long-term financial obligations of the city and what he continually referred to as “pressure on the budget.”

Spurred by recent concerns about proposals to take on additional debt for unfinished capital improvement projects like renovation of the Recreation Center, Public Works facility, Fire Station No. 1 and the Beacon Hill complex, Floyd asked the City Manager and Asst. Manager Andrea Arnold to project out costs for some of the city’s larger financial obligations, specifically the retirement fund, health insurance and pension payments to retired employees.

While Mayor Floyd originally asked that the projections be discussed over the next year, Commissioners Boykin and Baskett later suggested that the projections be delivered much sooner so the commission could consider future obligations prior to making decisions about incurring additional debt for the aforementioned capital improvement projects by the end of the calendar year.

Commissioner Patti Garrett added an additional request to that: a breakdown from the City Manager of how the 2006 bond fund money was allocated and how it has been spent.  City Manager Merriss agreed to fulfill both the Mayor’s request for debt projections and incorporate Commissioner Garrett’s request in a document that would be available to the entire community in the next “few weeks”.

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Which means potentially lower county taxes for city residents!

At tonight’s Decatur city commission meeting, Mayor Bill Floyd took a minute at the end of the hour to note the Georgia Legislature’s recent passage of House Bill 1508 during the just-concluded legislative session.

The bill requires that DeKalb County calculate the “particularized millage rates” of four specific district services: basic police services (traffic unit, patrols, etc), non-basic police services (SWAT, bomb squad, K-9 division, etc), parks and recreation, and streets and road maintainable.

Each “special services tax district”, which basically is either a DeKalb city, the county, or “Atlanta in DeKalb”, then has the ability to say “no” to any of these services by sending a certified letter to the DeKalb CEO and commissioners by September 2010 and thus not pay the associated tax next year.

The mayor did not mention which specific services Decatur might “opt out” of (My guess would be basic police and parks and rec), but did say that the planned action by the city would probably knock 1 1/2 points off the county millage rate for City of Decatur residents.

Hooray for not paying for things you don’t receive anyway!