…from last night’s school board meeting.

Over on the Oakhurst Message Board, resident Suzanne Miller (who also referenced the annexation map/presentation) reports back from last night’s CSD Board Meeting and gives the impression that the city commission already considers the annexation a done deal and wants a blind-sided school board to brace itself for 500 additional students. (All of this assuming that residents in the annexed areas vote in favor of incorporation in November.)

Here’s a snippet from her reflection….

According to the discussion at the school board meeting last night,
the mayor is telling the school system to go ahead and plan for 500ish
kids because the annexation is going forward and the kids are going to
be there in 2009. He says that he is working to have the annexation
proposal approved in THIS legislative session. The demographer that
the school system hired to help them with planning also reported
tonight that city leaders told him that the annexation was for
practical purposes a done deal. In fact the demographer’s report went
ahead and assumed that all 500 (actually the estimate is between 422
and 526) kids would enter the school system in August 2009.

All of this is in contrast to the messages that some
commissioners/city staff are putting out to citizens that this is only
in the preliminary stages and that no one has anything to worry about
because the Commission is only looking at its options. So, which is
it? Is it a done deal or are they only looking at it as an option for
sometime in the distant future? It appears that the answer to that
question depends on who is asking.

Obviously I can’t personally vouch for any of Suzanne’s recollections at this time, but I’m beginning to get the feeling that she is right about the city being a lot further along than they’ve claimed in either the GoDeKalb or AJC articles, where the city manager has said that discussions were only “preliminary”. Doesn’t a full-fledged presentation and analysis kind of fly in the face of that?

City staff will present their plan for annexation at next Tuesday’s (Jan 22nd) commission meeting. An official response from the city before that to clarify all of this would certainly be welcome.