Boys and girls, stretch those voting fingers.  Linda Harris found this baby in her spam folder 5 minutes before tonight’s commission meeting.

Decatur’s been nominated by Southern Living’s editors and “seasoned experts” for its “Tastiest Town Award” and the competition is FIERCE (see below).

Large metropolises like Houston and Baltimore made the list, along with already famous food meccas like Charleston and New Orleans. For a city of just 20,000, this is truly a case where it really is an honor just to be nominated.

But that doesn’t mean we’re going to take this online vote lying down, right?  Sheer population or regional reputation doesn’t account for everything when it comes to an online vote.  It’s all about passion (and online linkage).  So get ready, because we’re gonna give New Orleans and Charleston a run for their money.  Right Mr. Kessler?

Stay tuned for your first reminder about this vote on December 23rd.

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.

Last night, the Decatur City Commission heard from another round of residents upset about the recent deaths of cats in Drexel/East Parkwood neighborhood.  In a detailed Powerpoint presentation, Christy Bosarge detailed the death of her cat to a coyote 5 weeks ago.  She emphasized that she knew that the city could not eradicate coyotes, but that they needed to “put the fear” back into the coyote population so that they weren’t so casually interacting with the human population and their pets.

Ms. Bosarge even invited a coyote trapper, Chip Elliot, to the meeting, who was very complementary of coyotes’ intelligence and upfront about the fact that you can’t eliminate them from an area.  (A coyote’s territory is 5 square miles in an urban area, according to Elliot.)  The executive director for A.W.A.R.E, Tarah Hadley, also spoke out at the meeting, in opposition to trapping and killing coyotes in Decatur.

The contrast in viewpoints between Mr. Elliot and Ms. Hadley demonstrated the complexity of the issue of coyotes in urban environments.  While they both agreed that coyotes could not be removed from an area by trapping them, they disagreed that a coyote could be made more cautious of the human population through trapping.

However, Mr. Elliot admitted that the best case scenario is to trap yearly and hope that it instills caution in the coyote population.  But even this method won’t even guarantee that the population will decline.

The City Commission came away from the discussion with talk about getting the word out to residents about Decatur’s coyote population, but as the City Manager reemphasized in response to a resident’s question: the process of choice of most metro Atlanta communities is “cohabitation”.

So that’s that for the time being.  But let me quickly discuss the most interesting thing I heard at last night’s meeting.  In reflection on the comments from Mr. Elliot, at the end of the commission meeting Ms. Merriss noted that the calls to city hall with coyote sightings come in regularly like clockwork as the coyotes move around their territory, following the fresh water sources.  A sighting near Drexel will be followed a couple days later on Glenlake and then a couple days later in Winnona Park.

Also, at one point Mr. Elliot was discussing how coyotes choose their and noted that they go after whatever will burn the fewest calories.  Amongst the trash and other small animals, “cats who don’t run away”, were another option.

Which basically boils down to: if you live near a floodplain and have outdoor cats who aren’t especially skittish around dogs and other people, you should be the most wary about the coyotes.

Tonight, the Decatur City Commission approved a $51,000 change-order for Fire Station #1, increasing the budget 3% from $1,792,000 to $1,843,000.

At the meeting, Deputy City Manager Hugh Saxon noted the reasons for the change, which are also noted in the city commission meeting materials…

• concealed or actual site and building conditions, including relocation and adjustment of underground utilities, an additional structural steel beam at the new dormitory addition, changes to the relocated fire pole assembly, the addition of a dry fire sprinkler system in the training tower and miscellaneous masonry, steel and concrete repairs ($31,000)
• owner’s and architect’s requirements, including improved lighting and electrical equipment, a new sidewalk and protective railing at the southwest corner of the building, a resilient rubber floor in the fitness room, and a heavy duty rainwater tank system ($19,700)

The project is on schedule to be completed in April and May 2012 with an LEED Gold Certification, according to Mr. Saxon.

Based on Asst. City Manager David Junger’s description in his letter to City Manager Peggy Merriss (page 25 of city commission mtg materials), it should look something like the above.  (Though I’m not sure that’s an Isuzu cab, it would LOOK similar)

According to the note, the city’s current GMC rear-loader “has operated beyond its useful life, becoming increasingly unreliable and expensive to operate and maintain.”

If approved, look for this baby moseying down your street next February.

Just in case I was a bit too vague in my post about the sidewalk smoking ban, I wanted to be crystal clear that along with a bunch of other alcohol ordinance provisions, the Decatur City Commission passed the Sunday alcohol sales ordinance last night.

That means that starting this coming Sunday, November 27th, you may have the option of purchasing alcohol on Sunday at Ale Yeah!, Sherlocks, Oakhurst Market, Kroger and the four convenience stores around the city that sell alcohol.

But don’t go to Publix on North Decatur or the Decatur Package Store (sorta) across the street.  Those are both outside the city limits and DeKalb doesn’t plan to take up any Sunday Sales issues until next year.

As part of the approved revisions to Decatur’s alcohol ordinance at tonight’s City Commission meeting, the city will soon require a “sidewalk table plan” as part of the annual application process for an alcoholic beverage license.  Part of that ordinance revision includes the addition of Sec. 6.22.g.3…

Smoking is prohibited at tables included in a sidewalk table plan permit area and within five feet of any such area boundary.

The city commission voted in favor of the full ordinance, which means that the sidewalk smoking ban will go in effect for new alcoholic beverage license applicants on January 1, 2012 and renewing applicants on October 1, 2012.

At the commission meeting, Asst. City Manager Lyn Menne assured the commissioners that restaurant owners “know this is coming” and that it was “something we’ve been asked to look at”.

As noted at the meeting, this new ordinance will make it illegal to smoke along rather long stretches of Decatur sidewalks.  Based on responses to questions from Mayor Floyd, it sounds like the ordinance will be in effect 24 hours.

Say what you want about Decatur’s city government and staff, but they’re planners.

While some other cities rushed to get their Sunday sales ordinance approved so that they could have one extra day of Sunday sales – to the great benefit of those cities’ alcohol distributors – Decatur apparently decided to be prompt, but also smart.

Tonight, Decatur’s City Commission is likely to approve a revised liquor ordinance that will allow for the sale of alcoholic beverages on Sunday starting two days after Black Friday.  (If they don’t, expect drunken recitations of Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” in the streets.)  But that’s not the only change being proposed for that most hilariously-worded of Decatur ordinances.  (“Moral turpitude!” Hee hee!)  There are dang near nine different updates being made to “spirits law”.   (I quote that like I’m making some offbeat reference to a mid-90s indie film hoping to impress, but really I’m just a quotations “man of the night”.  See I did it again!)

The most notable of which is what I’ll term “The Cafe Alsace Amendment”.  That’s the amendment that will now make it legal for Decatur restaurants with valid serving licenses to allow patrons to bring their own bottles of wine to a restaurant and charge a corking fee.  This topic was brought up in a FFAF thread back in January, where a patron complained that Cafe Alsace wouldn’t let them bring in their own bottle of wine for consumption.  The proprietor of Cafe Alsace, Benedicte Cooper, rightly told the patron that while other Decatur establishments may do this, it is currently illegal, and therefore she would not.

A good six months later, Mayor Floyd mentioned in a commission meeting that after talking with Ms. Cooper, he’d like to see the alcohol ordinance changed so that this was no longer prohibited.  (See: Bring Your Own Wine? Mayor Thinks It’s Fine! post)  And then we waited.

What were we waiting for?  Apparently we were waiting for this Sunday sales vote, because now that we need to get it on the books so folks can start “rushing out for that elusive forgotten bottle of wine for a Sunday evening dinner party” – the specific reason most commonly given on DM – the city’s going to do a good bit of tweaking.  Want a list?  You’ll have to click thru…

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Decatur’s City Commission meeting last night was a surprising package of the abnormal.

First, many city commissioners showed open frustration over a completed MAK Historic District new construction home, which had multiple elements not approved by the Preservation commission that had “slipped through the cracks” and had been constructed.  After being denied by the HPC, because it didn’t follow the agreed upon specs, the home owner appealed to the city commission.  Many of the commissioners stated they hoped city staff would “close the holes” in the design review process and make sure that things did not escalate to this level again.  Mayor Bill Floyd stated that he believed this was a “staff mistake” and could not penalize the homeowner, forcing him to remove a metal deck from his backyard and take out double-columns on his porch, because of gaps in the system. The commission reversed the HPC’s decision to denying the Certificate of Occupancy.

Secondly, the city commission unanimously voted down the long-debated 1004 Clairemont Road subdivision project, which was originally approved by the Planning Commission in March 2010 with 14 conditions (see page 75 of meeting materials).   The development of the old Cliff Valley School property has a storied history among residents in the area, who strongly disproved of an original plan back in the mid-2000s of the construction of a traditional subdivision, complete with cul-de-sac on large lot that was originally compiled by a school that never was able to undertake its planned expansion.

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Decatur City Manager Peggy Merriss tells DM that even if Decatur residents vote in favor of Sunday alcohol sales at the polls tomorrow, they’ll still have to wait a bit before they can go straight from Sunday brunch with the in-laws into the liquor store (or in Decatur’s case, the beer/wine store).

Ms. Merriss states…

If the referendum passes, I anticipate recommending that the City Commission amend the existing ordinance to establish Sunday sell hours effective November 27, 2011.

Thanksgiving leftovers and a fresh growler.  Mmmmm….