Are you sick of wading through DeKalb County’s Tax Assessors Office website whenever you want to know the square footage of your neighbor’s house or you recall someone’s address but can’t for the life of you remember their last name?

Well not to fear city of Decatur residents!  You now have to have even less interaction with disorganized County websites!

Introducing the City of Decatur’s own property tax website: decaturgatax.com!

Actually, this website isn’t just a replacement for all the resident property value stalkers out there.  It’s actually quite the valuable resource for regular residents looking for info about their Decatur property taxes.

Not only do you have the ability to search for property tax records for parcels all over Decatur, but you can also view if your bill has been paid, print your bill, update your address, print a receipt, and review the cities homestead and other tax exemptions.  Pretty sweet.

The one thing you cannot currently do is pay your tax bill on the new website, however at the last City Commission meeting, Asst. City Manager Andrea Arnold mentioned that they are currently working on making that happen.

The AJC reports that of the 10 cities in DeKalb County, only Decatur, Avondale and Chamblee saw a cumulative increase in property assessments thanks to new construction.

Without new construction, all three cities would have seen a decline, according to the article.

…and the mayor is expecting an even larger drop next year, according to GoDeKalb’s coverage of Monday’s city commission meeting.

But new development (valued at $32-$33 million) will help the city maintain a balanced budget in the upcoming fiscal year (July 1, 2008 – June 30, 2009), without raising the millage rate. However, I’m wondering what happened to CDS’ desire to up millage rate by one point to hire more teachers and give raises? Has that been added into the equation yet? Or was it already nixed?

Also according to GoDeKalb, the new budget will include these things: a pilot program for the senior community, a new geographic information system (GIS) and an arts master plan.

An arts master plan? What’s that?